Free Electricity Leads to Bitcoin Mining Boom
Me Maduro, Me Stupid!
Source: Flickr user DonkeyHotey
Nicolás Maduro is a dictator that has destroyed Venezuela with his socialist policies and brutality towards his own people. Venezuelans barely get enough food to survive and wait in long lines to buy even the most basic groceries and food. Hyperinflation makes the currency increasingly worthless over a very short period of time. In order to continue in power, he has had to replace the entire Congress with his own lackeys and replace numerous other officials including the attorney general and numerous justices. He has taken over private businesses with force (and run them into the ground with his incompetence). He routinely denounces capitalism as a scapegoat; which is ironic since the hellhole he has dug gets deeper and deeper as he moves further and further away from a capitalist society. How does someone so immoral and irrational stay in power? Besides keeping the right military leaders happy, he has to give away various things like oil and electricity to uneducated masses of poor people that believe the stupidity that spews from his mouth.
Because they have virtually no other way to survive, savvy Venezuelans with a decent understand of cryptocurrency and the ability to hide their servers from corrupt police, have taken up bitcoin mining as a way to survive. The key is getting electricity almost for free. Bitcoin mining requires a massive investment of electricity and if the government is going to give it away for almost nothing, people will happily accept it. Ether is increasingly popular cryptocurrency for miners because of how difficult it is to detect. This is important because police that raid technically legal bitcoin server farms demand bribes or else they will charge the miners with other made-up crimes. Bitcoin usage has become increasingly popular in Venezuela as a safe haven compared to the hyperinflating Bolivar. Until something dramatic happens, like a coup forcing out Maduro and his socialists and the country abandoning the Boliver for the US Dollar or Euro, the interest in cryptocurrency mining and using cryptocurrency as a means of exchange will only increase.
