New York Times
Summary
A bitcoin mining operation is opening northeast of Niagara Falls this month on the site of the last working coal plant in New York State.
Across the state, a former aluminum plant in Massena, already one of the biggest cryptocurrency sites in the United States, is expanding.
And in Owego, a metal-recycling mogul with 11.3 million Instagram followers is making a gritty start-up with banks of computers in shipping containers next to a scrapyard.
Soaring Bitcoin values may be the investment talk of Wall Street, but a few hours north, in upstate New York, the buzz is about companies that are scrambling to create the digital currency by “mining” it virtually with all types and sizes of computer farms constantly whizzing through transactions.
In just a few years, a swath of northern and western New York has become one of the biggest Bitcoin producers in the country. The prospectors in this digital gold rush need lots of cheap electricity to run thousands of energy-guzzling computer rigs.
The area — with its cheap hydroelectric power and abundance of shuttered power plants and old factories — was ripe for Bitcoin mining. The abandoned infrastructure, often with existing connections to the power grid, can readily be converted for Bitcoin mining.
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