It might look like a WWII prison camp but this is Core Scientific's own photograph of its plant in North Carolina. It had plans to develop two more similar facilities. It doesn't make anything tangible: it is filled with computers that perform the calculations necessary to identify and claim bitcoins.

It's at least five years since warnings were made about the increasing rarity of unidentified bitcoins. And yet, around the world, there are many massive computer centres like this.

They generate an enormous drain on electricity supplies, not only from the computers doing what computers do but also from the cooling required to cope with the heat they generate.

Older readers will recall that YouTube sold itself to Google because it couldn't afford its bandwidth. Now, bitcoin miners can't afford their electricity.

Core Scientific stopped paying for its power in May last year. That suggests that it was insolvent since then at the latest. But it kept operating for more than six months before seeking protection. That might, depending on the circumstances, and we don't know them, be considered to be fraudulent trading.

If it is, and if the directors and/or shareholders took salaries/dividends then they may be considered to be laundering because, in most law, insolvency offences are predicate offences for money laundering purposes.

But one of the interesting things is nothing to do with this specific company. It is known that the crypto-currency and other high-tech applications, such as ChatGPT have a demand for vast amounts of computing power - and the expenses and environmental problems that go with them.

So why is it that the ESG groups that are so critical of power companies are silent about these computer farms?

As for Core Scientific, as of yesterday it doesn't own its computers. Its electricity supplier had already taken possession of many of them and now a court has ordered that they can collect the rest and take legal ownership.

That begs another question: can all those, largely specialist, machines be used for other purposes? And if not, what will happen to them. They were bought for USD23m. The have been accepted in settlement of a debt of about USD20m. The usual rule for tech is that it's worth about 10% of its original price the moment it's taken out of the box: that rule was established in the dot com meltdown when brand new kit taken out of failed tech companies could be bought in Los Angeles for ten cents on the dollar.

So what did the company's balance sheet say?