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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.”

The Guardian | Science & Technology

Netflix Uses Generative AI in One of Its Shows for First Time

“Netflix has used artificial intelligence in one of its TV shows for the first time, in a move the streaming company’s boss said would make films and programmes cheaper and of better quality.

Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, said the Argentinian science fiction series El Eternauta (The Eternaut) was the first it had made that involved using generative AI footage…

He said the series, which follows survivors of a rapid and devastating toxic snowfall, involved Netflix and visual effects (VFX) artists using AI to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires.

‘Using AI-powered tools, they were able to achieve an amazing result with remarkable speed and, in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with traditional VFX tools and workflows,’ he said.”

From The Guardian.

CNBC | Motor Vehicles

China’s Baidu to Bring Its Driverless Cars to Uber Globally

“Baidu has struck a partnership with Uber to deploy its autonomous cars on the ride-hailing giant’s platform outside the U.S. and mainland China.

The first deployments are expected to happen in Asia and the Middle East later this year. The two companies said the multi-year partnership will see ‘thousands’ of Baidu’s Apollo Go autonomous vehicles on Uber globally.

Baidu shares jumped 4.5% in premarket trade in the U.S. following the news, while Uber stock was more than 1% higher.

For Baidu, the move will help to internationalize its driverless car business outside of China. Uber will meanwhile gain a proven partner to take on autonomous driving rivals around the world.”

From CNBC.

World Bank | Financial Market Development

Mobile-Phone Technology Powers Saving Surge in Developing Economies

“More adults than ever in low- and middle-income countries now have bank or other financial accounts, leading to a rise in formal saving, according to the World Bank Group’s Global Findex 2025 report. This momentum in financial inclusion is creating new economic opportunities.  Mobile-phone technology played a key role in the surge, with 10% of adults in developing economies using a mobile-money account to save—a 5-percentage point increase from 2021.

In 2024, 40% of adults in developing economies saved in a financial account in 2024—a 16-percentage-point increase since 2021 and the fastest rise in more than a decade. Higher personal saving—through banks or other formal institutions—fuels national financial systems, making more funds available for investment, innovation, and economic growth. In Sub-Saharan Africa, formal savings increased by 12-percentage points to 35% of adults.”

From World Bank.

Blog Post | Scientific Research

Microscopic to Astronomic Knowledge Discovery

Compared to the unaided eye, humans see 100 million times more with microscopes and 375.5 billion times more with telescopes.

Summary: Human vision has always been limited, but through centuries of innovation—from early lenses to today’s most advanced microscopes and telescopes—we’ve extended our sight to both the atomic level and to distant galaxies. Instruments like cryo-electron microscopes and space telescopes have amplified our ability to explore the microscopic and cosmic, transformed our capacity for discovery.


Limitations in our sense of vision have driven us to invent and share new instruments of knowledge discovery. The unaided human eye can see a 100 micrometer (μm) object, about half the diameter of a human hair. Naked-eye stargazers can see a sufficiently bright celestial object up to 2.5 million light-years away. This was the extent of our vision until around 1600, when glassmakers in the Netherlands started to experiment with shaping lenses. The results of their experiments have given us the astonishing power to see millions and even billions of times more.

Microscopes

Zacharias Janssen developed the first microscope in 1595. It could magnify objects 3 to 10 times their size. By the 1800s, magnification had improved to 1,000 times. A significant advancement occurred in 1931 with the use of the transmission electron microscope (TEM), which could magnify up to 1 million times. TEMs range in cost from $100,000 to $10 million or more, depending on their features. The most advanced TEM, located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, costs $27 million. This microscope can achieve a resolution of half the width of a hydrogen atom, making it the most powerful microscope in existence.

The scanning electron microscope (SEM), developed in 1937, had lower magnification (approximately 100,000 times) but could produce three-dimensional images. From the 1980s to the present, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has increased magnification up to 5 million times; scanning probe microscopes—using methods such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)—have increased magnification up to about 100 million times.

However, magnification is only marginally meaningful unless paired with resolution, since empty magnification yields no useful details. For true improvement, resolution is critical.

The light microscopes of the 1800s could see 500 times more, at 0.2 μm. In the 1930s, electron microscopes improved resolution to 0.05 nanometers (nm), an increase to 2 million times magnification. Today’s cryo-EM/atomic microscopes have a resolution of 0.001 nm, which is 100 million times that of the unaided human eye.

Telescopes

Hans Lippershey is credited as the inventor of the first telescope, created in 1608. His instrument could magnify 3 times. After learning of the innovation the following year, Galileo built his own version and increased magnification to 30 times, yielding a 10 times improvement in one year. Telescopes have continued to improve in light-gathering power and resolution. In the 1700s and 1800s, innovations by Isaac Newton and others improved both of these factors. The Herschel reflecting telescope, produced in 1789, had 20 times better resolution and over 1,000 times better light-gathering power than the Galileo design. The Great Dorpat Refractor, built by Joseph Fraunhofer and completed in 1824, was the first modern, achromatic, refracting telescope. While the Herschel had a larger aperture, the Dorpat had much higher-quality lenses, yielding sharper and more measurable images.

The Hooker telescope was built in 1917 and offered 3 times resolution and 105 times improvement in light-gathering power over the Dorpat. The next major advancement was the creation of the Hubble telescope in 1990. As a space-based telescope 340 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, it was 10 times sharper and more stable than its Earth-based counterparts. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, has a much larger mirror (6.5 meter vs. 2.4 meter), giving it vastly greater light-gathering power, and it is optimized for the infrared spectrum.

The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is scheduled to go online in 2030. Compared to the JWST, the ELT is 6 times larger, giving it dramatically higher light-gathering power for ground-based observations. The ELT will achieve 14 times sharper resolution (0.005 arcsec vs. JWST’s 0.07 arcsec), especially when using adaptive optics. The JWST retains the edge in overall precision due to its space-based stability and optimized infrared systems, but the ELT will surpass it in spectroscopy, exoplanet imaging, and capturing the detailed structures of distant galaxies.

From the unaided human eye to the ELT, angular resolution will be 12,000 times better and light-gathering power will be 31 million times better. This gives the ELT a combined observational capability approximately 372.5 billion times greater than the unaided human eye. This staggering difference reflects advances in both resolution and light-gathering power, enabling us to study the universe in ways that were unimaginable just a few centuries ago.

Microscopes and telescopes are instruments of knowledge discovery. There has never been a better time to be alive if you want to zoom in and look at an individual 0.05 nm atom or zoom out and look at the edge of the universe, some 46.5 billion light-years away from Earth.