Then why did they even build it there? You know what the demand is going to be in the near future and you know what capacity you're designing for. Was this built purely for mining? Because if so, the money used to build this could have been used elsewhere.

People often bring this up when talking about bitcoin mining but it makes no sense to me. How can this be true (and the whole truth)? It sounds like the kind of argument that bitcoin supporters would spread happily. Which I used to be, by the way. I GPU mined back when it was all fun and games. I used to also doubt the claims that bitcoin uses the power of a small country. I assumed some journalist looked at the difficulty, derived the number of hashes that need be done, looked at an average computer in their office, and voila. But then I did the math, taking the hash rate and figuring in the most optimal case, using only the most efficient miners, and to my surprise it's true. A small country of power just being wasted. I'm all for proof of stake networks, but bitcoin just has to die, the sooner the better.