Two weeks after Turkey’s electricity price rose by 15%, a new store selling specialized mining equipment opened on July 13 in Istanbul, the country’s commercial center.
It seems counterintuitive to open a mining equipment store in a country with expensive electricity. But the Phoenix Store, Bitmain’s sales partner in the Middle East, performed mathematical calculations before opening a second store in the region. Phoenix CEO Phil Harvey explained that their main goal of opening an Istanbul store is to educate Turkish Crypto-friendly population About crypto mining. Customers can then purchase mining equipment and managed services operating in Canada, the United States, or Russia. Mining in Turkey is simply not feasible.
“It’s like you want to invest in a gold mine,” he said. “You can come here to invest in a gold mine, but it won’t be in the back garden. It will be outside.”
Cointelegraph Turkey Sit down with Phil Harvey after the speech to learn more about cryptocurrency mining China cracks down on mining.
“China needs to maintain the current growth of projects in the country,” Harvey began to describe the crackdown in detail. The country needs to improve in several areas, such as reducing its carbon footprint, in order to obtain funding from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank:
“The industry that is most likely to decrease overnight is the gray area industry. Just saying no to Bitcoin mining, about 68,000 GW of electricity was immediately withdrawn from China.”
This is a considerable source of income, but compared to the amount invested by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank in China for projects such as road initiatives, even this is insignificant. Harvey added: “Therefore, it is an easy decision for China to remove these miners and reduce their carbon footprint.”
Although several miners announced that they will relocate to Countries with cold climates such as CanadaHarvey believes that half of the losses due to Chinese suppression will never come back online:
“Because these old machines have been stored in the warehouse for many years, they only make 50%, and they are still running. But now it makes no business sense to take them down and move them.”
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The value of that machine may be at most 150 to 200 dollars, and it will take about the same amount of money to relocate them. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, “that’s why I said we lost half of the network.”
Harvey expects that regions such as Russia and Kazakhstan will increase its share in the mining sector by adding new machines to the network, but he currently does not plan to open new stores in these countries. After Dubai and Istanbul, Phoenix only plans to open a store in London. “We will not further expand stores beyond these three locations,” he said.
