Rogue Employee Mined 500K Bitcoins in 2011, Qiwi CEO Says

The CEO of Russian e-payments firm Qiwi said Wednesday that in 2011, an employee used its payment terminals to mine 500,000 bitcoins.

CEO Sergey Solonin told the story while speaking to students at the Moscow Advanced Communications School. Solonin – whose company has thrown its weight behind the Russian government’s work with blockchain and launched its own blockchain subsidiary in March of last year – said the experience was what first introduced him to the concept, according to a transcript published on the website Rusbase.

Solonin said he discovered that one of his developers had hijacked the company’s hardware to mine bitcoin when the machines were not in use. Moreover, he found that the developer had made roughly $5 million over the course of a few months – a great deal more than the company had seen in profit from the machines.

He explained:

“I thought ‘what a crazy stuff,’ we’re struggling to earn 3 cents on those terminals and such a gold mine is actually…