Economy
Small Towns Try to Tame the Bitcoin Boom
As cryptocurrency miners suck up cheap energy in parts of Washington and New York states, local leaders are scrambling to regulate the industry.
By the time Tim Currier, the mayor of Massena, New York, found out that Bitcoin miners had set up shop in his small town, it was too late to stop them.
Massena is a border town of about 10,000 along the St. Lawrence River, which provides residents of the area with a wealth of affordable and reliable hydroelectric power. That cheap juice also lured the cloud mining service Coinmint, which illegally moved into a vacant building in an industrial park in January and plugged in a fleet of computers. They needed Massena’s energy grid—with rates in the lowest ten percent of the country—to power the enormously electricity-intensive computational process involved with creating the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin.