“Most anywhere else, his power demand for mining would have gone unnoticed. But Bowman runs Plattsburgh BTC, and the small city in upstate New York has improbably become the front line in a growing energy debate.
Here’s the issue: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency begun in 2009 that leverages blockchain technology in order to operate without a central clearing authority. Transactions are confirmed by “miners” who are compensated for the computing power necessary to verify transactions in a few ways. But the primary incentive is being awarded new bitcoins, and as their value has risen, so has interest in mining the currency.
Bitcoin’s creators never imagined massive server farms and dedicated computing power, Bowman told Utility Dive. But that’s what happened.”
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