Bitcoin digital currency mining office debuts in West Texas

DICKENS COUNTY — Nestled a couple of miles north of the town of Dickens down a rock district street is a 125,000 square-foot distribution center loaded with innovative supercomputing gear that appeared to spring up nearly overnight.

In 2019, Dickens County Judge Kevin Brendle got an arbitrary email that in the end prompted this new datacenter getting things started around eight months prior. Presently, the office is producing Bitcoin in the Gateway to the Rolling Plains.

Take a visit through the new center:A see Dickens County’s new crypto mining center

The office is Argo Blockchain’s new leader cryptographic money mining focus, named “Helios,” which opened to much exhibition Thursday morning at the site among Afton and McAdoo.

The merriments at Thursday’s excellent opening included comments from chose authorities and company chiefs, directed visits, a catered supper and unrecorded music. U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Amarillo, and Lubbock Republicans state Rep. Dustin Burrows and state Sen. Charles Perry were all close by to salute the organization and local area on the achievement.

Argo is situated in the United Kingdom and keeps up with workplaces in Quebec, Canada and Houston, however CEO Peter Wall says “It’s kind of based here now. We have more people employed in Dickens County than any other place. This is our flagship mining facility. This is a huge, huge place for us.”

Wall says the datacenter will be equipped for mining around 25 Bitcoin each day, or multiple times the organization’s ongoing result. In view of Saturday’s Bitcoin esteem, that would mean the Dickens office could create about $900,000 in income each day for Argo, however Bitcoin values vary wildly.

PHOTOS: Argo Blockchain digital money opens leader in Dickens County

Mining, Wall says, is essentially the method involved with getting new Bitcoin in as an award for confirming other Bitcoin exchanges through complex numerical calculations on a PC network.

“In our current financial system, if I’m going to send you some money from one place to another, you use a bank, and the bank is the trusted third party,” Wall said. “In the Bitcoin network, you use a network of decentralized computers that are spread out around the world. We’re part of that network.”

Why West Texas?

Argo picked Dickens County to construct its 200-megawatt office due to the bountiful stockpile of modest breeze energy, Wall said, which is significant as a result of the organization’s attention on maintainability as they intend to fourfold the result of the Dickens office in the close future.

“The main thing that you need to be a Bitcoin miner is power, and what there’s lots of in West Texas is power, particularly wind power,” Wall said, taking note of that power in Dickens County costs not exactly 50% of what it does at the organization’s office in Quebec.

The area’s kin additionally drew them in.

“People in Dickens County are really talented and hard-working,” Wall said. “We’ve got 26 people employed now in Dickens County and 45 in the region. We’re now the largest employer in the county, other than the school systems.”

County Judge Kevin Brendle — who facetiously alluded to himself as “Bitcoin Brendle” — said that Argo’s utilization of force and individuals is helpful to the region, however to the local area as well.

“What Argo brings to Dickens County is hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure, which will equate to millions of dollars of tax revenue over the next five years that will go into our school systems and our county budgets,” Brendle said. “It will bring people in to work who will spend their money here, and at some point in time, we hope to expand our housing so we can bring more people here, because what they’re doing here, this facility, is just the first step.”

“The impact to our community is better jobs with benefits, insurance, retirement, vacation. It will be a tax boon for our school districts and the county,” he added.

In expansion, Brendle says that figuring offices like Argo’s could assist with balancing out the ERCOT matrix by spending existing overabundance power and closing down when mentioned by the lattice operator.

“The energy they’re pulling is called ‘excess energy’. They’re not drawing on energy that any other businesses or homes are utilizing. The substation has a congestion of energy. There’s more coming in than there’s an offload, so the company is able to sell that excess energy really cheap to companies like Argo,” Brendle said. “But, when the time comes that the ERCOT system needs it, they’ll send it back onto the grid.”

Several of the chosen authorities who talked during Thursday’s services alluded to the Argo Helios office as “the tip of the iceberg,” and Brendle agrees with that assessment.

“I get calls from Bitcoin miners every week that want to move in here,” Brendle said. “We’re not recruiting them. The recruitment was done when the renewable energy came. They’re coming. They’re coming.”

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