Big Picture

Going nuclear

The value of a single Bitcoin has skyrocketed over the past year, with some experts believing the cryptocurrency will hit $59,000 per coin in 2021. While your average amateur miner doesn’t have the computing power at their disposal these days to get any kind of reasonable return on the Bitcoin that’s still out there, what if you had a 3 GW network of data centres and four nuclear power plants to play with? In a move that’s becoming increasingly popular in Russia and Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s government is building a massive cluster of data centres beside its nuclear power stations to mine Bitcoin and hold state secrets. The hunt for the remaining $84.2bn worth of Bitcoin just went nuclear.