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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.”

Newsletter | Human Development

Weekly Progress Roundup

The global march of progress has resumed

Blog Post | Human Development

In NYT, Board Member Steven Pinker Says Progress Goes On

Election season can give one the false impression that the state of the country keeps getting worse when, in fact, it keeps getting better.

On the eve of this presidential election, the United States faces daunting problems. But that has been true on the eve of every election. As they say, the best explanation for the good old days is a bad memory. When we take an objective look at how the country is doing and which way it has been going, we see that American life is not a hellscape of carnage and decline. What stands out is a resilient democracy that tends to recover from setbacks and make halting progress.

None of this progress happened by itself. In the natural course of events, things get worse, not better, as benevolent conditions give way to disorder, disease and the worst of human nature. Progress is the dividend of human beings recognizing problems and mustering their ingenuity and will to solve them.

Among the most important of these people are political leaders. We should choose the ones who assess the nation’s problems realistically, distinguishing genuine afflictions from anecdotes and rumors and who vow to learn from its successes and not repeat its mistakes.

This post was excerpted from a New York Times guest essay by Steven Pinker. Read the full essay for free using this gift link (expires on December 1st, 2024)

New York Times | Conservation & Biodiversity

The Doomsday Plant Vault Gets Thousands of New Seeds

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, in the far reaches of northern Norway, is meant to be humanity’s last resort. Imagine it as the world’s doomsday garden shed: a secure genetic capsule, kept safe in case some catastrophe — a meteor strike or climate disaster, perhaps — threatens the planet’s crops.

The vault already had about 1.3 million seed samples from about 7,000 species, sent from all over the world. Last week, it received about 30,000 new ones.

The number itself is notable: It’s one of the largest one-time additions since the vault opened in 2008. (There are often three deposits a year.)

But perhaps more significant is the amount of so-called genebanks — organizations that store their own hoards of seeds in locations around the world — that participated in the latest donation, said Asmund Asdal, the Norwegian vault’s coordinator.

‘It is more important now that many new genebanks in developing parts of the world are depositing valuable and unique genetic material,’ he wrote in an email. Some, he said, made their first contributions last week.”

From New York Times.

Blog Post | Human Development

Superabundance Cuts Through Pessimism

The introduction to the Polish translation of Superabundance.

Summary: Superabundance by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley counters the pessimistic outlook on resource scarcity, arguing that resources have become more accessible over time thanks to human innovation. Through “time prices” the authors demonstrate that abundance is achievable even as the global population grows. The book underscores the importance of free markets, freedom of speech, and economic freedom as pillars for sustaining prosperity and refuting outdated Malthusian fears.


In a world full of popular media headlines warning of resource exhaustion, ecological crises, and overpopulation, it’s worth picking up a book that explains why there’s no need to be afraid. Superabundance by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley, based on data and compelling arguments, shows that the availability of a wide range of resources has been steadily increasing over the past 150 years. This is possible thanks to progress and the people behind it—their creativity and innovation.

Depending on the selection of goods and the period of analysis, abundance—understood as the number of work hours required to acquire a certain product or service—has improved over recent decades by an average of 2-4% per year, effectively doubling every 20 to 35 years. To understand the phenomenon of abundance, time itself is key, treated by the authors as a measure of wealth. This approach provides an interesting alternative to the useful yet imperfect metric of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). The so-called “time prices” used by Tupy and Pooley address some of GDP’s weaknesses, such as the difficulties in measuring changes in product quality and innovation.

From a historical perspective, the accumulated knowledge at the end of the 18th century, along with liberal ideas, enabled a shift from chronic shortages to the construction of a world of increasing abundance in various fields and regions of the globe. A significant advantage of the book is the data and charts that illustrate how humanity’s situation has improved over the decades. Furthermore, in the case of many goods and resources, abundance has increased faster than the population, which Tupy and Pooley call the titular “superabundance.”

The authors debunk the myth of overpopulation and refute the ideas of Malthusian proponents who argue that, given the planet’s finite resources, population growth is unsustainable. A larger population means more minds capable of generating innovative solutions to our shared problems. As George Gilder states in the book’s foreword, “people are not a burden on resources—they are a source of resources.”

Superabundance challenges the pessimistic beliefs about the world’s worsening condition, arguing that humanity’s future can be not only bearable but also filled with prosperity. The Foundation for Economic Freedom supported the Polish edition of the book, not only to show readers that the state of the world today is much better than in the past but also better than we might believe. More importantly, the book leaves us with a key question: will superabundance continue?

Tupy and Pooley highlight the conditions necessary for this continuation. Firstly, it will depend on people and the freedom of thought leading to ideas that can undergo market testing and ultimately drive progress. Secondly, freedom of speech is crucial for the growth of abundance, a freedom that today faces strong challenges—from both authoritarian regimes in poorer countries and from universities in wealthier nations. Thirdly, the continuation of progress requires the defense and strengthening of a free market, where the true value of human ideas is tested.

The authors note that human psychological traits, shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, are not conducive to institutional solutions that promote progress. The biologically driven “craving for a daily dose of fear and anxiety” creates fertile ground for various populist forces in politics, which promise equality and security, promote tribalism (us versus them), and view the economy as a zero-sum game—where one person’s gain is another’s loss. However, most phenomena in a free economy are positive-sum games, benefiting various parties involved in transactions, often strangers to each other. The arguments in Tupy and Pooley’s book offer a rational counterpoint to strong tendencies in the human psyche, which were beneficial for survival in prehistoric times but hinder development and quality of life improvement in today’s economy, based on trade, services, peaceful cooperation, and globalization.

Poland embarked on a path of accelerated development after its successful transformation in 1989, and despite many economic challenges, it has the potential for further growth and even greater prosperity in the future. The lessons from Superabundance can be valuable to anyone who wants to create more favorable conditions for economic freedom, private enterprise, innovation, and, consequently, economic growth. I encourage you to read it and to engage as citizens in the pursuit of continued progress.

This article was translated from original Polish using ChatGPT 4o. It appears as the introduction to the Polish edition of Superabundance.