By definition if you obtain any monetary benefit from a criminal act then it is Money Laundering. It encompasses a lot of different possible activities. Tax evasion is a crime but if you take that money and transfer it to an overseas account then that is money laundering.
(posted this same comment in the other HN comment thread about this story)
Hold on. Isn't BTC property, not money? By that logic this is like stealing corn, making candy corn, then selling it. Still illegal, but not money laundering.
I read an interesting paper not long ago that discussed exactly such a scenario (stealing electricity to mine Bitcoin). The paper is titled, "Bitcoin & Gresham's Law -- The Economic Inevitability of Collapse":
This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would get almost nothing from the package with even a ridiculous amount of standard systems.
All heavy duty mining nowadays is done by ASICs, even high end dedicated GPU farms can't compete, letalone the kind of machines likely to fall victim to a botnet. If someone did try to hijack those ASICs, you can bet the people running the mining business would notice, assuming it were even possible.
It's interesting how this might apply to an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining that a few have tried, however. This particular niche will always have this as a potential problem going forward.
Actually the original title of the article (I speak Dutch) was: Illegal bitcoin producer gets caught (literal translation), then in the first paragraph the article goes on how the guy was 'making' fake bitcoins.
It's also good to know that the newspaper in question is the 'Fox news' of the Netherlands. It's known for sensational, on the edge of fictional journalism. On top of everything they're obviously uneducated on many of the stories they publish.
For what it's worth, I think when this comment was made the submission linked to a different article-- Tweakers.net, the current source, is the most respected Dutch language tech news source.
On a positive note, now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist, and why they are so funny. They don't seem to have grasped that explaining a joke kills the humor...
>now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist
One full year? That's too optimistic. We'll soon be flooded with reviews and articles wasted on programs that don't exist: Apple product rumors, half-baked Google non-products, Microsoft prototypes...
(posted this same comment in the other HN comment thread about this story)