One of the Northwest’s selling points is its cheap hydropower. That’s why in recent years data centers have sprouted along the Columbia River in both Washington and Oregon.
But in north central Washington, an emerging power-hungry industry is meeting with some resistance. It involves the making and managing of the virtual currency called bitcoin.
Bitcoins are traded on the Internet. They can be converted to cash: one bitcoin is currently worth about $380. One to way to earn bitcoins is to lend computing horsepower to the global bitcoin network. That’s known as bitcoin mining.
One place that happens is at Dedicated Hosting Services. That’s a 1-year-old company that leases a former machine tool shop on the banks of the Columbia River.
“No one notices that anything is going on there because we are so quiet,” company president Michael Cao said.
Read more @ http://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-virtual-currency-meets-wariness-as-it-plugs-into-cheap-columbia-river-power/
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