US lobbied Greenland rare earths developer Tanbreez not to sell to China
President-elect Trump has expressed interest in taking control of the island.
Mining bitcoins requires a great deal of computing power which in turn needs a lot of electricity to solve the mathematical puzzles that reward miners with cryptocurrency.
China and South Korea have already banned bitcoin mining due to problems with a lack of control over fraud and money laundering, and in China’s case, concern over the amount of power that the activity sucks from the electricity grid.
Now one of the most popular destinations for bitcoin mining could be facing the same problem as large cryptocurrency miners pile in to take advantage of the island’s abundant geothermal and hydroelectric power plants.
According to Iceland’s National Energy Authority, bitcoin mining is expected to double Iceland’s energy consumption to around 100 megawatts this year, which is more than households on the island nation of 340,000 use, Metro News reported on Sunday.
In 2014 Oilprice.com found Iceland to be “the world’s top energy glutton,” using more kilograms of oil equivalent per capita than any other nation on earth. With most of Iceland’s energy coming from hydroelectric and geothermal power, Icelanders are some of the planet’s least energy-conscious. Click here for a fascinating video of why the Nordic nation uses so much energy.
5 Comments
tdarny
https://e-mine.co/?ref=22447
mine bitcoin on cloud
Gazeebahoffin
Mining Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) has a cost involving hardware and energy. But in the end, what do you have? Nothing of substance. If the grid goes down (due to energy shortages caused by excessive bitmining…) and the servers get wiped by power spikes, you’re left with absolutely zip, as many people are already finding out.
Wasting this much money on a Ponzi scheme that nobody really understands is madness!
Alex Povolotski
You don’t know what you’re talking about. So confuse people.
jerome
its not a Ponzi scheme. its just a very risky investment based on nothing real (maybe the most risky we can find today). its a new type of investment. if people wants to invest in nothing real, its their problem.
in another side, the energy consumption is real and increases too much. its a real problem. also the mining activity greatly impacts the PC component like the GPU and RAM prices which increase too much its another real problem for a virtual system.
Alex Povolotski
Quebec has the cheapest electrical power rates in North America. Some mining farms already struck deals with local businesses with direct hookups to power transformers to build and operate mining farms in QC.