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01 / 05
Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South

Blog Post | Adoption of Technology

Bitcoin Brought Electricity to Countries in the Global South

It won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa.

Summary: Energy is indispensable for societal progress and well-being, yet many regions, particularly in the Global South, lack reliable electricity access. Traditional approaches to electrification, often reliant on charity or government aid, have struggled to address these issues effectively. However, a unique solution is emerging through bitcoin mining, where miners leverage excess energy to power their operations. This approach bypasses traditional barriers to energy access, offering a decentralized and financially sustainable solution.


Energy is life. For the world and its inhabitants to live better lives—freer, richer, safer, nicer, and more comfortable lives—the world needs more energy, not less. There are no rich, low-energy countries and no poor, high-energy countries.

“Energy is the only universal currency; it is necessary for getting anything done,” in Canadian-Czech energy theorist Vaclav Smil’s iconic words.

In an October 2023 report for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship on how to bring electricity to the world’s poorest 800 million people, Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, sums it as follows:

Electricity matters because it is the ultimate poverty killer. No matter where you look, as electricity use has increased, so has economic growth. Having electricity does not guarantee wealth. But its absence almost always means poverty. Indeed, electricity and economic growth go hand in hand.

To supply electricity on demand to many of those people, especially in the Global South, grids need to be built in the first place and then have enough extra capacity to ramp up production when needed. That requires overbuilding, which is expensive and wasteful, and the many consumers of the Global South are poor.

Adding to the trouble are the abysmal formal institutions of property rights and rule of law in many African countries, and the layout of the land becomes familiar: corruption and fickle property rights make foreign, long-term investments basically impossible; poor populations mean that local purchasing power is low and usually not worth the investment risk.

What’s left are slow-moving charity and bureaucratic government development aid, both of which suffer from terrible incentives, lack of ownership, and running into their own sort of self-serving corruption.

In “Stranded,” a long-read for Bitcoin Magazine, Human Rights Foundation’s Alex Gladstein accounted for his journey into the mushrooming electricity grids of sub-Saharan Africa: “Africa remains largely unable to harness these natural resources for its economic growth. A river might run through it, but human development in the region has been painfully reliant on charity or expensive foreign borrowing.”

Stable supply of electricity requires overbuilding; overbuilding requires stable property rights and rich enough consumers over which to spread out the costs and financially recoup the investment over time. Such conditions are rare. Thus, the electricity-generating capacity won’t be built in the first place, and most of Africa becomes dark when the sun sets.

Gladstein reports that a small hydro plant in the foothills of Mount Mulanje in Malawi, even though it was built and financed by the Scottish government, still supplies exorbitantly expensive electricity—around 90 cents per kilowatt hour—with most of its electricity-generating capacity going to waste.

What if there were an electricity user, a consumer-of-last-resort, that could scoop up any excess electricity and disengage at a moment’s notice if the population needed that power for lights and heating and cooking? A consumer that could co-locate with the power plants and thus avoid having to build out miles of transmission lines.

With that kind of support consumer—guaranteeing revenue by swallowing any excess generation, even before any local homes have been connected—the financial viability of the power plants could make the construction actually happen. It pays for itself right off the bat, regardless of transmissions or the disposable income of nearby consumers.

If so, we could bootstrap an electricity grid in the poorest areas of the world where neither capitalism nor central planning, neither charity worker nor industrialist, has managed to go. That consumer of last resort could accelerate electrification of the world’s poorest and monetize their energy resilience. That’s what Gladstein went to Africa to investigate the bourgeoning industry of bitcoin miners electrifying the continent.

Bitcoin Saves the World: Energy-Poverty Edition

Africa is used to large enterprises digging for minerals. The bitcoin miners springing forth all over the continent are different. They don’t need to move massive amounts of land and soil and don’t pollute nearby rivers. They operate by running machines that guess large numbers, which is the cryptographic method that secures bitcoin and confirms its transaction blocks. All they need to operate is electricity and an internet connection.

