Quebec's appeal as Bitcoin mining hub in question as availability of cheap power vanishes
- Bitcoin enthusiasts have been pouring into the busy city for setting up mining shops.
- Quebec's Premiere shows no interest in welcoming them.
Canada's bustling city Quebec, which has been attracting a lot of Cyrpto and Bitcoin enthusiasts to the city, especially the Chinese, may now start to fizzle out as the hub for Bitcoin miners as the availability of cheap power goes away.
Canada's biggest electric utility Hydro Quebec has been getting lot of requests from Bitcoin miners to supply power to them - as much as 9,000 megawatts of energy-- about one-quarter of the utility’s total generating capacity of 37,000 megawatts.
"If all we do is connect the bitcoin miners who have applied, we could create an issue for ourselves,” Hyro Quebec's Chief Executive Officer Eric Martel said. “There are limits to what we can do. I have a huge network with lots of capacity, but I cannot host the entire planet.”
“If you want to come settle here, plug in your servers and do Bitcoin mining, we’re not really interested,” Quebec's Premier Philippe Couillard said at a conference in Montreal on Friday. “There needs to be added value for our society; just having servers to do transaction mining and acquire new bitcoins, I don’t see the added value.”
All the major cyrptocurrencies were trading up on Friday. Bitcoin was up nearly 3% at $11,330, Ethereum was up nearly 1% at $863, XMR, the outperformer of the day was up 7% at $367.
Author
Manoj B Rawal
Independent Analyst
Manoj B Rawal, financial markets professional with about 11 years of experience in writing, editing and advising on stocks, currencies and fixed income.
