Legal aspects of energy consumption when using mining equipment

Introduction. In the Russian Federation, there are currently no legal acts regulating the activities of individuals as sole proprietors or self-employed in carrying out transactions with cryptocurrency. As a result, the activity of creating and circulating digital currency has had no legal status for many years, as there was no direct ban on it. All activities are carried out without any registration, bringing illegal entrepreneurs huge profits, which are often associated with one or another type of theft of electricity. In 2022, the Russian Ministry of Finance submitted a bill to the Russian Government on the regulation of cryptocurrency, including its issuance, but it has not yet been adopted. According to unofficial data, taking into account historical conditions and the lowest electricity tariffs in the Russian Federation, and combined with favourable low average annual temperatures, one third of all bitcoins are produced in the Irkutsk region. Given that electricity tariffs for household electricity are 3-4 times lower than for other consumers, unscrupulous entrepreneurs resort to various opportunities to steal electricity for the operation of mining equipment. Materials and Methods. The normative basis of the study is formed by Federal Laws, Government Resolutions that form the legal basis for the functioning of electricity markets, sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the population, as well as criminal and administrative legislation; analysis of judicial practice. The methodological basis of the study was private-scientific methods of cognition: formal-legal, comparative-legal, system analysis, cognitive methods and techniques of observation, comparison, analysis, generalisation and description; private-scientific methods: formal-legal, comparative-legal. The Result of the Study. As a result of the studies conducted, it was found that due to the lack of uniform evaluation criteria and state regulation in the field of energy consumption, courts make positive decisions both in favour of unscrupulous energy supplying organisations and energy consumers, most often individuals. Findings and Conclusions. The authors have established the need to improve the current legislation (by analogy with administrative legislation) to protect energy consumers, to prevent the illegal use by citizens of electricity provided for domestic purposes for other purposes, strict observance of legality in obtaining and using evidence at the stage of its collection, as well as in the formation of judicial practice leading to the restoration of the adversarial nature of the parties. The development of a legal framework to prevent the illegal use by citizens of electricity provided for domestic purposes for other purposes should include a mechanism of access to the territory of the power plant location to control the reliable comparison of its consumption and noise loads. Alternative energy sources for these purposes could be a radical way to solve the problem of growing energy consumption in the production of cryptocurrency, currently disguised as consumption for heating and hot water supply.