Bitcoin miners break new ground in Texas, a state hailed as the new cryptocurrency capital
Source: Washington Post
Bitcoin miners break new ground in Texas, a state hailed as the new cryptocurrency capital
The Lone Star State is at the center of global attention to produce bitcoin
By Dalvin Brown
July 8, 2021|Updated yesterday at 5:36 p.m. EDT
ROCKDALE, Tex. — Chad Harris, the CEO of Whinstone Inc., the operator of the largest crypto “mine” in North America, remembers one of the last times Texas’s electric power problem became his electric power problem.
It was a Wednesday in June, and evening temperatures were hovering around 94 degrees — far higher than the state usually suffers at that time of year. Texans were churning up their air conditioning, and the state’s grid, which infamously failed for days during a cold snap in February, was straining.
“We just got a text saying, ‘The power grid needs support. Please curtail now,’ ” Harris said, while standing outside the company’s mining center at an old Alcoa aluminum facility about six miles outside this Central Texas town. Instantly, Whinstone’s system went offline. The tens of thousands of computer servers that spin away generating bitcoin inside three long buildings simply stopped. “With the flip of a switch, we turned this off,” Harris said.
In the world of crypto mining, having all your computers shut down at once, and stay down for hours, as they did in June, sounds like a disaster. Crypto miners compete with one another the world over to generate the computer code that results in the production of a single bitcoin, and the algorithm that governs bitcoin’s production allows only 6.25 bitcoin to be produced every 10 minutes, among the perhaps 70,000 crypto mines that operate around the world. If you’re not able to generate the code, but your rivals can, you are out of luck.
But thanks to the way Texas power companies deal with large electricity customers like Whinstone, Harris’s bitcoin mine, one of the few owned by a publicly traded company, didn’t suffer. Instead, the state’s electricity operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), began to pay Whinstone — for having agreed to quit buying power amid heightened demand.
That sort of arrangement has helped make the state one of the go-to locations for expanding crypto entrepreneurs the world over, despite its continued agonizing over power shortages. ...
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/08/bitcoin-mining-texas-electricity/
= new reply since forum marked as read
power companies deal with large electricity customers"
That's just nuts.
