El Salvador Is Mining Bitcoin With Volcanic Energy

A few weeks after officially becoming the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as a legal tender, El Salvador has started mining the cryptocurrency with volcanic energy. 

On Tuesday, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, shared a video clip of workers from LaGeo, a state-owned geothermal electronics company, trying to set up bitcoin mining machines.

The video, which was captioned “First steps…” circulated quickly across Crypto Twitter and currently has over 2.3 million views. 

As a follow up on the development, President Bukele has shared a screenshot of a mined bitcoin, saying: “officially the first bitcoin mining the volcanode.”

The screenshot shows 0.00599179  BTC worth is currently worth about $269, mined with volcanic energy. He added that the mining project is still  progressing and that they’re in the testing phase.

El Salvador is popularly known as “the land of the volcanoes” and the country generates its local power via geothermal energy. 

Reports reveal that El Salvador has about 20 potential active volcanoes that contribute to the county’s power source, and its new interest in harnessing thermal energy to mine bitcoin could provide an answer to the hunt for a reliable clean energy source to power bitcoin mining operations.

Meanwhile, volcano-powered bitcoin mining has been going on for a while. “It’s just geothermal energy,” says a popular Bitcoin miner, Alejandro de la Torre, who recently left China for Texas. 

Brandon Arvanaghi, a bitcoin mining engineer, also commented that complete renewable and unexploited energy power has been authorized solely because of bitcoin. 

“Bitcoin is the greatest accelerant to renewable energy development in history,” he said. 

As part of president Bukele’s commitment to Bitcoin, the country added BTC to its balance sheet. El Salvador also launched its own national crypto wallet dubbed “Chivo,”  which means cool in their local slang. The wallet processes transactions at no cost and offers fast  border payments for citizens. 

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