"We're trying to digitize coal," said Rogers, the chief strategy officer of Blockware Solutions, a bitcoin mining giant that is expanding rapidly in eastern Kentucky. Over the past year Rogers, a former venture capitalist, has been crisscrossing Appalachia, on the hunt for new bitcoin mining sites - and the power to run them.
[...]
Bitcoin mines have been springing up across the state - on top of abandoned coal mines, alongside highways, in industrial parks high in the mountains and deep in shale gas fields, hooked up to abandoned gas wells. [...] Kentucky's existing power infrastructure is itself a major draw, the companies say. The state is studded with abandoned industrial and coal sites already wired to handle large-scale energy supplies.
[...]
A 2021 report by the Appalachian Regional Commission labeled 38 counties in Kentucky as economically "distressed", or in the bottom 10% of U.S. counties in economic performance.
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Martin County's poverty rate - defined as individuals living on an income of less than $28,000 a year - stands at 30%, nearly three times the national average.
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Tax breaks
As part of Kentucky's drive to woo bitcoin miners, legislation written by Smith allows miners who invest more than a million dollars in the state to have their sales taxes waived.
Miners can also avoid paying sales tax on electricity bills, and Smith is pushing forward another batch of legislation that would give cryptocurrencies similar legal status to traditional currencies, such as allowing them to be passed on to heirs, something now difficult to manage.
Besides giving companies tax breaks to poison the planet very few jobs will be created.
There is debate around how effectively such operations can replace jobs lost when coal mines and other fossil fuel businesses shut. In 2016, coal mining employed an average of more than 6,000 people per mine, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet.
Bitcoin operations, by comparison, only need a skeleton crew of less than a dozen to stand guard and maintain the machines at a site like the Belfry bitcoin mine, powered by Kentucky's coal-heavy electrical grid. Still, with coal jobs having shrunk in the state to under 4,000 miners, compared to a peak of more than 50,000 in the 1970s, bitcoin miners say they are injecting much-needed investment into local economies.
The Belfry operation will provide between 5 and 10 full-time jobs, Rogers said, paying $23 an hour - nearly three times the minimum wage.
It is just one more thing killing us.
But in the meantime each mine creates as many as five jobs!
Maybe if the mine's really, really big it could be 10 jobs or even a dozen. I don't want to get a Pinocchio.
there is no way to store energy produced by hydroelectric, solar or wind.
Except this isn't true. Compressed air storage in underground caverns or massive tanks. It gets released to run turbines when needed.
Compressed air storage is there its just not widely used yet. Either you need a cavern that you can fill with air or build giant tanks. Like always it comes down to spending money on good things and not corporate welfare :sadness:
And yeah, crypto mining is bullshit on all fronts.
Pumped storage too, they pump water into a reservoir with the excess capacity and when they need more capacity they drop it into a turbine
This isn’t what I thought they meant by reindustrializing America :stress:
humans probably deserve climate apocalypse at this point
The latest episode of Trilbilly talks about this. It's a hilariously low number of jobs at tremendous expense to the state.
Bitcoin operations, by comparison, only need a skeleton crew of less than a dozen to stand guard and maintain the machines at a site like the Belfry bitcoin mine,
It’s a hilariously low number of jobs at tremendous expense to the state.
Once Bitcoin is worth $1 kajillion, the security needs will be so great that they will compete with Trillbilly's other favorite Eastern Kentucky industry - prisons - for that low wage talent!
Hold on there. Imagine World War III happens after we get a covid variant immune from vaccines.
Dying of pneumonia on the battlefield fighting for some eastern European nazis, cool cool cool
