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How the U.S. turned the world’s new bitcoin mining hub

How the U.S. became the world's new bitcoin mining hub

Well before China decided to kick out all of its bitcoin miners, they were already leaving in droves, and new data from Cambridge University shows they were likely headed to the United States.

The U.S. has fast become the new darling of the bitcoin mining world. It is the second-biggest mining destination on the planet, accounting for nearly 17% of all the world’s bitcoin miners as of April 2021. That’s a 151% increase from September 2020. 

“For the last 18 months, we’ve had a serious growth of mining infrastructure in the U.S.,” said Darin Feinstein, founder of Blockcap and Core Scientific. “We’ve noticed a massive uptick in mining operations looking to relocate to North America, mostly in the U.S.”

This dataset doesn’t include the mass mining exodus out of China, which led to half the world’s miners dropping offline, and experts tell CNBC that the U.S. share of the mining market is likely even bigger than the numbers indicate.

According to the newly-released Cambridge data, just before the Chinese mining ban began, the country accounted for 46% of the world’s total hashrate, an industry term used to describe the collective computing power of the bitcoin network. That’s a sharp decline from 75.5% in September 2019, and the percentage is likely much lower given the exodus underway now. 

“500,000 formerly Chinese miner rigs are looking for homes in the U.S,” said Marathon Digital’s Fred Thiel. “If they are deployed, it would mean North America would have closer to 40% of global hashrate by the end of 2022.”

The new mining mecca

America’s rising dominance is a simple case of luck meeting preparation. The U.S. has quietly been building up its hosting capacity for years.

Before bitcoin miners actually started coming to America, companies across the country made a gamble that eventually, if adequate infrastructure were in place, they would set up shop in the U.S. 

That gamble appears to be paying off.

When bitcoin crashed in late 2017 and the wider market entered a multi-year crypto winter, there wasn’t much demand for big bitcoin farms. U.S. mining operators saw their opening and jumped at the chance to deploy cheap money to build up the mining ecosystem in the States. 

“The large, publicly traded miners were able to raise capital to go make big purchases,” said Mike Colyer, CEO of digital currency company Foundry, which helped bring over $300 million of mining equipment into North America.

Companies like North American crypto mining operator Core Scientific kept building out hosting space all through the crypto winter, so that they had the capacity to plug in new gear, according to Colyer. 

“A majority of the new equipment manufactured from May 2020 through December 2020 was shipped to the U.S. and Canada,” he said.

Read more about cryptocurrencies from CNBC Pro

Alex Brammer of Luxor Mining, a cryptocurrency pool built for advanced miners, points out that maturing capital markets and financial instruments around the mining industry also played a big role in the industry’s quick ascent in the U.S. Brammer says that many of these American operators were able to start rapidly expanding once they secured financing by leveraging a multi-year track record of profitability and existing capital as collateral.

Covid also played a role.

Though the global pandemic shut down large swaths of the economy, the ensuing stimulus payments that proved a boon for U.S. mining companies.

“All the money printing during the pandemic meant that more capital needed to be deployed,” explained bitcoin mining engineer Brandon Arvanaghi. 

“People were looking for places to park their cash. The appetite for large-scale investments had never been bigger. A lot of that likely found its way into bitcoin mining operations in places outside of China,” continued Arvanaghi.

Making it in America

The seeds of the U.S. migration started back in early 2020, according to Colyer. Prior to Beijing’s sudden crackdown, China’s mining dominance had already begun to slip. 

Part of the appeal is that the U.S. ticks a lot of the boxes for these migrant miners.

“If you’re looking to relocate hundreds of millions of dollars of miners out of China, you want to make sure you have geographic, political, and jurisdictional stability. You also want to make sure there are private property right protections for the assets that you are relocating,” said Feinstein.

It also helps that the U.S. is also home to some of the cheapest sources of energy on the planet, many of which tend to be renewable. Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power.

Thiel expects most new miners relocating to North America to be powered by renewables, or gas that is offset by renewable energy credits.

While Castle Island Ventures founding partner, Nic Carter, points out that U.S. mining isn’t wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets. 

“The migration is definitely a net positive overall,” he said. “Hashrate moving to the U.S., Canada, and Russia will mean much lower carbon intensity.”

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Entertainment

Yoshi Wada, Ingenious Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

Yoshi Wada, Inventive Creator of Sound Worlds, Dies at 77

On the 18th Manhattan. He was 77.

