The kingdom of Bhutan has been quietly mining Bitcoin for years
forbes.com
forbes.com
And it doesn't really matter what the price of BTC is for something like this, as the resource is more or less entirely unused. It's just sitting there, doing nothing, so any value you can make out of it is better than the nothing they're already getting.
Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs?
For reference a milk cow costs about $1500 and can produce 2,500 gallons of milk in a year. For the cost of the Bitcoin rig maybe getting $10 a day a village could buy about 13 milk cows. Even selling milk at $1 a gallon that's about $88 a day. The "free" power can be used to Pasteurize the milk (UHT) for extra longevity.
That same $20k could buy a room full of laptops plus networking equipment and Starlink. They could take online courses to learn a variety of technical jobs and then do contract work for way fucking more than the $10 a day they'd get from a Bitcoin rig.
Edit: fixed Antminer from autocowrong
Why would it need to be free? It could be an ordinary investment that's paid off over time. (Though I assume that the payback period is probably quicker than 5 years, that seems a bit too long to be useful.)
Be careful about cows: there's quite a few charities who want to give out cows to help people (using the same logic as you do). But for many recipients the cow is a net drain on their resources. That same logic applies when buying a cow with your own money.
If the Bitcoin rig isn't free then the villagers don't get shit for years while it gets paid off. Then they're just sharecropping Bitcoin.
They could invite outside miners to set up shop in the village.
The miners would finance provide the capital, set up the mining rigs, and take all the bitcoin risk. The villagers would just sell them electricity. Just like they would sell electricity to any other business.
No clue whether that's what's happening in Bhutan, but it's a perfectly valid business plan, and pays the villagers right away.
It doesn't make any fiscal sense to find some out of the way location with a small scale hydro generator to set up a Bitcoin miner. The amount the village would need to charge to make a worthwhile amount of money will certainly be above large scale utility rates.
The Bitcoin miner in remote African village story smells like someone taking advantage of some villagers. They're either paying them below market rate for electricity or indenting them with a Bitcoin mining setup that will barely pay for itself over years.
If virtually no one else would buy the stranded electricity, the market rate would be zero otherwise. Anything more than zero is better for them.
There's more than one bitcoin miner in the world, so the villagers could get some competitive bids.
We need an economy that isn't denoted on dollars or euros or similar. Bitcoin is a step towards that. And all the PoW "waste" is worth it. (Though I wish there was a better alternative that's more environmentally friendly while still decentralized like PoW so PoS isn't a good candidate)
But note "assets" and "savings accounts" are not the same thing, and confusing the two is pretty bad.
Gold -> Good, and Bitcoin is like Gold in many aspects. While it doesn't have Gold's history yet, it has a few other qualities like easy transferrability and divisibility.
Other assets -> Like? ForEx is at the mercy of issuing government (just ask Russia who lost ~300B$). Land can be seized if it's outside one's jurisdiction.
In general, Bitcoin (like Gold) is a great asset to park some fraction of your wealth as a hedge against geopolitical risks.
If I put money in my savings account, I can use it tomorrow. If you put money in your BTC savings account a year ago, your BTC is worth less than money under a mattress (or in a modest yield savings account).
You may want to invest in BTC, and that's absolutely fine! But it's not a savings account.
Market forces don't really discriminate one innovation over another by whether it's socially desirable to you or me.
It's not an either/or thing.
Using power for bitcoin means it's not available for the next best use. It's all about opportunity costs.
Stranded power means power with a very low opportunity cost. But not necessarily zero (or negative).
As a thought experiment: think about what would happen, if bitcoin moved to a proof-of-stake system tomorrow.
Fixed that for you. Bitcoin mining does about as much good for society as hooking up thousands of 1500W electric resistive element space heaters and dumping the thermal output into the atmosphere.
Might as well install some mini split air conditioners backwards while we're at it.
It's not wasted any more than it is wasted when you play a game or watch a youtube video or TV. It's just a use of energy which you are trying to make as somehow bad. It's just a cultural preference.
But if someone worked out a way to generate BitCoin for free without any energy input, that would destroy BitCoin, because it depends on proof of work, where work is defined as consuming energy.
