Inner Mongolia

We suspect that title seems a bit odd to most of our readers, but in fact Inner Mongolia (which is a region of China while Outer Mongolia is a separate country) has one of the largest bitcoin mining operations in the world housed there - owned by Bitmain. Now this company also produces and sells the hardware that mines digital currencies, but they also mine it themselves. The photo above is just one hall in their ginormous mining operation in Inner Mongolia. The local electricity company there gives them a 30% discount on their electric bill, but even so, they still pay $39,000 per day to mine and use the equivalent energy of 12,000 homes. Now, if you believe in the future of digital currencies, as we do, then check out this story below and give consideration to how this is occurring in China - not the United States.

(Cindy Taylor, Publisher)

"A decade ago, after a speculative coal boom fizzled, the once-thriving desert city of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, became China’s largest ghost town, littered with unfinished or empty buildings and desperate for another way to make money. Blessed like most of China with cheap labor, land, and, most important, cheap electricity, Ordos threw open its doors to all-comers, including bitcoin, the stateless digital currency whose total market value has more than quadrupled this year to $70 billion, and whose ability to act as a kind of digital gold has captured the imaginations of governments, big banks, and small entrepreneurs. Today, Ordos (population 2 million) has emerged as a center of bitcoin mining, the process of approving transactions and creating new coins in the digital currency’s system. Over half the world’s major bitcoin mining pools—groups of miners who agree to add up their resources to improve their odds of finding bitcoin—are located in China, according to a research paper (pdf, p. 91) by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. That has made China a dominant force in a new industry that may one day define how global transactions are ordered..." Full Story at Quartz