Texas — a new home for cryptocurrency miners
In 2021, many miners settled in Texas due to policies that support cryptocurrency mining. First of all, the attitude of officials matters here. For them, it is an opportunity to stimulate the economy and create jobs. For miners, cheap energy is also important, which is necessary to mine cryptocurrencies. Once the cheapest energy could be had in China, but they started to close down cryptocurrency mines and develop their own virtual yen fully controlled by the government.
Texas has ambitions to become a leader in cryptocurrency. Therefore, he introduced regulations deregulating the energy network and various energy suppliers encourage signing contracts with them, outdoing themselves with lower prices. Cryptocurrency mining companies have the option of signing long-term contracts with a fixed energy price for the entire duration of the contract. It is even predicted that energy companies will pay miners to reduce electricity consumption during the summer months when demand is higher. It is worth mentioning that 20% of energy in Texas comes from wind farms, which are greener than coal-fired power plants.
The end of last year was difficult in the United States not only for the mining community, but also for other citizens. Between December 24 and 26, the country was hit by a winter storm that left millions of homes without power and killed dozens of people. In such a difficult situation, the miners turned out to be model network users who behaved appropriately to the situation by limiting energy consumption during peak hours to stabilize the network. During this time, the Bitcoin mining hashrate dropped by 30%. Interestingly, the miners were able to return about 1,500 megawatts of energy to the local grid. This has been made possible by the mining flexibility and mining support services that the Texas government in turn provides. It is estimated that this amount of energy would be “enough to heat 1.5 million small homes or supply energy to 300 large hospitals”. However, there is no data on the period in which they accumulated this amount of power.
Despite the fact that the mining capacity decreased, the collection of the main asset did not slow down. And the CEO of the Satoshi Act Fund said the network continued to run at its pace. However, there were questions about whether this cryptocurrency is really decentralized in this case. Another issue is hashrate distribution. Currently, mining is spread over several dozen large miners. Breaking it into tens of millions of smaller ones would make the situation that took place on Christmas simply imperceptible.
The United States has played an increasingly important role in the cryptocurrency industry since last year. New York (hashrate 19.9%), Kentucky (hashrate 18.7%), Georgia (hashrate 17.3%) and Texas (hashrate 14%) lead in mining.