His son and musical collaborator Tashi Wada confirmed the death but said the cause was unknown.

Yoshi Wada’s music was characterized by dense, persistent sounds that could create stunning acoustic effects. He absorbed much of various musical traditions – Indian ragas, Macedonian folk song, and Scottish bagpipes – while supporting his musical life by working in construction.

In an early technique, in the 1970s, he attached mouthpieces to pipes that could be over six feet long. In ritual concerts lasting several hours, he immersed the audience in the sonorous drones that emanated from this alphorn-like instrument, which he called the earth horn.

In combination with the electronics of the sound artist Liz Philips, the pulsating sounds of the pipes offered a new interpretation of the minimalist style that was then in fashion.

“The result was certainly one of the most coloristically attractive of the many recent examples of minimalist, stationary sound you hear today,” wrote John Rockwell of the New York Times of a Wada concert in 1974 at the Kitchen in Lower Manhattan, “more like an evening at the very beginning of Wagner’s ‘Rheingold’. “

Mr. Wada’s idiosyncratic singing and the use of bagpipes became the basis for two major albums released on free jazz labels in the 1980s. One, “Lamentation of the rise and fall of the Elephantine Crocodile,” was recorded in an empty swimming pool; To delve deeper into the project, Mr Wada slept in the pool. The other release, “Off the Wall”, made on a grant in West Berlin, combined bagpipes with a handcrafted organ and percussion.

“What I would like to have is a feeling for the endless space,” he said in a 1987 interview. “I want to create this feeling of infinity with sound.”

Mr. Wada also created elaborate sculptural sound installations. For “The Appointed Cloud” in 1987 he hung organ pipes and gongs in the Great Hall of the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens. Led by a computer program developed by David Rayna, visitors pressed buttons to change the sound of the composition in real time.

“Lots of young children came,” recalled Mr Wada in 2016, “and they went crazy pushing the buttons and it was a lot of fun.”

Yoshimasa Wada was born on November 11, 1943 in Kyoto, Japan, to the architect Shukitchi Wada and Kino Imakita. His father died in World War II and his childhood was marked by the rigors of the post-war period.

Yoshi had strong experiences early on in hearing monks sing in a local Zen temple. Enthusiastic about Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman, he started playing jazz saxophone as a teenager. He studied sculpture at the Kyoto City University of Fine Arts and searched Japan for avant-garde collectives such as the Gutai Group and the Hi-Red Center.

“It looked at the moon in a Zen garden for a whole night,” Mr. Wada later recalled of a “happening” presented by the artist and musician Yoko Ono. “That was a very nice feeling. I remember taking a bath afterwards and going home. “

After completing his Bachelor in Fine Arts, he moved to New York in 1967. George Maciunas, who is considered to be the founder of the Fluxus movement, lived in Mr. Wada’s building. Soon Mr. Wada was caught up in Fluxus’ high-minded absurdism, which made music out of cardboard tubes and syncopated sneezes.

Mr. Maciunas had begun buying abandoned buildings in the Manhattan area that would become known as SoHo and converting them into artists’ cooperatives, and he enlisted Mr. Wada to help with the carpentry and plumbing work.

Never having formal training in music, Mr. Wada took electronic music lessons from composer La Monte Young and in the early 1970s became a student of guru Pandit Pran Nath, who taught classical North Indian singing in Mr. Young’s studio.

“He tried to take everything in on a very high spiritual level,” said Mr. Young in an interview about Mr. Wada. “He was a very pure and noble person.”

His fascination with the microtonal inflections and hypnotic drones of Indian ragas, along with his dissatisfaction with standard instruments, led Mr. Wada to create the earth horns. But his musical interest continued to expand. He heard Macedonian folk singing at a festival and decided to study it, then formed a small choir to sing eerie modal improvisations. He attended Scottish Highland Games in the late 1970s and was impressed with the possibilities of the bagpipes.

After learning the solo bagpipe style known as “piobaireachd”, Mr. Wada built his own “customized” version of the instrument – with plumbing fixtures, pipes and air compressors – for evening performances that fused composition and improvisation.

“In studying all these different traditions, he always spoke of wanting to find ways to make them his own,” said his son Tashi in an interview.

Mr. Wada supported his family by continuing construction work and even starting his own construction company. He stored his menagerie of makeshift instruments in the basement of their building, one of the ones that Mr. Maciunas had developed. Tashi Wada remembered that a drum kit from his childhood found its way into one of his father’s sound installations.

