גיליון 2036: הנה באים השלטים

Bitcoin Magazine The 2036 Issue: Here Come The Sovereigns By the year 2036, Bitcoin mining looks nothing like it did five years ago, much less ten. Long gone is the model of Bitcoin miners that dominated the landscape of the early to mid-2020’s. These large, often publicly traded, mining companies looked for large tranches of cheap power in mostly first-world countries they could monetize at scale. These corporations did not generate their own energy, nor did most design and manufacture their ASICs. They looked for a confluence of attractive power terms from an electric utility, available land near substation infrastructure, and timed the purchase of ASICs for as short a payback period as possible. The compressing margins had already strained this business model by the middle of the decade. Then the explosion of artificial intelligence and high-performance compute (AI/HPC) data centers created a more profitable use of grid connected electricity. This effectively ended the availability of power for public Bitcoin miners in the markets they had adapted for. Many simply took their model and altered it slightly to accommodate the AI/HPC data center buildout. The process was similar, and the companies who successfully pivoted were rewarded by their shareholders. The opposite was true for those public mining companies who failed to build more traditional data centers As the era of public Bitcoin mining companies ended, governments started to notice the advantages of Bitcoin mining for expanding and managing a national grid. Rapid growth in generation commonly outpaced transmission capacity necessary for broader grid connectivity, creating pockets of electricity that could not be delivered and utilized. Several nations possessed surplus energy at off-peak hours, but deficits during peaks in the morning and evenings. Many of the grids throughout the Global South lacked a buyer or high-capacity transmission infrastructure to export surplus energy on day ahead markets. There was a growing realization that mining Bitcoin with the excess electricity was akin to exporting the power over the internet, rendering the expensive cross-border transmission infrastructure unnecessary for this specific sales activity. Countries began to use the design of mineral extraction deals as archetypes. In those arrangements, a joint venture or special purpose vehicle was formed between a foreign mining company and the government. The mining company would extract the mineral, but the country received a royalty in the form of a predetermined percentage of profits given it was the resource of the nation. The sovereign level Bitcoin mining deals were similar. The surplus power was a national asset just like minerals in the ground, but the difference being the temporal aspect of the electricity. Every hour that excess was not monetized, that electricity was unproductive, thus minutely changing the economics of the power plant that generated the electricity. If hours turned into day