Cuba has been progressing towards adopting and using crypto and other digital assets. However, crypto miners in the country have expressed their inconveniences with the ongoing scenario.
Crypto has lately been more popular and functional in Cuba as the citizens have started to use it as an alternative to getting services they would be unable to access otherwise. The citizens have been widely using crypto for international shopping, mobile and internet top-up services, and even sending and receiving remittances. Earlier this year, Russia and Cuba also pinned their hopes on crypto for increasing cross-border transactions. However, cryptocurrency mining is facing problems in reaching the same level of popularity.
While crypto mining was considered a smart investment by Cubans, the idea has recently been declined by the current state of the Cuban power grid. The power grid has revealed that the constant blackouts in the nation have jeopardized mining operations.
Raydel González, a small crypto miner who built his rig, briefed a local media house about the difficulties that a miner is facing in the country. He said:
“I, like many others, had invested a lot of money in cryptocurrency mining equipment that is not cheap. With the advent of blackouts, cryptocurrency mining in Cuba is unsustainable.”
Several other miners, including Eduardo Gomez, have purchased power plants to continue their mining operations without hindrance during blackouts. Still, the scarcity of gas is another major problem they have to deal with. The scarcity of gas has made it difficult for the miners to continue their operations that run on off-grid power to be sustainable. Gomez also mentioned that despite all these attempts, he could not earn revenue from an investment of $5,000.
However, even the miners that have managed to run their operations off-grid by securing a constant flow of gas to run their plants are affected by this issue. The frequent blackouts affect the local telecom grid, which cannot be operated with the little plants that Etectsa, the local Cuban telecom company, allows.
This problem was first reported in June when the company officers started facing similar issues. An official of the company at that time briefed that:
“Etecsa’s generators are running out of fuel to support so many hours of blackouts. The plants are not capable of generating all the energy necessary to keep so much equipment on for so long and that is why everything works incorrectly.”
The situation of miners in Cuba is similar to that of Iran, where mining operations had frequent power cuts. The country later banned crypto mining expecting electricity shortages during summers, but illegal mining continued, as reported by Todayq News.
However, in July this year, a regulation was issued which exempts miners from the requirement to use on-site power generation capabilities and allows them to purchase electricity from renewable sources across the nation and through the national grid.