Starting in 2007, Tashi Wada, who is also an experimental composer, helped reissue his father’s older recordings, which are now available on the Saltern label. In 2009, the Emily Harvey Foundation, which promotes the arts and had preserved some of Wada’s ear horns, invited him to repeat his performances from the 1970s. History lost the original electronic drone system; Instead, Tashi recreated the parts live. Father and son became regular musical collaborators.

Mr. Wada’s first wife was Barbara Stewart. In 1985 he married Marilyn Bogerd; they divorced in 2014. In addition to her son, he leaves behind her daughter Manon Bogerd Wada and a granddaughter.

In 2016, Tashi Wada interviewed his father for the art magazine BOMB and asked him about the hallucinatory effects he had experienced while practicing his music in a small studio in West Berlin in the 1980s.

“I didn’t use drugs at the time,” said Mr Wada. “It was not necessary. Sound pulls me into a dreamlike world when the sound is right. That is a very good effect and keeps me awake. “

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Business

The Separate Worlds of Invoice and Melinda Gates

The Separate Worlds of Bill and Melinda Gates

“It was a constant stress point in the foundation. It was Warren who put it down, but Bill’s appetite is always, “We should do this, we should do this.” The teams end up with this huge to-do list, ”said the former CEO.

Mr Buffett admitted in an interview with The Times last year that he spoke out against institutional bloating. “That’s the only piece of advice I never silence because it’s the natural tendency of any organization,” he said.

Foundation staff often have to wear multiple hats to meet requirements. For example, one employee, Anita Zaidi, serves in the highly technical role of director of vaccine development and surveillance, but also serves as president for gender equality.

In a 2015 TED talk, Mr Gates warned of the global threat posed by contagious respiratory viruses. The foundation was full of top talent working to develop new vaccines. However, there was not a single person out of around 1,600 employees fully dedicated to the pandemic prior to the outbreak of Covid-19.

All contract workarounds and consultants had so much bandwidth and it was decided not to have a dedicated team to work on the matter. Instead, the foundation championed the Coalition for Epidemic Preparation Innovation, which helped develop vaccines to control outbreaks.

When the pandemic broke out, the foundation used its resources and expertise. It has so far allocated $ 1.75 billion to fight the pandemic and has played a key role in shaping the global response.

Even without the divorce, the foundation was in the midst of change. Mr. Buffett, the third trustee, turns 91 this summer. Mr. Gates’ father, Bill Gates Sr., who was co-chair and directing hand of the foundation, died last September. Some observers have wondered if the couple’s three children could get involved anytime soon. The older two are already in college and medical school. Others have raised the possibility that this is the moment to loosen the grip of the family and install a board drawn by professionals outside the inner circle.

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Health

Finland Is Once more the World’s Happiest Nation, Report Finds

Finland Is Again the World's Happiest Country, Report Finds

In Finland, a relatively egalitarian society, people tend not to be fixated on “keeping up with the Joneses”.

“People are often pretty good at social standards,” said Antti Kauppinen, professor of philosophy at the University of Helsinki. “That is based on the training; Everyone has access to a good education. Income and wealth differences are relatively small. “

David Pfister, an Austrian architect who lives in Oulunkyla, a suburb of Helsinki, said he would describe Finns as happy, but it was hard to tell if they were happy. “The baby has increased our happiness,” said his wife, Veera Yliniemi, a teacher. Another man in the same suburb, Janne Berliini, 49, said he was lucky enough. “I have work,” he said. “The basic things are fine.”

People in Finland also tend to have realistic expectations of their lives. But when something in life exceeds expectations, people will often act humbly, preferring a self-deprecating joke to boasting, said Sari Poyhonen, professor of linguistics at Jyvaskyla University. Finns, she said, are professionals at keeping their luck a secret.

This year’s report received little coverage in the Finnish news media. “Finland is still the happiest country in the world,” began a short article that appeared in the daily Ilta-Sanomat.

All of the top 10 countries – including the four other Nordic countries – have different political philosophies than the United States, # 14 on the list, behind Ireland and ahead of Canada. Lower levels of happiness in the United States could be caused by social conflict, drug addiction, lack of access to health care, and income inequality, said Dr. Wang.

Things are far from perfect in Finland. As in other parts of the continent, right-wing nationalism is on the rise, and unemployment at 8.1 percent is higher than the average unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in the European Union.

