Earlier this week, the small Central American republic of El Salvador went down in history as the first country in the world to recognize Bitcoin as a legal tender. Now, in a move that is being heard directly from a Bond film, President Naib Buckley has announced a new innovative plan for new national currency: volcanic capital (get it?).
In a tweet posted within hours of the country’s adoption of the cryptocurrency, Buckley told the world that he had instructed the head of the state-owned geopolitical power company to set up a facility for volcanic-driven bitcoin mining. El Salvador may be the smallest country in Central America but it is one of the champions of geological energy production. This is because the Americans sit right in the middle of the arches of the Central American volcano: the 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) chain of hundreds of volcanoes across the entire route from Guatemala to Panama.
Using the thermal energy of 23 active volcanoes, El Salvador’s steam-powered turbines were able to generate about a quarter of its national electricity consumption renewably. This is important because energy consumption is a big problem for Bitcoin. To get cyber money, computer users must do it “mine” – in other words, they use the processing power of their machines to solve complex math problems. These solutions are used to verify previous transactions and are created next to some bitcoins for mining.
Contrary to common sense, however, Bitcoin has a limited amount – once it becomes all “minerals”, that is, no quantitative simplicity or inflation is allowed. And that’s why prices have skyrocketed, as a result of graphics cards, and soon all other things are going to be extinct. In the case of countries, bitcoin mining is now responsible for using more electricity than Argentina and it is caught by the Czech Republic. While this environmental impact is worrying, not everyone is convinced, with many Bitcoin fans saying that the popularity of the currency will revitalize renewable energy technology.
El Salvador’s planned volcanic mine, which comes just weeks after the creation of the Elon Musk-blessed Bitcoin Mining Council, is a sign of optimism that they may be right. “Our engineers just told me they had dug a new well that would provide about 95 megawatts of clean, 100% emission geological energy from our volcano,” Buckley tweeted a video with which he said there was a jet of pure water vapor. Has been taken out of the pipeline. “Start designing a full # bitcoin mining hub around it.”