By co-locating and building with electricity generation, bitcoin miners remove some major obstacles to bringing power to the world’s poorest billion. In the rural area of Malawi that Gladstein visited, there was nowhere to offload the expensive hydro power and no financing to connect more households or build transmission lines to faraway urban areas: “The excess electricity couldn’t be sold, so the power stations built machines that existed solely to suck up the unused power.”

Bitcoin miners are in a globally competitive race to unlock patches of unused energy everywhere, so in came Gridless, an off-grid bitcoin miner with facilities in Kenya and Malawi. Any excess power generation in these regions is now comfortably eaten up by the company’s onsite mining machines—the utility company receiving its profit share straight in a bitcoin wallet of its own control, no banks or governments blocking or delaying international payments, and no surprise government currency devaluations undercutting its purchasing power.

No aid, no government, no charity; just profit-seeking bitcoiners trying to soak up underused energy. Gladstein observes:

One night during my visit to Bondo, Carl asked me to pause as the sunset was fading, to look at the hills around us: the lights were all turning on, all across the foothills of Mt. Mulanje. It was a powerful sight to see, and staggering to think that Bitcoin is helping to make it happen as it converts wasted energy into human progress. . . .

Bitcoin is often framed by critics as a waste of energy. But in Bondo, like in so many other places around the world, it becomes blazingly clear that if you aren’t mining Bitcoin, you are wasting energy. What was once a pitfall is now an opportunity.

For decades, our central-planning mindset had us “help” the Global South by directing resources there—building things we thought Africans needed, sending money to (mostly) corrupt leaders in the hopes that schools be built or economic growth be kick-started. We squandered billions in goodhearted nongovernmental organization projects.

Even for an astute and serious energy commentator as Bryce, not once in his 40-page report on how to electrify the Global South did it occur to him that bitcoin miners—the very people who are turning the lights on for the poorest in the world—could play a crucial role in achieving that.

It’s so counterintuitive and yet, once you see it, so obvious. In the end, says Gladstein, it won’t be the United Nations or rich philanthropists that electrifies Africa “but an open-source software network, with no known inventor, and controlled by no company or government.”

NBC News | Air Transport

Drone Deliveries, Slow to Take Flight, Come to Silicon Valley

“The hype around drones may finally be starting to deliver.

Drone deliveries, first touted by Amazon more than a decade ago, are slowly taking off in some parts of the U.S. On Thursday, Matternet, a drone delivery startup, launched its service to Silicon Valley…

The announcement adds to signs of growth for drone delivery. In Fort Worth, Texas, which recently became the first major city in the United States to offer commercial drone deliveries, they’re being used to deliver groceries from WalMart.

In College Station, Texas, Amazon’s drone delivery service has become common enough for residents to see the service as a noisy nuisance. And, with recent FAA approval, the company seems set to expand drone delivery operations across the city and beyond. 

Experts say many of the obstacles to drone delivery, most notably the technology and regulations, have been hurdled.”

From NBC News.

New York Times | Business Sophistication

How AI Can Help Start Small Businesses

“Little data exists at this point on how many start-ups are using A.I., and whether the technology is helping them to get more quickly on the path to hiring and, ideally, profitability. That is partly because the intersection of entrepreneurial activity and generative A.I. has only recently emerged as an area of study for economists.

But research suggests that newer businesses are, at a minimum, more inclined to experiment with the technology.

According to a working paper published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research, A.I. use was higher among young firms. Applications like generative A.I. may be attractive to young and small firms, the paper’s authors wrote, because they are ‘general-purpose technologies’ that are not expensive to use.

And Gusto, a small-business payroll and benefits platform, found that roughly a fifth of businesses created last year said they were using generative A.I. to more efficiently carry out tasks including market research, contract reviews, bookkeeping and job postings. Liz Wilke, principal economist at Gusto, thinks use could transform the start-up landscape.”

From New York Times.

Blog Post | Progress Studies

What Are the Causes of Human Progress?

The escape from stagnation has always required a culture of optimism and progress.

Summary: Human progress requires a culture of openness to change and innovation, which historically has been rare and resisted by established elites. Periods of remarkable achievement, like that seen in Enlightenment Europe, occurred when societies embraced new ideas and allowed for intellectual and economic freedom. The key to sustained progress lies in maintaining a culture of optimism and a politico-economic system that encourages innovation rather than suppressing it.


