By: Zach Weissmueller

 

Bitcoin mining ties the world’s first decentralized digital currency to the physical world. But bitcoin remains borderless, seeking to exploit inefficiency wherever it can, whether that’s a Brooklyn bathhouse, an unmarked warehouse in Venezuela, or the small rural town of Washington, Georgia. 

Mayor Bill DeGolian of Washington welcomed CleanSpark, one of America’s largest bitcoin miners, to his town because it allowed the miner to buy energy at a bulk discount. 

“They’re buying a lot of power from the city. And that’s what helps the city…with what we’re selling to CleanSpark, the amount of power they buy per month from us is more than all of our other commercial and residential customers combined,” DeGolian said. 

At its Norcross operation, an 87,000-square-foot facility on the outskirts of Atlanta, CleanSpark is using the same immersion cooling technique that Goodman uses in his bathhouse to cool 4,300 bitcoin miners. The technique allows the company to spend less money to power the A.C. needed to cool the giant rooms where they keep the computers.

Bitcoin is too decentralized and too enriching for even the most powerful governments to stop at this point. The choice America faces isn’t whether to allow mining to exist or not, but whether to welcome it here in a vibrant market economy where it can bootstrap new energy sources and its byproducts can create economic value.

 

 
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