Several investors of crypto miners in Cuba are struggling to earn back their investment. The main reason for this is that the country is currently experiencing continuous blackouts that cause the miners to fail every time.
Crypto popular in Cuba
The blackouts also have (major) consequences for telecommunications, among others, as a result of which some of these operations, which rely on off-grid power plants, no longer need the internet to perform mining tasks.
Cryptocurrency in Cuba has now found a way. It is regularly used by Cuban citizens as an alternative to obtaining services they otherwise could not have obtained. Examples include international shopping and mobile and internet top-up services. Even sending and receiving money transfers are increasingly done via a cryptocurrency.
However, mining the cryptocurrencies is having a hard time getting around the same level of popularity. And this is not because mining is seen as a bad investment, but precisely because of the current state of the electricity grid in the country. The country is currently constantly confronted with blackouts, which means that the power grid is regularly temporarily cut off.
It is certainly noteworthy that not only the crypto sector in the country is affected by this. Anyone in Cuba who is currently not connected to some form of emergency power will unfortunately have to deal with this regularly. The telecom network, for example, is also affected by this. This is because these blackouts also affect the local telecom network, which cannot be managed with the limited installations used by Etectsa, the local Cuban telecom company. A representative of the company concluded with the following:
Etecsa’s generators are running out of fuel to cope with so many hours of blackout. They are not able to generate all the energy needed to keep so much equipment running for such a long time and therefore everything does not always work properly.