To make progress, we must do something differently from what we did yesterday, and we must do it faster, better, or with less effort. To accomplish that, we innovate, and we imitate. That takes a certain openness to surprises, and that openness is rare. It is difficult to come up with something that never existed. It’s also dangerous, since most innovations fail.

If you live close to subsistence level, you don’t have a margin for error. So, if someone wants to hunt in a new way or experiment with a new crop, it is not necessarily popular. There is a reason why most historical societies that came up with a way of sustaining themselves tried to stick to that recipe and considered innovators troublemakers.

That means that innovation depended on stumbling on a new way of doing things. Someone came up with a new and better tool or method by accident or by imitating nature or another tribe. But when populations were small, few people accidentally came across a great new way of doing things, and there were few people to imitate. In other words, there is a limit to what can be done in small, isolated societies.

It took greater population density and links to other groups to get the process of innovation and specialization going. Cultures at the crossroads between different civilizations and traditions were exposed to other ways of life as merchants, migrants, and military moved around. By combining different ideas, they set the process of innovation in motion. Ideas started having sex with each other, in the British writer Matt Ridley’s memorable phrase.

Such openness gave rise to extraordinary periods of achievement in cultures like ancient Greece and Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, and Song China. They were, as the American economist Jack Goldstone calls them, “efflorescences”—sharp and unexpected upturns that did not become self-sustaining and accelerating. They did not last.

The American economic historian Joel Mokyr talks about that as Cardwell’s Law—named after the technology historian D. S. L. Cardwell, who observed that most societies remained creative only for a short period. Often, they were ruined by external enemies, since poorer states and roving bandits are attracted by the former’s wealth.

But there are also enemies within. Every act of major technological innovation is “an act of rebellion against conventional wisdom and vested interests,” explains Mokyr. And conventional wisdom and vested interest have a way of fighting back.

Economic, intellectual, and political elites in every society have built their power on specific methods of production and a certain set of mythologies and ideas. The vested interests have an incentive to stop or at least control innovations that risk upsetting the status quo. They try to reimpose orthodoxies and reduce the potential for surprises, and sooner or later they win, the efflorescence is stamped out, and society reverts to the long stagnation.

An escape from stagnation requires a culture of optimism and progress to justify and encourage innovation, and it takes a particular politico-economic system to give people the freedom to engage in the continuous creation of novelty.

Enlightenment and Classical Liberalism

Luckily, this culture emerged forcefully in western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, in the form of the Enlightenment, which replaced superstition and authority with the ideals of reason, science, and humanism, as the Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker summarizes it, and classical liberalism, which removed political barriers to thought, debate, innovation, and trade.

It was the combined forces of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism that reduced intellectual and economic elites’ power to stamp out progress. Cardwell’s Law started to break down, and the road opened for individualists, innovators, and industrialists to change our world forever.

Why did this happen in Europe, and why then? There are two traditionally competing narratives, one associated with the right and one with the left, and they are equally wrong. According to the first, it was because Europeans were better than others (perhaps because of natural superiority, the legacy of the ancients, or Christianity). According to the second, it was because Europeans were worse than others (perhaps because of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism).

The problem with the first explanation is that experimentation in science, technology, and capitalism had been present in previous pagan, Muslim, Confucian, and other cultures. In fact, Europe imported and improved upon many non-European advances. The problem with the second explanation is that all previous civilizations also engaged in slavery, colonialism, and imperialism when they had a chance. Yet, they remained poor. So, what made Europe more successful must have been something else.

As noted, elites everywhere reacted to surprising innovations by trying to enforce political authority and intellectual orthodoxy. What made Europe different was that the elites failed. Unlike the Chinese or Ottoman empires, Europe was blessed with political and jurisdictional fragmentation, which has been emphasized by scholars like the British-Australian economic historian Eric Jones and the English historian Stephen Davies.