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Business

WHO says 87% of the world’s provide has gone to higher-income international locations

WHO says 87% of the world's supply has gone to higher-income countries

The elderly wait in line to receive a dose of CoronaVac-Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine from Sinovac during a vaccination day for 67-year-old citizens in Brasilia, Brazil on March 29, 2021.

Ueslei Marcelino | Reuters

Wealthy countries have received the vast majority of the world’s supply of Covid-19 vaccine doses, while poor countries have received less than 1%, the World Health Organization said at a news conference on Friday.

Of the 700 million vaccine doses distributed worldwide, “over 87% went to high-income or high- and middle-income countries, while low-income countries received just 0.2%,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

On average, 1 in 4 people in high-income countries have received a coronavirus vaccine, compared to just 1 in more than 500 in low-income countries, Tedros said.

“There is still a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines,” he said.

Tedros said there is a shortage of doses for COVAX, a global alliance that aims to provide coronavirus vaccines to poor nations.

“We understand that some countries and companies plan to make their own bilateral vaccine donations and bypass COVAX for their own political or commercial reasons,” said Tedros. “These bilateral agreements run the risk of igniting the flames of vaccine inequality.”

According to Tedros, COVAX partners – including the WHO, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – are pursuing strategies to accelerate production and supply.

The alliance seeks donations from countries with an oversupply of vaccines, is accelerating the review of further vaccines and is discussing ways to expand global production capacity with several countries, said Tedros and Gavi CEO Dr. Seth Berkley.

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Entertainment

Take heed to 5 of the World’s Latest, Wildest Devices

Listen to Five of the World’s Newest, Wildest Instruments

What does someone have to invent a new instrument? If you ask the finalists of this year’s Guthman Musical Instrument Contest, you will get different answers – including boredom, curiosity and frustration.

The creative impulse is often triggered by the question: what if a piano could sing? How does a guitar learn to play microtones? Can a keyboard instrument be taught to overturn like a cello? Some of the participants had to expand their skills to include wood carving or soldering. One sought help from his plumber; another from his Lego-obsessed 7-year-old.

In a normal year, finalists can bring their creations to life in front of a live audience. Although the annual competition, organized by the Georgia Institute of Technology, was held online this year, the videos submitted by entrants allowed viewers to immerse themselves in a world of ingenuity. The university announced the winners on Friday.

Guitarist Kaki King, one of the judges, said in an interview that it was nearly impossible to compare and evaluate entries that contained a harp-guitar hybrid and an electronic khipu that was knotted on an ancient Andean encryption method Strings based. King said what ultimately guided them was the tactile attraction and magnetism of an invention.

“As a player, writer and composer,” she said, “you have a desire to put your hand on something, and that determines the measure of its value.”

Here are five highlights of the competition, brand new members of the huge family of instruments.

Ulfur Hansson (Reykjavik, Iceland)

The design for Ulfur Hansson’s electromagnetic harp came to him during a monotonous college course. He logged into a computer graphics program and drew a scribble: a circular line that winds inward and gathers in the center in a heart-like shape.

“It was definitely vision over sound,” Hansson said in a telephone interview. This winding diagram, the result of a mathematical relationship, now adorns the flat wooden surface of a shield-like structure that hides 24 strings that were made to vibrate by electromagnets. The magnets can be activated by buttons engraved in the front panel or by remote access via a computer, causing an ethereal hum like a ghost organ.

Since the strings can vibrate either at their fundamental frequencies or at one of the harmonics of their overtone series, the Segulharpa is “kind of chaotic,” said Hansson, who carved four of the instruments and soldered the electronics by hand. “It just keeps evolving when you play. You can feel that it is shaping itself. “

David Shea, Monica Lim and Mirza Ceyzar (Melbourne, Australia)

Experimental pianists have long played with hand-held electromagnetic devices called e-bows, which vibrate the strings of the piano without direct contact. There are prototype pianos with a built-in electromagnetic component, but their size and cost keep them out of the reach of most performers.

Composer David Shea dreamed of an instrument that would transform any concert grand piano into an electromagnetic piano capable of both traditional sounds and steady drones of electronic music. “I thought, could there be a travel version that is modular and can be constantly adapted by anyone who plays it?” he said in a video interview with Monica Lim, a fellow pianist and composer who helped shape the design.

