Eastern Europe Has A Bitcoin Problem

As Europe remains in the grips of an energy crisis caused by sky-high demand for liquefied natural gas, a tight global energy supply, and Putin keeping the pipelines at low capacity as gas-rich Russia gains political ground, another sleeping giant has emerged to become a huge and surprising hindrance to the continent’s energy security: crypto-mining.

As miners producing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Etherium suck up massive amounts of energy to perform the complex proof-of-work computing necessary to create new crypto-assets, some European…