A digital currency may have stalled in recent months, but in Iceland only one direction has been known so far.
But the astonishing success of digital currencies around the world has had an unexpected impact on the island of 340,000 people, which could soon cause severe energy shortages for its population.
With Iceland becoming one of the world's key energy-hungry digital energy servers, according to analysts, the struggle for gold, but in the 21st century, the industry's demands for electricity have also rocketed.
For the first time, those demands have gone beyond Icelandic energy consumption, and energy producers fear they will not be able to cope with rising demand if Iceland continues to attract new companies betting on the success of digital currencies.
Companies have come to Iceland in recent months with requests to open new data centers to "dig" on digital currencies, even as concerns grow that the country may have to slow down investments amid growing decline in its ability to generate electricity.
"Six months ago, interest in opening digital data centers began to rise suddenly," said Johann Sennorie Segorbergson, a spokesman for Iceland's energy producer Johann Sennorie Segorbergson. "For the past three months they have been receiving one call a day from interested foreign companies Preparing projects in the country.
"If all these projects are realized, they will not have enough energy to meet their needs," Segorbergson told the BBC.
To illustrate, every digital currency in the world relies on a platform called Blockchain, which is required to trade in digital currencies. Tracking and verifying transactions on these currencies is like solving the puzzle because networks are often decentralized, and there is no single authority responsible for Monitoring payments. As a result, transactions in the digital currency involve a huge number of calculations, which in turn have a large server capacity, which requires a lot of electricity.
This tracking and verification science, which ends with the dissolution of a large number of calculations, is the so-called "exploration" of the digital currency, at the end of which the owner of the device or the server is rewarded with currencies created by the algorithm on which the currency is based.
Why Iceland?
The economics of prospecting means that most prospectors need access to a reliable and cheap energy source of about two to three cents per kilowatt-hour, and as a result, many of them are near the cheap power sources.
Iceland is in the North Atlantic and is famous for hot springs and great rivers. It produces about 80% of its hydroelectric power, compared to 6% in the United States, and the country's cold climate makes it ideal for data centers full of servers. Without fear of high temperatures.
Source: Washington Post
