RUSSIA’S recession had taken its toll on Yuri Dromashko, an entrepreneur from the Siberian city of Irkutsk. His property investments had floundered. A karaoke bar was flailing. A venture to make machines that print magnets from Instagram photos failed miserably. “We were all crying,” he recalls. Then in 2016 his brother proposed bitcoin mining. Mr Dromashko acquired servers from China and watched the cash roll in. “It’s almost like you print money out of nowhere,” he says. “It’s the childhood dream.”
Irkutsk has embraced the digital gold rush. Awash in electricity from hydroelectric plants, the region charges 2.1 roubles ($0.04) per kilowatt-hour, compared with 5.3 roubles in Moscow. That makes “mining”, in which computers solve cryptographic challenges to generate currency, especially profitable. Seminars have proliferated. “Cybercurrency fever has swept Irkutsk,” declared a local television station this...Continue reading
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