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El Salvador mined 0.00599179 bitcoin, or roughly $ 269, with the energy of a volcano.
President Nayib Bukele – who has stake his political future on a national bitcoin experiment – tweeted early Friday morning that this was the country’s first trip to volcano-fueled bitcoin mining.
Tuesday, the president posted a flashy 25 second teaser video, which includes shots of a government-branded shipping container filled with bitcoin mining rigs, technicians installing and plugging in ASIC miners, and panoramic antennas of an energy factory deep in a forest , on the edge of a volcano.
The video, which has since gone viral with over 2.3 million views, is simply captioned “First Steps …”
If the Central American State does strike a new coin, it will mean that Bukele kept a promise made for the first time in June, when he said that he had tasked the state-owned geothermal power company, LaGeo SA de CV, to “put in place a plan to offer facilities for mining #Bitcoin with very cheap, 100% clean, 100% energy renewable, 0 energy emissions from our volcanoes “.
Bukele said in his tweet on Friday that the mining project was still ongoing and that they were “testing and installing” new mining equipment.
The president has also provided a breakdown of mining rewards so far.
Volcano-fueled bitcoin mining has been around for some time.
“It’s just geothermal energy,” said bitcoin miner Alejandro de la Torre, who recently left China for Texas. “Iceland has been doing it since the very beginning of bitcoin mining.”
El Salvador is literally dubbed the “land of volcanoes,” and already, geothermal energy accounts for nearly a quarter of its national energy production, according to official data.
El Salvador’s decision is also a boon to the wider debate around bitcoin’s carbon footprint.
“A fully renewable and untapped energy resource has been harnessed solely because of bitcoin, “bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi said.” Bitcoin is the greatest accelerator of renewable energy development in history. “
This foray into mining comes just weeks after El Salvador became the first country to declare bitcoin legal tender.
As part of the rollout, the government added hundreds of bitcoins to its balance sheet and launched its own national virtual wallet – called “Chivo” or Salvadoran slang for “cool” – which offers transactions at no cost and enables transactions. fast cross-border. Payments.
CNBC has reached out to President Bukele with questions about his future state-sponsored bitcoin mining plans, and we haven’t heard back.
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