European rulers had the same ambitions to conquer and control, but on a peninsula of peninsulas, they were halted at mountain ranges, bodies of waters, riverine marshes, and forested landscape. Therefore, Europe was split into a mindboggling array of polities, independent cities, autonomous universities, and different religious denominations.

Hundreds of different sovereigns could not coordinate repression and impose one orthodoxy on all. That always left room for thinkers, entrepreneurs, and banned books to migrate to the jurisdiction most hospitable to their particular heresy. The Protestant Reformation was a further blow to ambitions for universal authority. How can you revert to a trusted authority when you don’t know which authority to trust? Nullius in verba (take nobody’s word for it), was not just the motto of the Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, but the spirit of the whole Enlightenment project.

European princes discovered that rivals who welcomed more migrant scientists, entrepreneurs, and technologies also acquired more wealth and thereby more war-making capacity. Disruptive innovations still threatened the elite power base in the long term, but a lack of innovation might threaten their lives instantly—via a superior invading army. In a fragmented Europe, sovereigns faced the opposite incentive of rulers of vast empires, who feared domestic discord more than they feared foreign conquest.

Fear of change therefore began to give way to a fear of stagnation. “And thus, it is,” wrote the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784, that the Enlightenment gradually arises “from the selfish purposes of aggrandizement on the part of its rulers, if they understand what is for their own advantage.”

Scientific and Industrial Advances

The associated classical liberal transformation, pioneered by the Dutch Republic, and then taken further by Great Britain and the United States, simultaneously widened the freedom for new experiments and enterprises through greater equality under the law, more secure property rights, and freer domestic economy and expanding markets.

That created a virtuous circle, since the scientific endeavor, businesses forced to compete, and an open society are by their natures works in progress, subject to constant challenge and improvement. They allow more people to experiment with new ideas and methods and combine them in unexpected ways.

As the American economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has shown, these processes went hand in hand with a profound reevaluation of urban and bourgeois life. Whereas commerce and innovation used to be seen at best as necessary evils to fund a hierarchical and aristocratic society, they now started to be seen as desirable, even honorable.

This relative freedom for inquisitiveness and irreverence unleashed first a scientific revolution and then an industrial one. The cumulative nature of knowledge instilled a powerful sense of optimism. When telescopes, microscopes, and the English scientist Isaac Newton unlocked nature’s mysteries, the whole world soon learned about it and started thinking about how natural regularities could be exploited for practical purposes.

Through migrations, correspondence, the printing press, coffee shops, and learned societies, scientists and entrepreneurs systematized knowledge in mechanics, metallurgy, geology, chemistry, soil science, and materials science. That made it possible to consciously manipulate, debug, and adapt methods, materials, and machines to changing needs. New knowledge pointed to new experiments that could be used to interrogate nature further, and the results of those interrogations pointed to new technologies that could be used to grow more food, prevent or cure disease, shape materials, and exploit energy sources.

The modern corporation and financial markets emerged as vehicles for systematically transforming capital and knowledge into goods and services that improved people’s lives. No longer did mankind have to wait for someone, somewhere to stumble on a breakthrough at widely dispersed intervals. An economic and intellectual system devoted to the systematic pursuit of discoveries and innovations had been created. From Manchester and Menlo Park to Silicon Valley, pioneers methodically pushed the technological frontiers further into the unknown, and free competition and international trade made such wonders widely accessible at everyday low prices.

Therefore, for the first time in history, progress did not come to a sudden halt. It continued and accelerated. More people than ever looked at the world’s problems and were free to come up with their own suggested solutions. Finally, mankind reached escape velocity, and progress was no longer a bump on a flat line of human development but a hockey stick, pointing sharply upward.

“It may be that the Enlightenment has ‘tried’ to happen countless times,” writes the British physicist David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity. And therefore, it puts our own lucky escape into stark perspective: All previous efforts were cut short, “always snuffed out, usually without a trace. Except this once.”

It should make us deeply grateful that we are among the few who happen to be born in the only era of self-sustained, global progress. But it should also make us focused and combative. History teaches us that progress is not automatic. It only happened because people fought hard for it and for the system of liberty that made it possible.

