An Antminer rig is nearly $20k. A Starlink setup is $600 then $50 a month. Plus any other capital costs. If the electricity is "free" just the rig and Starlink satellite cost will take over five years to pay off assuming the mining revenue is $10 a day.
Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs?
For reference a milk cow costs about $1500 and can produce 2,500 gallons of milk in a year. For the cost of the Bitcoin rig maybe getting $10 a day a village could buy about 13 milk cows. Even selling milk at $1 a gallon that's about $88 a day. The "free" power can be used to Pasteurize the milk (UHT) for extra longevity.
That same $20k could buy a room full of laptops plus networking equipment and Starlink. They could take online courses to learn a variety of technical jobs and then do contract work for way fucking more than the $10 a day they'd get from a Bitcoin rig.
> Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs?
Why would it need to be free? It could be an ordinary investment that's paid off over time. (Though I assume that the payback period is probably quicker than 5 years, that seems a bit too long to be useful.)
Be careful about cows: there's quite a few charities who want to give out cows to help people (using the same logic as you do). But for many recipients the cow is a net drain on their resources. That same logic applies when buying a cow with your own money.
They could invite outside miners to set up shop in the village.
The miners would finance provide the capital, set up the mining rigs, and take all the bitcoin risk. The villagers would just sell them electricity. Just like they would sell electricity to any other business.
No clue whether that's what's happening in Bhutan, but it's a perfectly valid business plan, and pays the villagers right away.
So Bitcoin miners will just go to some out of the way village in Africa to buy electricity? I don't need to imagine electrical utilities, those already exist.
It doesn't make any fiscal sense to find some out of the way location with a small scale hydro generator to set up a Bitcoin miner. The amount the village would need to charge to make a worthwhile amount of money will certainly be above large scale utility rates.
The Bitcoin miner in remote African village story smells like someone taking advantage of some villagers. They're either paying them below market rate for electricity or indenting them with a Bitcoin mining setup that will barely pay for itself over years.
You only need a crazy efficient rig to mine Bitcoin if you have to still make money after factoring in your electricity costs; if you are given free electricity, you will be profitable using any existing computer you have to mine: you also won't be making as much money per unit of time, sure, but you will still be making money at that rate.
Mining rates are a few tens of cents per day per TH/s. Even with "free" electricity the payback time for a miner will take a long time. If you've got a non-optimized miner the payout rate would take months just to be measurable.
