Chinese Billionaire Building $300M Cryptocurrency Hub in Hartford, CT | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Billionaire Building $300M Cryptocurrency Hub in Hartford, CT

cryptodisrupt.com

86 pointsDowwie18 comments

If anyone else is having troubles accessing this link here's an alternative one:

https://www.businessinsider.sg/fintech-college-being-built-2...

Things are looking up for New England's rising star!

Do they actually still call it that?

I recall thinking that was a terrible slogan 20+ years ago. At some point, it's not that the star you see is rising--it's a distant headlight on high beams to make up for the other one being busted.

I don’t know really. My wife, who is from the region, is the only person I’ve heard call it that now that I think about it. I find it amusing though so now I do too.

Haha who calls it this beyond politicians unfamiliar with Hartford’s history?

Not sure crypto-based business will be a real, lasting gain for the region.

Of course it will. Hartford is the insurance capital of the world, and insurance is one of the biggest use cases for blockchain. Think of how many startups are going to get funded and then bought out by those companies and completely transform them.

Great! I love to see new research centers, especially in the US. My company has my office in the university research park at UIUC (Urbana/Champaign Illinois). A great environment for innovation, supporting startups and entrepreneurs, etc.

I have been an working in AI since the 1980s and I am just becoming interested in blockchain (I can recommend the edX blockchain classes).

Hartford is an interesting location to choose. I think cost of living is reasonable there and it is only 1+ hours from Boston and not so far from NYC.

For those reading headlines, at first I thought this was a $300 million mining operation, and was wondering how Hartford CT was a competitive power supply.

Actually this idea is crypto-focused college campus, research park, and coworking spaces.

Make it $250M.... $200M... $700M... $3M... GONE :P With the crypto market cap down 70% since January (and general interest with it) they better hurry. Even entrenched players in the crypto space are moving into traditional assets. Makes me wonder if they're not just trying to move money out of the mainland.

Money. Laundering. Bitcoin lets one convert power bills paid with renminbi into cryptos sellable for hard currency. Switching up the crypto makes it look less suspicious.

Never mind RMB. The same can be done with dollars. Why does your building use so much power? Must be those cloud computers. Oh, not very profitable? That’s technology...

Because (1) China subsidizes power production but (2) enforces currency controls. Bitcoin conveniently allows you to arbitrage the power subsidies and circumvent the currency controls in a single scheme.

Would love to hear you elaborate on your statement about established crypto players are moving into traditional assets. Do you mean crypto exchanges allowing customers to trade equities? I haven't been following these developments closely. I'm interested in what you're referring to.

One example is Bitmain (largest bitcoin asic manufacturer) trying to move into making chips for machine learning.

That’s one I was thinking of the other was a charting service that has started displaying traditional data, I can’t remember the name for the life of me rn

> With the crypto market cap down 70% since January

Jan 2017 it was $1k. It'll be back up by december

I don’t see why that bubble was different than the previous crypto bubbles.

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