Crypto Miners Test Texas’ Limits

As our colleague David Pan has been reporting, Bitcoin miners have been having a very rough time of it.

To paraphrase one of his recent stories, falling Bitcoin prices and rising energy costs “led to combined second-quarter losses of more than $1 billion for the top three US publicly traded players — Core Scientific, Marathon Digital and Riot Blockchain.” Yikes.

This crunch has led to miners trying to raise cash by selling off their emergency stockpiles of Bitcoin - into the teeth of a down market.

At the same time, miners continue to flock to places like Texas - and not everyone is a fan of these relatively recent arrivals. Texas isn’t known for having the world’s most stable power grid, so miners and state officials have sought to pilot ways to address concerns about energy consumption. 

Bloomberg reporters David Pan and Michael Smith join this episode for more on how the miners are holding up.

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