Order Out of Chaos: The New Face of South American Bitcoin Mining

South American Bitcoin mining is usually sold on one number, the price of power. At Mining Disrupt Miami, held July twenty-fifth to twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-three, Andres Romero went country by country.

Romero was chief growth officer of Hash House, a hardware supplier founded in Shenzhen in twenty seventeen that had supplied more than five hundred megawatts of power gear to mining farms. Bitcoin traded at twenty-nine thousand, one hundred twenty-five dollars that week. Today it is eighty-three thousand and ninety-three dollars.

Paraguay came first. Its giant hydro dam, shared with Brazil, gives the country a regulated power rate built for miners: under four cents a kilowatt-hour at high voltage, four point six cents at twenty-three kilovolts. As he put it, "it's currently the most attractive option with the fully regulated energy rate." Bitfarms had just added another one hundred fifty megawatts there.

Brazil was a window. Energy trading prices had fallen to their lowest in years, and as he put it, "we're talking about buying energy directly from the market at below 30 dollars a mega one hour," or about thirty-one to thirty-two dollars once other costs are added. In twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen, he said, mining there had not been possible at all. His one piece of advice: choose your infrastructure partner carefully.

Argentina and Colombia were off-grid stories. Argentine energy companies YPF and Pampa Energy ran one-megawatt pilots in twenty twenty-one and twenty twenty-two. In Colombia, groups were mining on stranded gas in remote regions for under three cents all-in, though the logistics were costly.

Before banking, he gave a capital cost comparison between Paraguay and the US, based on prefabricated buildings with the last step of transformation included, and said importing miners into Paraguay was still a discussion with the authorities, though many companies were doing it with English-speaking lawyers and importers.

Then the paperwork. Banks in Paraguay could be wary of crypto companies, with only two intermediary banks for international wires. Brazil was easier, with licensed exchanges and no special energy tax for miners. Buenos Aires had added a four percent tax on mining.

He named one more hurdle: contractors who quote a timeline and rarely keep it, in South America and in the US alike. That was the pitch for Hash House's own product at the show, a ready-to-deploy immersion cooling data center co-developed with MicroBT for its M56 miners.

He closed with a photo of Bitfarms' site in Paraguay and asked whether the room would agree it matched what gets built in the US. He saw people nodding.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and the conversation continues at Mining Disrupt twenty twenty-seven, March twenty-second to twenty-fourth in Irving, Texas.