Belarus is trying to attract miners with low taxes and power tariffs. Will global investors put money into a country called “Europe’s last dictatorship” and aligned with Russia? egreechee reports. CoinDesk’s MiningWeek, presented by FoundryServices
; in January it started paving the way for investment funds to buy crypto.
Despite these incentives, Belarus, with a population of 9 million, accounts for less than 0.01% of the entire Bitcoin network's hashrate, a measure of computing power on the network, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. By comparison, Sweden, with 10 million people, accounts for 1.18% of the network’s hashrate, according to the same index.
The main change after the war in Ukraine is that ballooning sanctions “may just further incentivize the Belarussian government to accelerate activity in the mining sector since they may need to find ways to work around the restrictions,” said David Carlisle, the director of policy and regulatory affairs at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.“At the moment, small-scale private mining is more common in Belarus,” said Yury Kaliaha, mining director for local miner GreenMiner.
“This power plant produces more power than we need in Belarus. Hence, we’ll have to either export electricity or mine crypto assets,” Matveyev said. The higher the consumption of electricity from the nuclear plant, the more prices will be lowered, as the plant makes back its original investment, the lawyer added.