Bitcoin Miners Flock to New York’s Remote Corners, but Get Chilly Reception

This area of Northern New York is very economically depressed, and it's interesting to see some of the businesses that set up shop there, or set up their supply chains to draw from that region. They often promise lots of jobs, but few deliver.

Chobani was one of the few that has helped the economy (through support for the local dairy industry, see https://magicvalley.com/news/local/chobani-not-a-windfall-fo...) but others such as the large-scale wind farms across the region use hundreds of workers from elsewhere to build and maintain the turbines, and don't have many permanent local jobs (http://northcountrynow.com/news/hopkinton-wind-advisory-boar...)

The New York Times should have dug into the claims from the Bitcoin miners about job creation ("Coinmint told state officials it would eventually employ 150 people in Massena") as it looks like (based on the descriptions of Coinmint's existing ops) there are only a few people needed to manage what they already have, they are not committing to any large-scale building projects, and much of the mining gear is imported.

Local news orgs have more reporting about the bitcoin miners and the impact on the region:

http://northcountrynow.com/business/blockchain-industries-pu...

http://www.northcountrynow.com/letters/snake-oil-alert-block...

Incidentally, this area is quite beautiful and cheap to live and run a business in. In many of these small cities you can buy a really nice house for $100,000-$200,000. It's about two hours south of Ottawa, a bit further to Montreal and Syracuse, and includes the northern part of the Adirondacks as well as the St. Lawrence River, Lake Ontario, and Lake Champlain region. The college town of St. Lawrence University is Canton, located in St. Lawrence county, and there are state colleges in Potsdam and Plattsburgh. A few cities have set up economic development zones and incentives for companies to relocate there including Ogdensburg, which sits next to one of the bridges to Canada, and I believe Watertown NY, as well.

>Mr. Recny asked why an enterprise that required only a few people to run it should be able to drive up the operating costs of a company that employed about 500.

Why should an enterprise that requires only about 500 people to run it be able to drive up the operating costs of a company that employed about 2,000? and other such logic from "the only justified subsidy is my subsidy" camp.

>The concerns are part of a broader battle over the enormous carbon footprint of Bitcoin mining, which on a global scale uses as much energy as a medium-sized country.

>But the iconic American corporations that abandoned plants in Massena left behind the precious resource that drew them here in the first place: abundant, cheap electricity flowing from a dam in the St. Lawrence River.

So the source of the power a hydroelectric dam. That's about as low of GHG per kWh as you're going to get. "Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas". If they ban these miners, like was done in some Canadian provinces, they'll potentially move to an area with higher GHG per kWh. Since mining is more location agnostic than other production services, it's natural that it be located in economically remote but low-GHG, power/energy rich locations.

It's Chilly inside and it's chilly outside

> work that's useful to humanity

You could argue that having currency transactions based on distributed trust is useful to humanity.