The Crypto Racket

Come for the cheap electricity and stay for the sweetheart tax deals! When it comes to Bitcoin, Texas is the crypto-mining epicenter of America. There, 40 mines are humming away, sucking up enough electricity to power 800,000 homes. Riot Platforms wants to expand their mine in the North Texas town of Corsicana. To do that, they’ll need nearly 1.5 million gallons of water each day to cool the computers mining Bitcoin 24/7. And that’s just for one farm. Can the fragile electrical grid, the environment, and the residents handle the consequences of crypto miners migrating to Texas en masse? Candice Bernd investigates in this piece published at Texas Observer in partnership with The Nation.

In Texas, the state does virtually nothing to regulate cryptomines. Although miners face up to $25,000 in fines each day if they failed to register large mines consuming over 75 MWs by the PUC’s February 1, 2025, deadline, no state agency places strict rules on the mines’ noise levels or resource consumption. Hood County residents can appeal to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), but it regulates only the mine’s power source: Constellation Energy’s Wolf Hollow II gas plant. “The people have been left out of this thing since day one,” Weeks told the Observer. “There has been no consideration or concern for human beings at all. It’s just wrong.”