Today Bitcoin (BTC) has been mined for the first time using energy from a volcano! The president of El Salvador announced this in a tweet earlier today.
El Salvador is a country with many volcanoes. The country generates a lot of energy with so-called geothermal power plants. These power stations use the heat in the earth around volcanoes to generate energy. El Salvador generates about 25% of the country’s total energy consumption with such geothermal power plants. And now the first volcanic bitcoin is born!
The Central American country was the first country in the world to recognize bitcoin as legal tender. The president, Nayib Bukele, already announced at the time of the bill’s entry into force that he wanted to mine bitcoin with volcanic energy. He then wrote in a tweet:
“I just instructed the president of our geothermal power company to create a plan to provide Bitcoin mining facilities with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0-emissions energy from our volcanoes”
And that now seems to actually work. Bukele shared a tweet this morning with the balance of a mining account. So far, the country has been mining 0.01083155 BTC, probably as part of a mining pool.
— Nayib Bukele 🇸🇻 (@nayibbukele) October 1, 2021
“We are still testing and installing, but this is officially the first Bitcoin mining with the volcanode,” the president said. It seems to be an ideal solution to Bitcoin’s energy consumption problem. Many opponents think that the energy that Bitcoin consumes is too crazy and that the emissions from the network are too large.
In recent months, however, more and more bitcoin mining companies have gone the green route. Companies are increasingly using green energy or promising to offset their emissions. El Salvador’s bitcoin mining operation is also a 100% green solution and may be the start of greater development in the country.