[ChancyChance]

An easier and more reliable way to make money is to sell it to neighboring countries that need energy. Like they had been doing. Seems to me a little corrupt birdie told them about BTC and their ruling class wanted in on another way to hide wealth. Like every other use of BTC

[HashBasher]

How is it easier to sell energy? Electricity is not digital, you need to build the wires, figure out the demand and fund the operations of the whole thing.

[acdha]

That’s already setup: they export something like ¾ of the electricity they produce to India. I suspect this is either trying to get higher rates or possibly challenges related to their seasonal hydropower issues – if India is building more capacity for the times when the water levels are too low, the long-term rates aren’t going to be going up.

[lordlimecat]

You need to do those things for a datacenter too.

[Zetice]

That’s the rub; you can’t get the energy out of where it is. You can’t really use it for your country, you can’t sell it, it’s just kind of there, unused.

[zetazzed]

What do you mean you can't sell it? Bhutan exports 70% of their energy to India (https://www.sasec.asia/index.php?page=news&nid=1178&url=bhu-...). India needs lots of energy to do normal energy things that improve people's lives, like lighting and cooling homes and running irrigation systems.

[alienthrowaway]

What? They are already selling energy to neighbours - it contributes 30% to GDP. Are you suggesting they cannot sell more of it?

[crooked-v]

> you can’t sell it

Bhutan sells a massive amount of power.

[arcticbull]

You absolutely can by investing in transmission infrastructure instead of wasting it on guessing nonces. It incentivizes continuing to waste it instead of transmitting to to places with productive uses.

Transmission is extremely efficient. A power line spanning all the way from New York to San Francisco should be about 92% efficient.

Transmission line losses are only about 2-3% per 1000km. [1]

[1] https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO...

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Cables.

[throwaway290]

after I heard about express cryptocurrency management workshops for Thai buddhist monks last year I am not surprised

[sidiropo]

There are power generation facilities in Canada that are paying the US to take their excess energy.