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> Georgia provided land and cheap electricity so Bitfury, an American company, could set up a Bitcoin mining center in Tbilisi. I hope they realize the digital
by kuhhk 8y ago
> Georgia provided land and cheap electricity so Bitfury, an American company, could set up a Bitcoin mining center in Tbilisi.
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...
- DoctorOetker 8y ago>The governing Georgian Dream party sold 45 acres for $1 for Bitfury to set up shop. 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...
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoHappened all over the US last year. Lots of cities around me gave tax breaks and land to bring in “hundreds of tech jobs”... what we actually got was 12 jobs and jet engines cooling the servers stuffed in old buildings to the locals annoyance. There was money to be made in crypto. But not by buying coin low and selling high.
- DoctorOetker 8y agowow, I didn't know this was happening in US as well, are there any articles on the subject you can recommend?
- bardam 8y agoSee this N.Y. Times article focusing on Plattsburgh, NY: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-new-york-electricity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/nyregion/bitcoin-mining-n...
- DoctorOetker 8y agothats sad on so many levels of course, but least comprehensible at all is: >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...
- DoctorOetker 8y agoit's really a shame they're not even trying to be creative: 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...
- celticninja 8y agoI remember an article where one local government, where power costs were very cheap, had to ban new bitcoin mining farms because they power draw was huge and the benefits gained by having them as an employer in the area were so small.