Inside a Bitcoin Mine At a Natural Gas Well In Texas

"Motherboard's new CRYPTOLAND documentary series went to West Texas to get into the weeds about cryptocurrency mining and its impact on the environment," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader. From the report: Motherboard visited Giga Energy Solutions in east Texas for the latest episode of CRYPTOLAND, an eight-part documentary series on how cryptocurrency is affecting our world. Mines like Giga's are at the center of heated debate over cryptocurrency's environmental impact. To critics, turning natural gas into bitcoins is emblematic of everything wrong with the growing industry. To Giga Energy co-founders Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh, though, they're undertaking an environmental service -- generating virtual currency using harmful gas that would otherwise be sent into the atmosphere. Instead of combusting surplus natural gas from an oil rig, they're diverting it into a generator, which converts it into electricity to power computers that mine for bitcoin. There's been a lot of skepticism around crypto's impact on the environment as well. The report continues: Alex De Vries, a data scientist at the Netherlands' central bank and founder of Bitcoin energy tracking project Digiconomist who spoke with Motherboard reporter Audrey Carleton as well as Hines and CRYPTOLAND host Krishna Andavolu, says Bitcoin's reliance on the fossil fuel sector is making vast and irreversible contributions to climate change, however. "Most people are putting their money in Bitcoin simply because they expect the value of Bitcoin to go up," he said. "If that's the situation, where there is just not much possible practical use, but there is a very large energy impact, then my verdict would be that's absolutely not worth it." The full episode is available on YouTube. In a separate episode published on Wednesday, Motherboard unearthed found footage from one of the first Bitcoin conferences: Bitcoin 2013 in San Jose.

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