But what it brings (decentralization) is well worth all the negative sides anyway.
No, it's not. You can't mine inefficiently and remain profitable. There's a market after all.
This is such a ridiculous comment. I have to wonder why we have such gleeful wilful ignorance whenever the topic of Bitcoin or crypto comes up.
Even worse, it puts a floor on the price of energy, which disincentives everyone else from seeking more efficient solutions to power production, because all that efficiency will be wasted by proof-of-work anyway. We as a species will never have free energy, and this is the reason.
And yes, before you answer, that applies to any hobby you can think of. You won't be astute by pointing out that e.g., car enthusiasts are similarly wasteful.
You could put that power to better use, but if you don't have something lined up then the waste of idle turbines bypassed by water is just as bad as the waste of mining bitcoins.
In the case of a 'stranded' dam, there isn't likely to be a reason to generate power either now or later, so you might as well run BTC generation. I suspect this has been the motivation to build an awful lot of 'stranded' hydro dams, though...
Chips are not made after lunch until evening. They are made weeks and month ahead
Bitcoin demand is a bit erratic so maybe it's more negative than positive, but it's definitely not all bad.
The chip shortage last year which affected cars, roof window, refrigerator etc were also affected by ASIC production for Bitcoin miners
It's possible that without Bitcoin production in the many years leading up to 2020 the supply crunch would have been worse.
Also remember that a huge chunk was based on GPUs and those don't mine Bitcoin, they mine other things.
And the only thing they ever did was guessing a hash.
Our economy needs enough chips without demand from Bitcoin. The only thing this did was making it more expensive for everyone.
I'm serious when I say that if there was less asic demand in 2015 and 2018, no matter what the asics were for, that might have reduced the asic capacity in 2021 enough to make the problems we had even worse.
Fabs (especially the ones who can build the chips we talk about) are not build on a crypto hype and also not build short-term.
A) Make resistive element chips out of wafers and all the normal complex chip patterning, using up the fab side of things and wafer space
B) Subsidize custom chip molecular simulation accelerators for cancer research, by providing the fab side of things and wafer space to design researchers or companies
A is as good as B?
I'm saying that over the course of several years, A is better for chip advancement and availability than nothing at all. And in the real world it's A+B vs. just B, the same amount of B in both scenarios.
I'm not aware of Bitcoin reducing any cancer research budgets anywhere. Are you?
It would not be bad for long-term tractor availability, if they kept up big purchases for many years. Especially if tractors were a hotbed of research and improving by orders of magnitude.
Or to put it another way: It's a hugely inefficient way of boosting tractors, but it will in fact boost tractors. It's not a good idea overall, but it will have some positives.
Perhaps you meant something else?
Have you seen someone trading worthless money into BTC in a crisis? No you have not.
Either you keep Bitcoin and start really using it globally or this argument is wrong.
And you can see in El Salvador how bad it is.
> International accepted
Yes, except China!
> 50% attack
Buddy are you still in 2013?
> Crisis
Yes, there are some accounts of people fleeing the Ukraine war with their savings in a USB stick, Bitcoin sure is great in a time of crisis where criminals would be on the look out for shiny metal!
> start really using bitcoin..
What are you talking about? I'm using Bitcoin right now! I use it every day especially when I am soundly asleep knowing that my Bitcoin is safe and my purchasing power will grow in the long term.
> El Salvador
El Hodlador knows what long term means.
51% is still possible. See the last Blogpost about it on hn 1-3 weeks ago.
El Salvadors people are suffering under Bitcoin.
And yes pls tell me how you actually use BTC on a daily basis.
If that's not good for society, I don't know what is.
Or creating or just using your own currency?
There are a lot more good options than shitcoins
Those "shitcoins" at least pave a way to take power from large entities whose best interest isn't saving world's climate, doing more good than harm indirectly.
This issue of power in weird places could be aided by processes that make… well, something useful.
That competes with using mined bitcoins to trade for fuel.
You can probably also just join an existing mining pool, and negotiate that they pay you in real money straight away.
> But at least fuel serves a purpose (especially in remote areas!)
Money can be exchanged for goods and services that can serve almost any purpose.
Great...
