For a long time Bitcoin mining was demonized and framed as a civilizational threat, a boiling-the-oceans indulgence for libertarian cranks. Interestingly, by 2024, the same institutions that were wailing about Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption, were breaking ground on gigawatt-scale AI data centers, quietly reversing their original positions on climate change. The physics never changed, but the politics definitely did.

What really changed was who controlled the compute, and that was always the actual variable being managed. The ghouls in charge never hated Bitcoin mining for the environment. That was always a convenient fiction which was used to conceal something far more sinister. They hated it because it exposed the architecture of control that has kept entire continents in perpetual dependency.

Where AI data centers are now the epitome of centralized hash power, Bitcoin mining is the antithesis of this. It became the crack in the dam that proved that energy production could be profitable, decentralized, and sovereign; that a village in Zambia or a province in Argentina could bootstrap its own grid without an IMF structural adjustment program. It proved that money and energy are two sides of the same coin, and that whoever mints both controls their own destiny. Thus sovereignty over one's own energy production, is a bypass around the entire postwar architecture of conditional development finance.

The IMF and World Bank did not simply lend money to the developing world, but they lent money in with conditions that included currency devaluations, austerity, privatization of state utilities, often on terms that left recipient nations perpetually short of the one thing they needed to actually industrialize; cheap, abundant, dispatchable power, as no nation has ever become prosperous by making energy more expensive, less reliable, or more difficult to access. Bitcoin mining, thus creates demand for energy in places where the development apparatus has ensured there is none. The miner does not just acquire bitcoin, but he also acquires infrastructure. He becomes a power producer in a world that has conspired to keep him powerless.