Skip to Content
Blockchain

A US city placed a moratorium on crypto mining

Cheap electricity made Plattsburgh, New York, a Bitcoin mining hotspot—briefly.

Backstory: The city has cheap electricity—domestic power costs 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour versus the US average of 10—thanks to a hydroelectric plant. Commercial users can get prices as low as 2 cents, which lured Bitcoin miners who need to power their computers.

The news: When there’s high demand in Plattsburgh over a given month (because of mining operations setting up, say) the city has to buy extra power on the open market, which is more expensive. Locals feared price hikes on their utility bills due to the influx of crypto miners, so the council banned crypto mining for 18 months.

Plus: Upstate New York is going to be raising electricity prices for crypto miners.

Why it matters: Other places, such as Quebec, have also wooed crypto miners with cheap electricity only to find out that they don’t have the supply. Expect this trend to continue.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

ChatGPT is about to revolutionize the economy. We need to decide what that looks like.

New large language models will transform many jobs. Whether they will lead to widespread prosperity or not is up to us.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

GPT-4 is bigger and better than ChatGPT—but OpenAI won’t say why

We got a first look at the much-anticipated big new language model from OpenAI. But this time how it works is even more deeply under wraps.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.