A technician inspects the backside of bitcoin mining at Bitfarms in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec. -Collected
At the site of a former cocoa factory in Canada's Quebec province, tiny holes punctured in the walls of a warehouse allow fresh air to cool thousands of whirring processors connected by a tangle of wires. Yessoulou Coulibaly watches over the sea of 7,000-odd computers hidden away in this industrial park at a center operated by Bitfarms, one of the emerging players of the cryptocurrency "mining" boom.
Unlike the dollar or the euro, cryptocurrencies are not issued by central banks. Instead they are "mined" or created thanks to server "farms" like the one in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Hyacinthe -- which crack increasingly complex computer codes in order to unlock new batches, or blocks of virtual coins.
Mining on a large scale requires massive computing power, which in turn requires a lot of electric power. That is where Quebec comes in the picture: luring miners with its plentiful, cheap electricity and below average temperatures -- akin to Iceland, where a sister cryptocurrency blitz is also underway. Coulibaly is among a wave of entrepreneurs flooding the province, in a bid to transform it into a Silicon Valley for the emerging sector. But some authorities are leery, fearing a surge of demand for electric power could trigger blackouts, for the benefit of an industry that few fully understand.
In March, a number of Quebec municipalities slapped moratoriums on new cryptocurrency factories while the province's government and the Hydro-Quebec public utility have halted new projects to get a better grasp of the technology and its broader economic impact. The first to put on the brakes was the tiny municipality of Bromont, east of Montreal, where a new bitcoin operation was seeking to consume 30 of the town's 36 megawatts of total available excess power.
Soon after, the neighboring township of Brome-Missisquoi imposed a similar ban on new bitcoin mines. "Most of the business requests that we had in our region to open computer warehouses to mine cryptocurrencies would result in very little job creation," said the town administrator, Robert Desmarais.
-AFP, Saint-Hyacinthe
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