“Are We Going to Spend Hydrocarbons to Produce Bitcoin?”
The question was asked by national deputy Martin Berhongare, who submitted requests for reports to various ministries on the establishment of BitFarm in the country.
And it is that the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining in the country and in the world has long been debated.
In 2021 alone, global bitcoin mining consumed 134 TWh (TeraWatts hours, equivalent to one billion MWh), more than was consumed in Argentina in the same year.
In our country, late last year, CAMMESA, under the instructions of the then Secretary of Power, Federico Basuldo, launched an investigation to trace cryptominers, measure their consumption and project how much they might need in 2022. Of.
In Tierra del Fuego, which is considered the national capital of crypto mining (BitPatagonia and CryptoPatagonia are the leading companies in the field), activity represents 22% of electricity consumption. “The 3 main cities, Ushuaia, Rio Grande and Tolhuín are on the border”, said the Energy Secretary of the Insular Province, through Resolution 40/22 of the Secretary of Energy (January 2022), raising the price of electricity for those developing crypto mining Gone (a lot).
The measure is explained in Global Geography: China, a country that represents 70% of the world’s crypto mining, restricted activity amid the energy crisis as well as the exchange and possession of digital currencies. From there, activity moved to different latitudes, concentrating in the US, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Canada, fundamentally resulting in saturation of power lines in some cases, leading to mining prohibited or over-regulated in other countries. Done. : Iran, Iceland, Kosovo, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Nepal, Qatar and Oman etc.
—Rio Cuarto will receive 55,000 Whatsminer M30S model bitcoin mining equipment, which is currently one of the most powerful in the specialty hardware market.
—The Whatsminer M30S, from the company MicroBT, boasts a processing power of 88 terahashes per second (TH/s). In total, the equipment to be installed in Argentina will add 4.84 exhash per second (EH/s). Bitfarms intends to establish in Argentina which represents approximately 2% of the entire bitcoin hashrate (210 EH/s) in the world.
-The consumption of each device is about 3.3kW.