Mining farms... what are you talking about?

We continue in our blog with the section: What are you talking about? It is a small contribution to this blog dedicated to Culture and in which we want to collect all those terms or expressions, whether or not they are included in the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), but which for one reason or another, now or in recent years are "sounding" in the media, in the street, in our environment.

Today we present a term that is beginning to be heard in the media and even on the street, but which is generally unknown and quite difficult to understand. We are referring to mining farms.

MINING FARMSMining farms: This term describes facilities that control or enable cryptocurrency transactions in the world. Put this way it sounds even innocent and normal, but it is actually becoming, in some cases, a serious problem for security, the environment and the economy.

As can be read in this article of the publication Very InterestingCryptocurrency mining consists of solving complex mathematical puzzles by completing block chains within the blockchain. Once a sequence is complete, the miner gets a reward in the form of the cryptocurrency he or she is mining. But this activity requires a lot of energy and powerful computing equipment.

If we talk about mining farms, that's what we mean, a large facility that instead of housing livestock houses computers, many computers doing cryptomining tasks. And, of course, consuming a lot of electricity. Right now, it can be said that this is a very unprofitable activity in countries like Spain and that is why it is developed in countries with cheaper electricity. As indicated in this article, Iceland, where electricity is obtained through geothermal energy, is one of the paradises of mining farms. China is also home to mining "macro-farms", although in recent months, mining has been banned in several regions of the Asian giant due to its very high electricity consumption.

In Spain, in recent months, some installations of this type have been dismantled in order to develop their activity by taking advantage of illegal connections to the electricity grid, detecting very high energy consumption which, for the rest of the users, represented a danger with an unstable electricity service.