If we want to remain the one great exception to history’s rule of oppression and stagnation, every new generation must find it within itself the desire to make the world safe for progress.

Blog Post | Energy Production

Degrowthers Are the New Barbarians

The degrowth movement fails to appreciate that human ingenuity and technological innovation can solve the very problems they aim to address.

Summary: Like Rome’s ancient grandeur, today’s economy is supported by human ingenuity. Rome’s technological marvels such as the aqueducts were threatened by barbarians who sought destruction and ultimately achieved it. Modern sources of flourishing are likewise under fire. Today, the “degrowth” movement advocates for radical reductions in energy use. But like the Ostrogoths destroying aqueducts, this new form of regression underestimates human ingenuity as our source of prosperity.


In ancient times, the city of Rome was home to a million people—an achievement not to be repeated in Europe until the 19th century. The city flourished because of extensive Mediterranean trade networks, rule of law, and security provided by the far-flung legions. But Roman life would have been impossible without its aqueducts. These magnificent symbols of human ingenuity and progress brought water to the city, nourishing its population and lubricating its economy.

Rome began its long slide from preeminence in the 3rd century. By the 6th century, Rome was a shadow of its former self. It was then that the invading Ostrogoths sped up the process of decline by cutting Rome’s aqueducts and eventually capturing the city. Fast-forward to today and consider the “degrowth” movement, which advocates for slashing energy use in modern economies.

Degrowthers argue that to avert environmental catastrophe, we must drastically reduce our consumption of energy, particularly fossil fuels. They envision a future where economies shrink, energy use plummets, and humans adopt simpler, less resource-intensive lifestyles. While their intentions sound reasonable, their proposals are as destructive to our society’s prospects as the Ostrogoths’ actions were to ancient Rome.

The aqueducts of Rome were engineering marvels, bringing fresh water from distant sources to the heart of the empire. They enabled the city to thrive, supporting public baths, fountains, and private households. When the Ostrogoths cut these aqueducts, they didn’t just disrupt the water supply; they struck at the core of Roman life. In a similar vein, energy is the lifeblood of modern economies. It powers our hospitals, schools, factories, and homes. Cutting off this supply, as degrowthers propose, would not only slow our economies but would also unravel the fabric of our society.

Consider the immense benefits that energy has brought us. Over the past century, access to abundant and affordable energy has lifted billions out of poverty, extended life expectancies, and driven unprecedented technological progress. Our reliance on energy has enabled us to build skyscrapers, develop lifesaving medical technologies, and connect the world through the internet. To cut energy use drastically would be to turn our backs on these advancements and the potential for future progress.

The degrowth movement fails to appreciate that human ingenuity and technological innovation can solve the very problems they aim to address. Just as the Romans used their engineering prowess to build aqueducts, we can develop new technologies to create cleaner energy sources. Our use of solar and wind power is growing by leaps and bounds. Nuclear power is undergoing a renaissance, while geothermal and fusion energy hold much promise for the future. We’ll likely be able to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels without necessitating a return to pre-industrial lifestyles.

Put differently, degrowthers overlook the dynamic nature of human progress. Throughout history, humanity has faced and overcome numerous challenges. The Industrial Revolution, for example, caused significant environmental damage, but it also set the stage for the technological advancements that would eventually lead to a cleaner environment and greener energy sources. By embracing innovation rather than retreating from progress, we can continue to improve our quality of life while addressing environmental concerns.

It is also crucial to consider the global impact of degrowth policies. Developing nations, which are still striving to reach the levels of prosperity enjoyed in the West, rely heavily on energy to fuel their growth. Imposing stringent energy restrictions would stifle their development, thereby exacerbating global inequalities. Instead, we should focus on ensuring that these countries have access to affordable energy, enabling them to grow and share in the benefits of progress.

Degrowthers’ vision of a future with less energy consumption is a step backward, akin to the barbarians who, lacking understanding or appreciation for Roman civilization, sought only to destroy. Just as Rome’s aqueducts were symbols of human achievement, our energy infrastructure represents the potential for a brighter future. Let’s not let the modern-day barbarians cut it off.