Coal to crypto: The gold rush bringing bitcoin miners to Kentucky

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Kentucky — In a ravine deep in the Appalachian mountains, Warren Rogers stands on the ruins of an abandoned coal-washing plant that used to prepare hundreds of tons of the fuel a day for transport through the tiny town of Belfry, Kentucky. His construction crews have been putting in 10 to 12-hour shifts through the winter, retrofitting the old site to power a new kind of extractive operation: mining the digital currency bitcoin. «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.

Did you Know?

Billed as India's first blockchain wedding, in the presence of a digital priest,

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. «We own a money-printing machine,» Rogers said, gazing at a tangle of power lines which descend the steep hills and connect to a pair of rusted old buildings, where his team is installing rows of Chinese-made bitcoin-mining computers. «We're building our own Fort Knox,» he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. When the planned construction is done, the facility will create up to three bitcoins per day — worth over $100,000, all the while sucking more power than all the houses in Belfry combined, based on estimates from Blockware Solutions. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are created or «mined» by high-powered computers competing to solve complex mathematical puzzles. It is a process that guzzles energy and fuels planet-heating emissions, unless the machines run on power from renewable sources. Meanwhile, there is debate around how effectively such