For local decisions, they should check what gives them the most resources. And that might be 'trying random hashes to trade for goods and services'.
Bitcoin can incentive a local market in a global scope.
Bitcoin is a horrendously horrible virus.
Quite crazy to think about that this virus might be invented all over again somewhere Ina distant Galaxy far far away.
> Why would a country, like a business, choose to make less money?
See also: Microstrategy, El Salvador.
Plenty of countries have chosen to have environmental goals at the cost of making less money.
That kind of argument makes less and less sense the more you think about it. It's like arguing that Africa can't develop the Internet until after they get their telegraph network up and running. There's no reason that a functional power grid requires the use of fossil fuels as the primary energy source, and we're already at a point where renewable energy is as cheap to set up as fossil fuel plants. An advantage to starting industrialization later is you don't have to waste time working through worse versions of technology. If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, especially because you often have a chance of undercutting existing providers who have too much sunk capital costs in less efficient technology.
That's not true in general. It depends on the specific situation.
You are right about learning from existing technology, and that people will not and should not blindly retrace the technological evolution, missteps and all, of those who came before them.
To give an example that combines both points: a poor country might be well advised to focus on bicycles instead of modern cars. But that doesn't mean they need to do a penny-farthing before they can get to safety bikes.
I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.
East Africa has huge savannahs that are ideal for solar power. I've written here many times about the solar gold mine upon which both North Africa and the Middle East are sitting. I agree: There is a good chance that coal power plants don't make sense in the face of very cheap solar power. Also, many developing nations depend upon foreign capital / loans to build power plants. The lenders will very much prefer green energy over coal. What is harder: Tearing down coal power plants in developing nations. Why? The money is already spent to build a huge power plant.
This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]
That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.
[1] https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2007/08/27/telkom-sbc-and-a-f... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070827181955/http://www.busrep...
That's usually how I end up choosing things I thought I could never choose.
Quantity demanded increases as price decreases https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand
Bhutan controls the price they will sell at, and for hydropower the marginal costs can be very low, so surely they do control the quantity demanded.
Most likely there is a treaty setting a floor price on the power or a demand ceiling, and they have hit one of those. Those limits are negotiated based on all of these considerations.
I don’t agree with “They don't control the demand for their power” because Bhutan do have choice over how much they deliver, even if it is only in the long term via their contracts. Bhutan exports 70% of their power, so clearly India wants it.
As an aside, I have two very good friends who work designing electricity markets, and planning country interlinks. I am not a specialist, but I do try to keep up with the play.
Without specific knowledge of the agreements between India and Bhutan, this is also hypothetical, and I have to say that it's a big assumption that "India clearly wants it." And even for economics 101 commodities, no supplier controls their demand curve or the optimal quantity to sell.
I get your points, but ultimately Bhutan has control over building hydrodams within its borders, so it is controlling supply, so it does have a lot of control over the price. Of course you can come up with a million quibbles about the details, but you are just arguing yourself into a corner case.
OP’s point was: “Are you suggesting they cannot sell more [electricity to india]?”. You said “They probably can't”. Yet Bhutan is developing more hydro dams, and they are going to sell more electricity to India. Case closed!
Unless you can find some data showing that they are spilling water for $0 without generating electricity…
Bhutan doesn't have the best relations with Nepal either after the ethnic-cleaning of Nepali Hindus (1/5 its population) from Bhutan. Nepal, ofc, is as poor as India (though better than Bihar).
Spoiler: it hasn't.
Per a Bhutanese source, it has been mining BTC since it was 5000$. Also, the electricity is free so it hasn't lost any serious money given the low expenditure. Last time BTC was 5000 was in Mar 2020 so given that they are still doing it, I don't see why this is unprofitable for them. If it was, they would have stopped by now.
Lots of things could prevent the sale of some energy, though. Someone else mentioned the idea that their market is saturated.
Sure, so investing in smart load management is an optimal solution. With EVs and chargers coming online that's a huge load you can send a signal to in order to adjust demand. A country like Bhutan is very well suited to this kind of approach.
Or change the energy mix so you have a balance of baseload and variable load generation.
