I hope they realize the digital currency doesn't necessarily "stay" in Georgia. Either way, the prime minister provided a loan out of his own investment fund, and it's been paid back. Not sure they are betting big on crypto, but they are using 10% of their electricity for it...
yes this looks like textbook corruption: the government just "gives" land and energy to cryptocurrenncy mining operations? seems very probably that not the government but those in government who set it up are getting crypto bribes in return...
There was money to be made in crypto. But not by buying coin low and selling high.
>With electricity so cheap that most residents use it to heat their homes, the city’s consumption exceeded its allocation on several days, Mr. Read explained. As a result, the Municipal Lighting Department had to purchase additional power at much higher prices — a cost it spread across its customers.
The machines are generating heat (and cryptocurrency) from electricity the locals were using to generate heat... At least they could have co-located the machines with the locals in a way that heat can be exchanged with inside and outside, and a meter measuring energy consumption when heat is directed inside...
The least wasteful form of mining is by replacing electric heaters with mining rigs, but that's not what happened here, it's more like going to the library to fetch some books because you ran out of toilet paper...
thanks for sharing the article
there's lots of similarities in this article with the Georgia one: besides the local economic depression, in both articles they also mention the local prison and the local casino...
for example why not use the heat to pasteurize milk? co-locate the miners with the pasteurization plants
even better: desalinate water to steam, use the steam to heat the milk and the milk to cool the steam, now you have desalinated water AND pasteurized milk...
but oh no, that would actually create a job for a couple of people to work it out and change the plants and negotiate and discover similar opportunities...