Oh dear. @bloomberg had been publishing some good fact-based invetigative journalism on Bitcoin mining recently. They may think twice about handing the mic to @davidfickling again. Granted it's an opinion piece, but even an opinion should really be written by someone who has done at least cursory investigation of the domain they are writing on. David Fickling by contrast clearly demonstrated that he has no understanding of how energy, hydro, grids or bitcoin mining works and his research on bitcoin mining in the countries he is writing about didn't even extend as far as reading the investigations of his peers in the media. I won’t spend the energy debunking all the nonsense in the article but here's a few of the most glaring errors: The "journalist" makes the claim that Bhutan has somehow been adversely impacted by Bitcoin mining because "that power could have been used by the poor". 101-level misinformation. Bhutan uses surplus water that would have flowed over the side of the dam or sold very cheaply to India. No locals miss out. This has been widely covered by more thorough journalists including WSJ, Forbes, Aljazeera. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/09/17/how-bhutan-quietly-built-750-million-in-bitcoin-holdings/ He also conveniently leaves out the well documented fact that bitcoin mining spared Bhutan a foreign currency reserve crisis source: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/4/14/bitcoin-king-why-is-bhutan-betting-on-crypto ... which in turn meant they avoided an IMF debt burden, built a bitcoin treasury now worth almost 50% of their entire GDP and allowed them to put up salaries of govt workers by 50-65% (again, well documented facts from the media outlets that did their homework) source: https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/a-remote-himalayan-kingdom-bet-big-on-bitcoin-mining-so-far-it-has-paid-off-a28bc4b8 Ethiopia miners use surplus hydro. Surplus. As is often the case with large infrastructure projects like dams, they are overbuild for future capacity. Many of the  transmission lines have not been built to supply the rural population so the surplus energy is used for bitcoin mining. The 55M additional profit for EEP is being used to build out transmission lines ahead of schedule, delivering power to rural Ethiopians earlier. The Ethiopian Tribune called "Bitcoin mining's success: a Model for Energy-Rich Nations" source: https://ethiopiantribune.com/2025/06/ethiopias-bitcoin-mining/ The “that power could have been used for something better” is highly misinformed because most of that hydro power is wasted surplus energy. I know of no informed journalists are still persisting with this take, which was once common in 2021-22 before the independent reports and peer reviewed research (22 papers) started flooding in and showing that bitcoin was using vast swathes of wasted energy). As for “straining grids” - again, this is old FUD debunked multiple times. 3 different peer reviewed studies have shown that bitcoin stabilizes grids because it is a non-rival and flexible user of power. Grid operators in ERCOT and other regions have confirmed this. source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q5uVC5HYSr04CNchhL-ByzgmNKzlbsYTnSZVEecIqFE/edit?tab=t.0 Bitcoin mining has been shown to help reduce electricity prices, accelerate the green energy transition, accelerate renewable hydro microgrid development that brings Africans out of energy poverty,  obviate gas peaker plants, delay expensive grid upgrade costs, and work synergistically with other users of energy because it has an in yoke economic incentive to power down when electricity prices spike (ie: demand from other users rises). This is not conjecture, or opinion, it's been widely documented in 20 peer reviewed journals. source: https://x.com/DSBatten/status/1923014527651615182 While the writer tries to neuroassociate bitcoin with fossil fuel by reference to some ancient history in Kazakhstan (very few miners are still located there) this is again highly misleading as bitcoin is, unique to any global industry, predominantly powered by sustainable energy (52.4%, source : Cambridge April 2025, https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2025/cambridge-study-sustainable-energy-rising-in-bitcoin-mining/ So what is the true picture? The real picture is that Bitcoin mining is doing the exact opposite of the claims in this opinion piece: ie - bringing 10s of 1000s of people in the most energy-poor regions of the world out of energy poverty. Gridless is one of many examples, where as a result of green micro-hydro grids coupled with Bitcion mining, 28,000 rural Africans have already been brought out of energy poverty. source: Looking forward to more informed opinions from journalists who do their homework in future @Bloomberg. @wsj, @bbc, @forbes and @AJEnglis have made the effort. So can you. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly4xe373p4o(Daniel Batten)