Photo by Aleksi Räisä on Unsplash

Could A.I. kill Bitcoin?

Governments, data centres and BTC miners to go to war

Yaakov C Lui-Hyden
4 min readMar 29, 2024

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A problem in need of a solution

Fred Thiel, CEO of bitcoin miner Marathon digital, has discussed recently the competition between the needs of BTC miners and data centres.

Both use enormous amounts of energy, right when we are on the cusp of a transition away from Fossil fuels towards renewables, and creaking old grids are buckling under the strain of power demands.

Ol mate Fred believes BTC miners can have a role in this mix, with the ability to shut off mining during peak demand, something data centres cannot do, and also proposes expansion into the developing world- which is less regulated- to keep the BTC lights on, with less scrutiny.

Certainly a half glass full kind of guy. With halving coming up, requiring even more energy to produce one Bitcoin, the race for securing energy supplies is rather critical.

Just to give some more context, Boston Consulting Group have stated that data centres use about 2.5% of the US electricity currently, but that will rise to 7.5% by 2030- about the same as a third of all US homes in total. Enormous numbers.

In 2022, data centres used 460 TWh around the world, by 2026 it will be 1000 TWh, equivalent to the entire energy use…

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Yaakov C Lui-Hyden

Yaakov is a world traveller and is accused of being an Australian. Published several novels. He writes about travel, writing, geopolitics and trading.