Armenia Opens $50 Million Dollar Bitcoin Mining Operation

Reported on by Bitcoin.com, Multi Group Concern and Omnia Tech International Company, on October 18th, officially launched a $50 million dollar bitcoin and ethereum mining farm in Armenia. There are currently 3,000 mining machines in-use and 120,000 additional machines set to be added and operational over time.

“We intend to create here a blockchain-based center for the development of new information projects, which will turn Armenia into a high-tech platform,” said Robert Velghe, the founder of Omnia. The Bitcoin.com article notes Velghe indicated his company and Multi Group are planning to invest more than $2 billion in Armenia.

The article describes Armenia’s goal of becoming its own “Silicon Valley” with the establishment of a “free economic zone” which government officials have said will host a “state-of-the-art technology center.” This has attracted the first mining operation in the nation’s history.

Every new mining operation has global implications. Lately, many have started to focus on how mining is centralized out of China. For instance, since 2015, China has “…constituted over half of the total network hash power” and “As of June 2018, over 80% of Bitcoin mining is performed by six mining pools, and five of those six pools are managed by individuals or organizations located in China.”

The addition of this mining operation will help to pull the hashing power out of China and distribute it more equally across global networks. Centralized mining allows third parties, such as governments, to affect the bitcoin network through the regulation of their citizens. Continued cryptos growth and adoption, such as the Armenian mining operation, will be the best mitigator of large-scale centralized mining.