The African village mining Bitcoin \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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The African village mining Bitcoin unherd.com/2024/01/the-african-village-mining-bitcoin/

6429 sats \ 8 comments \ @garyKrause_ 5 Jan bitcoin

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31 sats \ 0 replies \ @TNStacker 5 Jan

This is well-written and researched.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @harrr 5 Jan

Wonderful article, summarizes quite some interesting developments.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @398ja 7 Jan freebie

An interesting fact that came to mind while reading this paragraph.

https://m.stacker.news/11031

Until1975, fifteen years after the independence, one could still travel from Cameroon/Africa to France with only a passport; there was no visa requirement.10 years later, it was still possible to use your CFA Francs in some places in Paris, or exchange them for French Francs at no cost.

What it important to remember is that colonies were populated by millions of European settlers who emigrated with their families to take advantage of the opportunities in trade, business etc. These laws, I suspect, served the purpose of helping them to make business.

The African economy was much freeer and expectedly, booming like never before (and sadly, in most cases, also after). For the first time, many indigenous Africans could experience social mobility and be part of the new emergent middle class, and in general, everyone's standard of life improved. Cameroon's gdp in the early 60's was higher than Singapore's, South Korea's etc.

How times have changed!!

What do you think happened to the settlers after the independence?

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @joyepzion 6 Jan

Bitcoin utility can be a big win for villages like this

12 sats \ 0 replies \ @ssaurel 6 Jan

This is the kind of story we love to read about Bitcoin and how Bitcoin changes lives every day. While in the Western world, Bitcoin is not yet a necessity, Bitcoin already is in many areas around the world.

Bitcoin is a game-changer in Africa to accelerate the economic development of poor and isolated populations:

This initiative flips that narrative by using Bitcoin mining to fund energy in parts of Africa that are too poor or remote to merit connection to grids, but which do have plentiful supplies of potential power sources. Mining soaks up the excess energy of these renewable plants. And this delivers not just electricity but a powerful jolt to drive development in the local economy.

Thanks for sharing this article.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @aoeu 28 Aug

Wow, Robbie K is an idiot.

I tried to comment on the article, but it looks like you need an account.

Robbie K: "In no way is this a ‘good idea’. It’s a ridiculous waste of resources that could otherwise be utilised for the good of those communities. If any wealth is actually created from it then no doubt it will go to one powerful person or group. Whole thing should be smashed to bits."

Robbie K, what is a waste of resources? Do you mean the bitcoin mining being the thing that is wasting resources? If so, you don't understand how bitcoin mining works. It is exactly the thing that incentivizes the creation of power plants like these in areas where it would otherwise be uneconomic to build them. The communities in the story above benefit by finally being able to get cheap electricity and the companies that place the power plants get bitcoin in return. It is a win-win.

The people of that village get electricity for the first time in their lives too. So that is not a waste of resources either.

While you might think that bitcoin is completely speculative or worthless, that doesn't matter. At the present time, each bitcoin is worth roughly $60k USD. A company is willing to spend real resources to construct these power plants so the reward of getting bitcoin must be worth something to them.

You seem to think that the energy these power plants are producing should be put to better use than mining bitcoin.

Robbie K: "It would be extremely naive to believe the Bitcoin operation will be run on otherwise wasted energy."

Maybe you think the power should go 100% to the local community? What you seem like you don't understand is that these power plants only exist because of the mining for bitcoin. When a power plant generates electricity, it has to go somewhere. It must be either be consumed or stored. Companies would have no incentive to build power plants in these remote areas because there would be such little demand for the electricity and no place for the excess energy to go. Bitcoin mining finally makes it economical to build these power plants, basically give the electricity away for free to the community that it is in, and then use the large amount of excess power to mine bitcoin.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiedOnTitan 7 Jan

Excellent read. Thanks for sharing. This kind of traction is fundamentally more important than BTC becoming a commodity for wealth managers to diversify into with an ETF (reminds me of email to fax service). That's all fiat noise. What's happening in Africa, Bondo Malawi in particular, underscores a true grass roots economic alternative to what the Gov't dishes out, and if this scales, we will see the vision of a global sound money expanding organically.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SaToSHiWoMaN 4 Mar outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.