Ukraine could be possibly legalizing crypto after all!
Although the usage of power plants have been used for cryptocurrency mining before, there wasn’t any as big as a government scale. Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear energy company Energoatom is considering utilizing nuclear plants for crypto mining to help ease its economy and reduce energy wastage.
The Ukrainian government believes that usage of power plants for Bitcoin mining could combat the excess electricity produced which could be beneficial to save the country’s resources due to COVID-19 lockdown.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Energy is facing a surplus up-rise of power usage produced by the nation’s nuclear power plants due to the lockdown. As many are forced to stay at home, additional consumption of energy became inevitable. The nation is now trying to utilize the power from nuclear plants to conduct cryptocurrency mining as it requires a huge amount of power usage.
Embarking the country’s path to Digitalization
On Wednesday May 6 Ukraine published a statement on Facebook that they have begun utilizing nuclear plants as a solution for crypto mining due to the COVID-19 lockdown. The country is now looking forward to starting to apply solutions to avoid the wasting of energy to increase digital assets as part of its course toward digitalization led by its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
While there is no telling when the current pandemic will end. The country fears that if situations were left unchanged, there would be a gradual increase in offences that may affect its country’s resources leading to an economic crisis.
Ukraine will be looking into the digital expects so part of its solution through crypto mining. The post also stated:
“There is a way to transfer this ‘liability’ into an ‘asset’. One of the modern approaches for using excess electricity is to devote it to cryptocurrency mining. That would not only allow to maintain the guaranteed load on the nuclear power plants, but also ensure that companies can attract extra funds. Therefore, it would open the way to a fundamentally new economy, new approaches, a new market model.”
An effective Solution?
In March 2020, Cointelegraph reported on how a company in New York utilized a private power plant for Bitcoin mining. Which led them to earning about $50,000 worth of BTC daily. So how will this work for a full scale project powered by the government?
Back in May 2019, the Ukraine government caught several power plant workers using nuclear energy to mine cryptocurrency where they were then fined for stealing electricity to illicit bitcoin mining operation. The officers confiscated a huge stash of computers and hackers had to pay a ransom of $1 million worth in bitcoin.
A Possible Crypto Mining heaven?
Could Ukraine be possibly building itself a digital heaven for crypto miners? If you are a crypto miner, you would know the struggles of effective mining which is not only power consuming, painstaking, costly but also sporadically rewarding. However it would also require a lot of time and quality equipment to set up your own mining rig.
As we compare to using a country’s resource for production, how much cryptocurrencies do you think Ukraine could generate with its use of power plants?
Header image source: Pixabay,Pexels
