Sweden Aims To Reduce Electricity Supply To Bitcoin Miners?
- Energy Minister of Sweden is not in favor of Bitcoin mining
- The government aims to track the electricity used by miners
The Energy Minister in Sweden, Khashayar Farmanbar, has recently expressed his views on the Bitcoin mining sector and the energy utilized in the process. He seems not to be in favor of power allocation to BTC mining and believes that the same energy should be used in job-generating projects like steel plants.
Sweden, which is one of the top three BTC mining hubs in Europe and a potential global BTC mining hub, has to make a choice between utilizing the energy in employment-generating sectors or in Bitcoin mining that is grabbing growing amounts of power. According to a report by Bloomberg, Farmanbar believes there is no contest as the latter takes a heavy amount of electricity and, thus, Sweden might not be very hospitable to BTC miners.
“We need energy for more useful things than Bitcoin, to be honest. We are moving from a period of administration to an extreme expansion where our entire manufacturing industry is seeking to electrify,”
he stated.
Notably, a few weeks back, the Swedish government asked the country’s Energy Agency to develop ways of monitoring the amount of power used for digital infrastructure, with an emphasis on Bitcoin mining in particular.
The government’s investigation increases the possibility that crypto miners’ existence in Sweden, whose large hydro reservoirs and massive wind parks have produced some of the cleanest and absolute cheapest electricity in the world, will become more difficult.
Two businesses operating in Sweden are Canadian Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd. and Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining Ltd.
Farmanbar has not disclosed any potential mining regulation measures for the nation. One possibility is to change the sequence in which new power users get access to the grid so that those who may directly benefit society, such as by producing a lot of jobs, are given preference. Limiting the existing preferential tax treatment that is given to all data centers regardless of how they are used is another option.
Since the cryptocurrency boom in 2021, there has been an increase in Bitcoin mining. However, due to the heavy energy used in the process, the President of Kazakhstan recently signed a bill to impose higher tax rates on miners.
It’s interesting to note that Glassnode data from the end of June reveals that miners controlled 65,200 BTC and were distributing 3,000–4,000 Bitcoins each month.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
