American-based mining firm Stronghold Digital Mining has successfully obtained $105 million in funding to support its initiative to convert coal waste to Bitcoin. The project claims to convert 200 tonnes of waste coal to create one Bitcoin.
In an interview with Forbes, Stronghold Co-chairman Bill Spence talked about this initiative and how the mining firm is working to become the opposite of traditional crypto companies. ‘Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.’
Additionally, Spence also talked about their plans to use coal waste for crypto mining.
‘Coal waste fires have been wreaking havoc in my home state of Pennsylvania for the last hundred years. Not only are these coal fires a major source of greenhouse gases, but the acid runoff and ash from these uncontrolled burning piles pose serious threats to the health, environment and water quality of the surrounding communities,’ Spence shared.
‘Simply put, we employ 21st-century crypto mining techniques to remediate the impacts of 19th and 20th-century coal mining in some of the most environmentally neglected regions in the United States,’ he added.
Scrubgrass Plant is Stronghold’s facility in Pennsylvania that works to reverse the effects of coal waste by converting the material to an energy source that can be used to mine cryptocurrency.
Spence also discussed Stronghold Digital Mining’s plans for the future and their aim to have at least 28,000 miners by the end of 2021.
The practice of mining cryptocurrency is known to take up enormous amounts of fossil fuels and renewable energy. Moreover, the total electricity consumption used for crypto mining annually is equivalent to that of small countries like Chile and Argentina.
This massive energy consumption has gained attention worldwide, especially from environmentalists. Stronghold Digital Mining’s project hopes to be the potential solution to this problem by making cryptocurrency mining more sustainable and environmentally safe moving forward.
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