If someone had told you that a volcano would become a Bitcoin miner, would you have believed it? Well, that’s the ambition of the president of El Salvador who, not content with having Bitcoin recognized a few days ago as a legal currency in his country, now wants to use the geothermal energy of volcanoes to extract precious BTC.
Some have mining farms, others… mining volcanoes!
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is hotter than lava when it comes to Bitcoin (BTC) adoption. In an initial tweet, the statesman begins by saying that he has contacted LaGeo, one of the leading companies dedicated to producing geothermal energy in El Salvador, with a view to using this green energy to produce Bitcoins:
“I just informed the president of LaGeo (our state-owned geothermal power company), to put in place a plan to offer facilities for Bitcoin mining with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable and 0 emissions energy, thanks to our volcanoes. All of this will evolve quickly! “.
The power of volcanoes at the service of Bitcoin
While the idea may seem far-fetched at first glance, one should not underestimate the incredible electrical capacity that can be found in the subsoil of countries sitting on volcanic chains.
So, in a tweet in response to the first one (above), Nayib Bukele announced that engineers from his country have just dug a new geothermal well, and that its 95 MW (Megawatt) of electrical production could be exploited by building a BTC mining center near this well.
If, like us, you were wondering what this represents and can supply in terms of number of specialized machines (ASIC), BigBlock Datacenter Bitcoin, has kindly estimated this at a whopping 30,000 ASICs, with a computing power of 90 TH (Terahash) each. That’s enough to produce, at a guess, about 530 BTC per month – that’s almost 20 million dollars per month, at the current price!
It’s a tough time to be anti-Bitcoin: not only is the king of cryptos now officially recognized as a full-fledged currency by a country, but the thesis of the ugly “polluter” Bitcoin is once again beaten to the ground. After hydroelectricity (renewable and CO2-free), it is now geothermal energy that proves that Bitcoin is totally viable and sustainable from an environmental point of view, in addition to being a revolutionary force for the economy and finance.