Or do something with it that isn't guessing random numbers on machines 99.7% of which will never successfully guess a single block and go from factory to space heater to landfill.
Can't remember which miner, but one of the majors, made more money in credits for pausing their waste than they did from the bitcoins that came out the other end last year. It's just extorting the public.
> Not sure about Bhutan's grid, or who they can interchange to, but there are frequently wind farms in TX that have to take a loss to generate power simply because they are forced to generate power, and there is no demand for power in the region, and the buses (power lines) are congested.
So invest in building more power lines.
The myth of stranded energy is toxic. Wasting it on bitcoin mining is an incentive not to connect it to the grid the way it should be connected. Either don't build it, or build it and connect it. The worst case outcome is to build and then waste it.
Transmission losses are only 2-3% per 1000km.
Bhutan has 0.15 vehicles per capita, among the lowest in the world. 47% of their popular has no education. You’re saying Bhutan should build a smart grid for EVs rather than run a Bitcoin mining operation?
I think that’s kinda ridiculous.
> You’re saying Bhutan should build a smart grid for EVs rather than run a Bitcoin mining operation? I think that’s kinda ridiculous.
Not just EVs, there's plenty of things you can make demand-responsive. Do something - anything - with it. Electrolyze water for hydrogen. Electric smelters. Power for a data center! The world is your oyster.
What's ridiculous is wasting the power on lotto tickets and e-waste and furthering the single least efficient technology humanity has ever conceived of.
By this logic we should remove airbags from cars also-- the vast majority of airbags just cost money to manufacture and don't ever expand or save a life, ending up in landfills unused.
An anti-efficient transaction processing system (that gets less efficient the more people mine) managing 2-3 transactions per second is the same as ... airbags ... because they're not used in the ideal outcome?
The majority of electricity used to mine bitcoin (about 100TWh per year) is coal, and coal kills about 25 people per TWh generated. So it's steady-state responsible for about 1000 deaths per year if we assume only 40% of the power is coal. The Verge says its about 85% coal and gas. [1]
What's the quantity of resources consumed by airbags at rest?
Bitcoin doesn't 'just cost money' to make, it consumes wild quantities of power and yields wild quantities of e-waste. 100TWh per year and 54kT of e-waste.
If we followed this model, would you be ok with each laptop you buy yielding 333 identical laptop in a dumpster somewhere ... because airbags?
Like I said, I'm having trouble following this argument. Is there a chance your argument is less about airbags and more about, er, somewhat heavier bags?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/10/23677113/bitcoin-mine-inv...
This misses the point that mining is probabilistic. Mining pools pay out based on the number of hashes tried, not the number of blocks solved. Your misunderstanding seems to be that the utility of something can be based on a probabilistic outcome. It is akin to saying that airbags are 99% (or whatever) wasteful because most of them aren't actually involved in a crash, and therefore 100x inefficient. You pay extra for a car with an airbag because it has value in the rare event you do have a crash it has immense value. Similarly, a mining pool would pay a single bitcoin mining rig to mine for years without it solving a single block, because the mining pool would realize the entire value if it did find a block, and so it pays out just under the expected value of this reward times the probability of the event happening.
Second, your argument ignores the fact that the unit of a "mining machine" is completely arbitrary. If mining machines were on average 2x larger and more powerful (but there were half as many of them), then by your argument bitcoin mining would be 2x less wasteful. That makes zero sense.
Absolutely not, it's millions of times more wasteful than that. You don't need to allocate a single miner to a single block and then throw it out. It's just so many order of magnitude more wasteful than it needs to be that it's hard to reason about. You should be able to run the entire Bitcoin network on a single Raspberry Pi. It's literally 2tps, each a few bytes.
> Your misunderstanding seems to be that the utility of something can be based on a probabilistic outcome.
There's no misunderstanding. The kWh and kT of e-waste don't need to happen, it's just a poorly designed proof of concept that ran amok.
> If mining machines were on average 2x larger and more powerful (but there were half as many of them), then by your argument bitcoin mining would be 2x less wasteful.
