A cash-strapped city in rural Texas will soon be home to the world’s largest bitcoin mine. Local protesters are “raising hell.”
On a good day, the stretch of highway from Dallas to Corsicana takes an hour to drive. The route passes gleaming white water towers that stand over single-story towns, cowboy churches, and DW’s Adult Video, a porno pitstop that still—if the billboard can be believed—does a roaring trade in DVDs.Corsicana, the seat of Navarro County, is best known for kicking off the Texas oil boom in 1894, when a 1,000-foot well meant to alleviate a water shortage instead turned up an oil field that extended for miles. In the century to follow, tens of millions of barrels of oil were pulled from the city—and Corsicana got rich.Today, only one or two thousand barrels are extracted each year. Almost a sixth of the 24,000 people who live in Corsicana are below the poverty line, well above the national average. The city’s roads are potholed. Several neighborhoods are lined with broken wooden shacks and overgrown trees that weigh down the power lines. Even the leafy boulevard of the historical district, which has a few nice stores and a coffee shop, is pocked with boarded-up units.But on a 265-acre parcel of land about 10 miles out of town, construction is underway on a gigantic bitcoin mining facility. It belongs to Riot Platforms, a publicly listed crypto mining company, which intends to grow it into the largest in the world.The oil fields are drying up. In Riot’s high temple of cryptographic computation, local officials think they’ve found a stopgap. Some Corsicana residents aren’t so sure. They see the facility as a blot on the landscape that threatens their property values, vulnerable energy grid, and quiet rural lifestyle. And they're fighting back.