Crypto Power Hunting
The Chinese miners forced to leave behind the country’s cheap electricity from abundant coal and roaring rivers have found themselves thrust into a wild and extreme world of crypto power-hunting. Just as miners sprinted toward gold fields in California and Alaska over a century ago, Bitcoin miners now are bolting toward any source of inexpensive, reliable power they can find. Their next destinations matter greatly to an industry emphasizing decentralization and independence, and to other energy-consuming sectors, with which they are competing for access to greener power.
A cryptocurrency mining operation in Nebraska.
Source: Compute North
One weekend in late June, hundreds of gloomy Bitcoin miners crowded into a luxury hotel in Western China. They had a big problem: Just weeks earlier, the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency mining over concerns about illicit coal mining <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-26/china-s-crypto-mining-crackdown-followed-deadly-coal-accidents?sref=SvwPxqpB> and underlying financial risks. Now they had to figure out how to move millions of computers out of the country.
Security guards outside the Enegix facility.
Enegix’s clients will soon be shipping about 10,000 mining machines, a mix of Bitmain’s S19Pro and the Whatsminer M21S model from Chinese manufacturer MicroBT, to Kazakhstan by plane. Transport by land from China would be cheaper, but trucks can get held up at the border for weeks. Spending that time mining Bitcoin instead can make up for the extra cost of airfare.
Even within the U.S., there are regulatory differences among states. Cipher Mining Technologies Inc. , the U.S. arm of Netherlands-based Bitfury Holding BV, is working to build up mining capacity in Texas, the only state with a deregulated power grid, and Ohio because of the state’s cheap power prices and low-carbon power sources. A state like New York, where lawmakers previously proposed a bill that would have limited crypto mining in the state, isn’t as attractive.
The physical attributes of a site matter too: extreme temperatures in either direction are a negative, as is an overly dry and gritty environment. “Literally the dust blows into the computers and you have physical problems,” said Cipher’s Page.
This is GREAT for Crypto!