Bitcoin miner paid crazy 8 figure sum by Texas state to sit down and do nothing
Published on Sep 08, 2023 at 7:26 PM (UTC+4)
by Alessandro Renesis
Last updated on Sep 11, 2023 at 11:57 AM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
A Bitcoin miner in Texas was given an enormous amount of money to literally sit down and do nothing.
Getting paid to NOT work is the ultimate hustle, but this is next-level stuff.
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It all happened because of the record-breaking heatwave that hit Texas in August.
As many people know, Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of energy.
And top of that the firm in question, called Riot Platforms, is not a two-bit company that operates out of somebody’s garage.
Riot is a publicly-traded company and it runs thousands of computers to mine Bitcoin.
That obviously requires a lot of energy, and Texas simply couldn’t afford to allocate large reserves of energy to non-essential businesses.
This explains the size of the grant.
The state of Texas paid Riot $31.7 million in energy credits to temporarily shut down its operations in August.
In other words, Riot was paid $31.7 million in exchange for turning off its computers and… going to the beach or something.
Riot had a revenue of around $250 million last year, but the company is currently losing money.
Chiefly because energy prices have been rising across the board for months, while Bitcoin price has gone down.
But that’s an entirely different conversation.
Still, this is nothing new.
Due to unique circumstances that somehow usually happen when bureaucracy is involved, getting paid to NOT do something is not unheard of.
Farmers in the US and the UK, for example, routinely get paid to NOT grow crops.
This happens year in year out, usually for environmental reasons.
As for Riot and its Bitcoin mining business, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) accidentally did the Bitcoin miner a huge favor.
Not just because getting $31.7 million to do nothing is always a good gig, but also because projections show the amount of Bitcoin Riot would’ve been mined in August was nowhere near $30 million.
More like $10 million.
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