No, I'm measuring waste by weight, in kilotons per year. In addition to energy consumption. So if a machine was twice as large it would contribute the same amount of waste in both columns.
a) good, because now twice as many miners actually solve a block, so instead of 99.7% waste it is 99.4% waste.
b) doesn't matter, because I just changed the unit of measurement-- each machine is just doing twice as much work.
c) doesn't matter, because bitcoin is already infinitely wasteful-- in which case pointing out that 99.7% of machines are somehow more wasteful than the other 0.3% does not make sense.
d) bad, for some other reason.
It's 99.7% of machines based on the characteristics of the current most efficient miner.
I gave all the relevant waste metrics. Power, weight. And to help visualize, the quantity of the current best-in-class miner.
This is legendary pedantry. You can multiply and divide out to get any of the three measures of the scale of waste from the others. This whole thread was about you disliking 'P' in 'P=IV' but having no issue with 'I', 'V' or the idea you can multiply them together.
Gonna go ahead and end our conversation here.
But the prices might drop below what crypto-mining pays.
Bhutan sells a massive amount of power.
Transmission is extremely efficient. A power line spanning all the way from New York to San Francisco should be about 92% efficient.
Transmission line losses are only about 2-3% per 1000km. [1]
[1] https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO...
Could you explain how you arrived at this conclusion? The value of mining is generally proportional to the available power. If the capital expense of a mining rig is less than a transmission line, it might be better to mine than to transmit. For example, if it costs 1 million dollars to install a transmission line, but only 1 thousand dollars to setup a mining rig that could consume all the energy, it probably be more feasible to mine than to transmit.
So if there's a small amount of power, you get no yield from mining. If there's a lot of power, you can afford to connect it to the grid. If there's a medium amount of power, decommission some of the supply - or never build it in the first place. All three options are better that using it to probabilistically guess at nonces and prove you expended it on nothing of value - and get paid for it.
> So if there's a small amount of power, you get no yield from mining.
You are going in circles. The amount of mining you can do is exactly proportional to the available power. It does not suddenly go to zero. If the yield or profit is greater than the costs, it is economically worthwhile.
This is the exact opposite of burning money. Your assessment whether bitcoin mining is wasteful or not is beside the point, the point is merely to unlock the economic value of stranded energy.
- excess supply would force rates to go negative
- excess supply would damage transfer equipment
- the wind exceeds the safety rating of the generators, due to either vibration, blade stress, or thermal issues
Increasing demand only helps with the first scenario, whereas I suspect the latter two are more likely reasons in the UK (esp with so much generation stranded up in Scotland).
It seems free hosting and earning the 10x block rewards for “valuable” things, is the only way.
Has ANYONE here successfully set up a Filecoin Plus mining operating lately? How much does this program pay out per $1000 in cloud storage?
I would pay someone to show me how to actually set it up and expolain where to advertise my pinning service. I can find almost no useful information on any of the above. Looking forward to MaidSAFE launching soon.
Also I don’t believe in staking or trading because it’s a zero sum game that you are just as likely to lose as win (if you don’t have an edge). Earlier this year I debated Richard Heart about staking Hex vs actual utility and open source software:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3eU3hx0U0Y
Although I seem to call it correctly (March 12: buy way out of the money put options at $4 strike on FirstRepublic) I am too busy and overwhelmed to act on it (deposit money into RobinHood, have it clear, time my entry etc.)
If someone in place A with cheap, stranded power enters the mining business, the difficulty of bitcoin mining will increase, and perhaps enough to convince a miner in place B to exit, and thus free up some energy there to use in another productive endeavour. Be that for computation or for a different use.
In this sense bitcoin mining acts a bit like a pneumatic system to 'move power around' in a virtual sense.
I specifically use pneumatic as the analogy, and not hydraulic, because hydraulic fluids are incompressible.
My example assumed for the sake of simplicity that people starting bitcoin mining in A would drive up hash rate and thus difficulty enough to make mining unprofitable on the margin in some place B.
The electricity used for mining in B before can now either be used for something else, or the people in B can produce less electricity and save on resources.
Which means Bitcoin mining is a virus searching and consuming as much cheap energy as possible.
We are not at a point we're the margin is so small that we see consumption/mining shifting. We only see consumption and more consumption.
And of course this totally decentivie making the energy usable through things like high voltage DC lines or metal smelting or even making hydrogen.
