cryptomining

In a revolutionary step for one of the most closed economies in the world, the President of Turkmenistan, Serdar Berdymukhamedov, signed a law on virtual assets on November 28, 2025. This document, published in the official newspaper "Neutral Turkmenistan", will come into force on January 1, 2026. It legalizes cryptocurrency mining and trading, allowing individual entrepreneurs and legal entities to engage in these activities provided they obtain licenses from the Central Bank of Turkmenistan.

For more than two centuries, factories were built wherever ports, railways and cheap labor were available. Today, the rules are changing. The rise of digital industries has disrupted the traditional logic of “where industry should be located,” and Bitcoin mining demonstrates this transformation more clearly than any other sector.
Instead of chasing low-cost labor, Bitcoin miners focus on something entirely different — the cheapest wasted watt of electricity, preferably in places no conventional industry would consider. Computing power can now move to energy, rather than energy moving to people.
This shift is reshaping the global industrial map faster than anyone expected.

Bitcoin Mining: Minimal Labor, Maximum Energy
Unlike normal factories, a mining operation doesn’t need supply chains, truck fleets or hundreds of employees. It needs a warehouse, a handful of technicians, an internet connection and — above all — massive amounts of cheap electricity. The output is purely digital, requiring no transport.
This gives miners access to types of energy that would otherwise be unused:
• curtailed power from solar and wind

• grid-bottlenecked renewable overproduction

• flared gas on remote oil fields

• seasonal hydro surplus
Traditional industries ignore such sites. For Bitcoin miners, they are ideal.

When “Wasted Energy” Turns Into a Subsidy
Solar and wind farms in the U.S. frequently face curtailment. In California alone, over 3.4 TWh of renewable energy were curtailed in 2023. In some places energy prices regularly fall below zero, meaning producers must pay the grid to take their electricity.
Bitcoin miners step directly into this gap:
• Soluna builds modular datacenters inside wind and solar sites

• Riot earned tens of millions in energy credits by shutting down during peak demand

• Bitdeer and others convert excess hydropower into “clean bitcoins”
Mining often stabilizes the grid: miners consume energy when there is too much of it — and shut down when demand spikes.

Hashrate Moves Faster Than Any Factory in History
When China banned mining in 2021, miners moved entire containerized farms across continents in months — something no traditional industry could replicate.
• The U.S. surged to over 40% of global hashrate

• Kazakhstan briefly rose to ~18%

• China quietly regained a share in provinces with surplus hydropower
ASIC farms depreciate within 2–3 years, their output is weightless, and the “factory” is often a converted shipping container. Bitcoin mining is the most mobile energy-intensive industry ever created.

Miners as Controllable Load: Perfect Partners for Renewables
In Texas, miners are recognized as “controllable load resources” — large-scale consumers who can shut down within seconds.
This model benefits everyone:
• miners pay extremely low rates

• grid operators gain a fast-acting emergency buffer

• renewable projects add more capacity without overloading the network
Texas often pays miners in energy credits that exceed the value of the BTC they would have mined.

Mining Farms Are Becoming Heat Sources for Cities
A new trend is emerging: monetizing not only electricity, but also heat.
• In Finland, a trial used mining heat to support district heating

• Several European and Canadian projects funnel mining heat into residential heating networks

• Bhutan uses hydropower to mine Bitcoin and channels mining profits into government revenue
This shifts the narrative — miners increasingly help use energy efficiently, instead of wasting it.

AI Datacenters Are Following the Same Path — With Limits
AI infrastructure is also moving toward cheap stranded energy. But it has constraints:
• inference requires low latency

• many workloads cannot tolerate outages

• SLAs demand high reliability
Even so, training and batch inference can be deployed in the same places where Bitcoin mining thrives. Some companies already switch between AI compute and mining depending on energy availability.

What’s at Stake: A Rewrite of Global Industrial Strategy
Bitcoin mining has shown for the first time that the real driver of industrial placement in the 21st century isn’t labor or ports — it’s energy that would otherwise be wasted.
Winners include:
• Texas (wind + solar + flexible grid rules)

• Iceland, Norway, Bhutan (hydropower)

• States offering tax relief (e.g., Kentucky)

• Regions with seasonal energy surpluses (parts of China)
The same logic is attracting AI datacenters, cloud computing, and high-performance computing.

The Future: An Economy Organized Around Watts, Not Workers
If the industrial age was organized around factories and labor, the digital age is being organized around surplus electrons, cool climates and friendly regulation.
Bitcoin was only the beginning.

The map has already begun to shift.

And the same forces that pushed miners into remote energy pockets may soon reshape where AI, cloud computing and next-generation infrastructure are built.
The competitive advantage of tomorrow won’t be low-cost labor — it will be the cheapest, most accessible watt of electricity.

#bitcoin , #BTC , #CryptoMining , #CryptoNews , #AI

Stay one step ahead – follow our profile and stay informed about everything important in the world of cryptocurrencies!
Notice:
,,The information and views presented in this article are intended solely for educational purposes and should not be taken as investment advice in any situation. The content of these pages should not be regarded as financial, investment, or any other form of advice. We caution that investing in cryptocurrencies can be risky and may lead to financial losses.“