Best of all, the miners in Sortland are fully supplied with renewable electricity, creating jobs and even using waste heat from their activities to dry wood and seaweed, which then also goes to local businesses. Mining company representatives in the province say the new claims against them are unfounded and are just another attempt to create an infodump to criticise BTC mining.

What Bitcoin is being criticised for

Kjetil Hove Pettersen, CEO of local cryptocurrency company KryptoVault, made the following statement in an interview with Cointelegraph.

Usually only the harshest criticism gets the most media attention. It doesn’t reflect the opinions of all the locals.

Sortland is in the north of Norway

Pettersen pointed out that the owners of the local power grid are actually happy about the presence of the miners. Their activities help in balancing energy consumption. But criticism and open confrontation with the business of the miners is nothing new. He continues.

The claim that we are suppressing other industries by wasting so much electricity, when in fact the opposite is true. Sometimes we are accused of raising electricity prices, which is also untrue.

A comment by Arcane Research analyst Jaran Mellerud might bring more clarity to the conflict. Here is the relevant quote.

Northern Norway has a huge electricity surplus due to small local demand and limited transmission capacity for the resource.

KryptoVault platform website

So the balance of energy consumption at the expense of the miners is achieved by using the “surplus” electricity produced. Otherwise it would not have been used anyway, but now the local energy companies and municipal budgets are being replenished by the miners. In addition, the mining centres are creating new jobs.

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Pettersen admits that the crypto industry has “a lot of work to do to dispel myths and misconceptions”. Bitcoin is a lifeline for many people, with the cryptocurrency already in active use around the world. It has even become official tender in El Salvador. Incidentally, the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, is planning to create an entire city for miners, the construction of which will be funded by bonds backed by BTC.

Mellerud also insists that criticism of mining is actually a purely political issue that is based on false speculation. Here is his rejoinder on the topic.

Municipalities in northern Norway should value Bitcoin mining as a way to harness surplus electricity. Mining creates jobs and increases revenues for local budgets, as they often finance local energy companies.

ASIC miners

This is why Bitcoin’s “list of shortcomings” can be added to endlessly. Critics will make up any reason to oppose cryptocurrencies – noise, pollution and so on. After all, Bitcoin gives people a lot more value, so in the long run the number of active supporters of BTC should increase too.

That said, the prolonged period of decline in the crypto market over the past few months has had a negative impact on the popularity of digital assets. However, their adoption in developing countries is still reaching new records. That’s the conclusion reached by experts at analytics platform Chainalysis in its recent report, The 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index. They analyzed millions of transactions, web traffic and other metrics to identify the top countries in terms of crypto adoption rates.

Where is cryptocurrency use most active?

According to Cointelegraph sources, the study found that emerging markets are leading the way in terms of cryptocurrency adoption. Lower-middle-income countries rank among the top 20 nations in terms of the adoption index. These include Vietnam, the Philippines, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Morocco, Nepal, Kenya and Indonesia.

Upper-middle-income countries such as Brazil, Thailand, China, Turkey, Argentina, the Russian Federation and Ecuador also featured highly in the rankings. Among high-income countries, however, the US and the UK are the only two candidates. This is not surprising, because despite “cryptozyma,” the centres of creation of promising new startups are predominantly located here.

Country rankings for cryptocurrency adoption

In addition to the crypto adoption rankings, the report also showed that, contrary to the not-so-best market conditions amid a bearish trend, digital assets are much more popular now than they were before the 2020 bull run. And that’s to be expected: the cryptosphere goes in cycles, with Bitcoin and altcoins becoming more popular in each successive cycle of its history.

Read also: MicroStrategy wants to buy more bitcoins. How much are we talking about?

Tracking transactions on the blockchain helps not only to analyse the market, but also to catch cyber fraudsters. For example, the day before, Dutch police arrested a 39-year-old suspect who allegedly stole tens of millions of dollars worth of BTC. Following his arrest, police searched his home and seized the carriers and keys to the cryptocurrencies.

So far, the investigation has revealed that the suspect, whose name has not been released, laundered bitcoins using malware from the open-source Electrum wallet. In other words, he used a fake version of the Electrum wallet to disguise his transactions. The stolen coins were then converted into Monero. In addition, the suspect also used the cryptocurrency exchange Bisq to disguise the origin of the criminal transactions throughout the process.

Cryptocurrency user


It appears that Bitcoin miners will continue to find themselves at the centre of criticism from various organisations. This is especially true given Etherium's move to PoS on Thursday, which caused this network's power consumption to drop by 99.95 per cent. And as the BTC blockchain continues to consume huge amounts of electricity, it becomes an even more obvious target for environmentalists.