El Salvador announces it is going to make Bitcoin a national currency, Beijing cracks down on crypto miners due to energy consumption, Sydney entrepreneurs launch a Green Bitcoin fund: Bitcoin’s price remains volatile.
El Salvador Plans To Make Bitcoin Legal Tender
39-year-old El Salvador president, Nayib Bukele Tweeted the announcement characterising it as an idea that could help El Salvador move forward.
He said that, In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy, and in the medium and long term we hope that this small decision can help us push humanity at least a tiny bit into the right direction.
If implemented, the Central American nation would become the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.
Sydney’s Iris Energy Spruiks Green Bitcoin
Iris Energy says it is a sustainable Bitcoin miner that owns and operates real assets, including a 9MW British Columbia, Canada, data centre.
A 21MW expansion is slated for later this year.
Iris plans additional data centre development sites and new computing hardware which will expand capacity to 180MW (4.5EH/s) across multiple sites in 2022.
Fear Animates Green Loathing
Attacking crypto from a broadly Green angle, UK Development academic, Peter Howson, attempts to stir up a populist anti-Bitcoin movement.
“Huge concrete data centres, permanently plugged into power plants and telephone exchanges, maintain much of online life. But the infrastructure behind internet-based cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, dogecoin and ethereum is more like a rusty travelling circus. And right now, that circus is on the road.
Bitcoin relies on a network of millions of specialist machines, known as miners, around 70% of which are currently based in China. Like a never-ending game of Hungry Hippos, each player hammers their mining machines 24/7 to try and scoop up as many bitcoins as possible. With only a few hippos, its easy for everyone to be a winner. But with around 2.5 million miners chasing an ever-shrinking number of prizes, the game is becoming increasingly difficult.
Aussie Arts & Letters 