Eg it used to be profitable to mine on your PC. Those days are long past: the returns don't cover the cost of electricity. Hence a shift away from that.
See https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption for an estimate of bitcoin power usage. It's going down as well as up.
The article says a tenth of the entire country's inbound trade and 15% of the entire government budget was spend buying "computer chips". And that this has "fueled a yawning trade deficit and tallied with a sharp drop in the country’s foreign currency reserves."
Maybe they'll get a good return on "the $193 million spent on computer chips" plus whatever they spent to build hydro power plants to tap that "more or less entirely unused" resource? How much would you bet against the only real money ever made here ending up in the pockets of pork barrelling politicians and bureaucrats getting kickbacks from the mining rig vendors and hydro dams/powerplant construction contractors?
Now after building this for millions the country is searching for a solution to do with this magic free energy source.
And instead of trying to use it for something at the end guessing a hash wins.
What a Kafkaesque world we live in.
It's a scam token that has a hysterically variable exchange rate.
Hahahah. Why? First world nations do this on the regular.
Ugh.... that comment just reeks of Western privilege. What Bhutan does with their resources & energy is of no concern to any outsiders, unless they're involved in said operations themselves. Reductively, the advisor's comments just say:
"They shouldn't be able to do X with their own resources. WE know what's best for them, not Bhutan."
I'd love to know if you've found a solution to this dilemma.
Have a look at Switzerland for an example.
> All warfare is a waste of resources, but those who decide to become pacifists are eventually out competed and subsumed by those who maintain the art of war.
They are using 'pacifist' in a rather loose sense.
So: Switzerland ain't wasting resources on warfare (though spend a bit on keeping their defenses working), and they aren't 'out competed and subsumed by those who maintain the art of war' either.
Your remark about profiting from other people's wars is a different topic.
Would performing a blockchain transaction that gets taxed by a validator of a country that is enemies with your country be a criminal act?
Control of scarce resources.
In reality, it's a bit more complicated, because states are run by people, and those individual people have interests, not the states.
The latter consideration helps to understand why eg the US invaded Iraq in the 2000s but then didn't take their oil (as your 'control of scarce resources' theory might predict).
[1] https://blog.coinfabrik.com/libra-association-a-menace-and-a...
In the next article [2] I put the focus in the interoperability as the core tenet of blockchain or whatever technology you want to invent to set a better standard for global currency standards.
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rise-stable-coins-beyond-face...
I prefer to keep total energy costs down (wrt to multiple factors including C02 production) and this isn't as straightforward as your comment implies.
Ask people of Bhutan, they'll count 1 and 3rd as equally wasteful.
So, if you have a power source, and it is too far from where energy is needed, just use that power source to mine, and make bitcoins.
Which is preposterous considering it is a Kingdom
i just saw a meme of it but im looking for confirmations lol
sometimes its the countries yoy dont hear in mainstream news that surprises you
If they truly are not fazed in some general way, it seems more likely that they would not be fazed simply because they live within a geopolitical program which has been defined by external entities.
In other words, perhaps they must live out an existential perspective, because other paths of political expression are essentially locked up.
Related, I wonder about the locus of control with regard to crypto. Who is managing their interface to their crypto, which intelligence agencies from other nations may be effectively overseeing it, etc.
Not to dispute their sovereignty, but I'd imagine the latent vulnerability level would be extremely high if the crypto position is anything near significant enough to threaten key political negotiation parameters.
I've met several Taiwanese people who have been to Bhutan for tourism and have a favorable view of the country.
its rather unique, but they totally extort anyone who tries to visit, its expensive!
The most important bit of evidence that nobody there knows what they're doing and that the crypto grifters have swindles an entire country's government.
"Early entrants" were mining in 2009/2010. Maybe even as late as 2012 or 2014 might count as an "early entrant" - around the first halving and when the difficulty jumped past 1.0E+6
> It’s unclear why Bhutan never disclosed the project to its citizens or international partners.
> Rumors of government-backed bitcoin farms spread across the country in recent years.
So it was secret. They had also been buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of chips, and not explaining why. So... yes. "Quietly" is apt here.