Energy Riches Fuel Bitcoin Craze For Speculation-shy Iceland (apnews.com)

Iceland is expected to use more energy "mining" bitcoins and other virtual currencies this year than it uses to power its homes. From a report: With massive amounts of electricity needed to run the computers that create bitcoins, large virtual currency companies have established a base in the North Atlantic island nation blessed with an abundance of renewable energy. The new industry's relatively sudden growth prompted lawmaker Smari McCarthy of Iceland's Pirate Party to suggest taxing the profits of bitcoin mines. The initiative is likely to be well received by Icelanders, who are skeptical of speculative financial ventures after the country's catastrophic 2008 banking crash. "Under normal circumstances, companies that are creating value in Iceland pay a certain amount of tax to the government," McCarthy told The Associated Press. "These companies are not doing that, and we might want to ask ourselves whether they should."

Comments

Crypto-currency mining is fly-by-night

[MrL0G1C]

Iceland has every reason to be wary, mining algorithms and technological advancement ensure that whatever equipment you have will be obsolete soon enough. The crypto-mining company might still exist in a year or two but it might not. These companies run on a month-by-month basis and they'll happily up sticks and move to another country if the electricity is cheaper.

If they're not making sure that these crypto mining companies pay for the electricity generating equipment then they could easily be left with big generating capacity and no customers to use it and pay for the loans that were made to build it.

Schmeptical

[Hognoxious]

Icelanders, who are skeptical of speculative financial ventures after the country's catastrophic 2008 banking crash

Skeptical my arse, they made out like bandits.

It was their customers that lost out.

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/m...

Re:Schmeptical

[Rei]

What gets me about all of the Icesave nonsense is all you had to do was click through to the terms - just 1-2 clicks from the front page of the website about Icesave accounts - and it listed the insurers. The #1 insurer was a private fund. The #2 insurer was the British government (in the UK; the Dutch government in the Netherlands). It was explicitly spelled out! And indeed, that's how it should have been according to banking regulations; private funds were perfectly acceptable as the primary insurer, and the country of the citizens purchasing the product is the secondary insurer. Of course, the private Icelandic banking fund went bankrupt in the crash, which passed the liability on to the secondary insurers (aka, the UK and Dutch governments). Who sued Iceland in the EFTA court, to try to get Iceland to take on their liabilities. And - I can't stress emphasis on this enough - lost on all counts.

Should banking regulations have allowed private funds to back accounts? Probably not. But they were what they were.

That's not to say that there weren't Icelanders who contributed to the crash - far from it. The level of criminality going on among top figures in the banking industry to deliberately prop up bad assets and make off like bandits was insane. But people here are as angry with them as people elsewhere, as they crashed our economy. Our currency literally got cut in half. Picture that, in a country where most goods are imported. Picture that, in a country where loans were generally denominated in foreign currencies. The 3 banks that went under had combined liabilities equal to half that of Lehmann Brothers... but in a country 1/1000th the population of the US. It was devastating.

And on top of that, we had the British trying to stick us with their liabilities and treating us as terrorists. You know, the UK - the country that spent decades stealing our fish and depleting our stocks. But hey, if you want your nets back, you can have them. ;)

Cancer Genetics Crypto Coin

[Drethon]

Need a crypto coin that is unlocked by doing processing for cancer genetic research. Probably no way to make it work but it would be nice if all this crypto coin mining processing went to something worthwhile.