Their groundbreaking idea was a mini-computer for each note that hovers over the string without touching it. A pianist can play both the electromagnetic component and the traditional keyboard at the same time – “a dialogue,” said Shea, “between the old and the new” – or in a duet with another person (or a computer) using the drones Sing brings. The device is portable and easy to install.

“It’s more like one layer sitting on top of the other, more percussive sound activated from the keyboard,” Lin said.

Atlas Cogulu, Tolgahan Cogulu and Rusen Can Acet (Istanbul)

Tolgahan Cogulu has been teaching the guitar to play new notes for years. “I love the guitar,” he said in a recent video interview. “I can’t play my own music, though.”

Turkish music is based on microtones, while traditional guitar has frets that arrange the pitch according to western vocal systems. In 2008, Cogulu designed a microtonal guitar with movable frets, but it continues to be a specialty instrument.

One day, his young son Atlas made a Lego replica of his father’s microtonal fingerboard. Cogulu immediately saw its potential. “It’s a miracle idea,” he said. “It’s the most popular toy in the world and the most popular instrument. And when you combine them it becomes a microtonal guitar – because you can move the frets on the Lego studs. “

Rusan Can Acet, engineer and PhD student at Istanbul Technical University, had the idea of ​​3D printing a base plate for the fingerboard. The Lego pieces snap into place and a set of movable 3D printed frets are attached on top. Production was almost ridiculously cheap, said Cogulu, and only stopped briefly when they had used up all of the thin, square one-off pieces in Atlas’s Lego collection that are essential to their design.

In class with his students, Cogulu discovered that he had come across a tool for teaching music theory. With its movable frets, the microtonal Lego guitar makes the changing intervals visible in various Western, Turkish and Balinese modes. Cogulu and his team are making the 3D printable files available to everyone for a modest contribution. He also plans to build pre-assembled versions that he hopes will be useful in music schools.

Clark Battle (United States)

“I’m basically an unreasonable cellist with guitar envy,” said Clark Battle. As an improviser, he admired the chordal flexibility of a piano or guitar. But, as he explained in an email exchange, he was unwilling to give up the flexible pitch of his chosen instrument, the cello. He began to wonder what a piano could look like that would allow a musician to vibrate and push notes – as you can on the cello.

The result is the Evolano – a “further developed piano”. The instrument has keys, action and hammers like a piano aligned along a central ruler. The strings move with the keys and slide over a curved fret that sets the pitch. Chords are played the traditional way of a keyboard by pressing multiple keys. By moving the hands, the entire chord structure can move smoothly like a cello glissando.

Battle said his study of kung fu impressed him on the importance of “respecting the natural vertical symmetry of the human body.” Regarding the sound, he added: “To be honest, I had no expectations of the tonal aspects of the instrument. Since there is no precedent for tonality, it would sound like what it did. “

Steve Parker (Austin, Tex.)

Steve Parker’s musical instruments make no sound. Instead, this trombonist uses brass instruments as sculptural hearing aids. His inspirations are the early 20th century military sound location devices – some referred to as war chambers – that were used to detect approaching enemy aircraft before the invention of radar. Parker’s instruments emit a similar threat, with yards of Seussian tubing ending in the exposed bells of trombones and sousaphones.

Parker’s devices – some portable, others attached to a gallery wall – become part of compositions that play with the dimensionality of sound. They also associate music with aggressive listening modes like surveillance and espionage.

“They’re picture frames – but they’re more than that,” said Parker in a video interview from the American Academy in Rome, where he is currently a fellow. “They don’t just choose and amplify certain sounds. They also resonate at certain frequencies. Since the instrument vibrates when the sound hits it, it harmonizes it in a subtle way. “

Parker says the effect on the listener is disoriented. He likes how the repurposed marching band instruments – rich in associations with warfare, protests and modern gladiator sports – can be turned into tools for listening together. And he enjoys the “piece of bricolage” with which instruments are dismantled and their components are soldered with copper pipes from the hardware store. As he did so, he said, “I’ve become quite friendly with my plumber.”

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Business

World’s ‘ethical failure’ WHO says

World's 'moral failure' WHO says

Healthcare workers administer the COVID-19 vaccine to residents of the Jackson Heights neighborhood at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church on January 10, 2021 in Tampa, Florida.

Octavio Jones | Getty Images

LONDON – The head of the World Health Organization said Monday the fair distribution of coronavirus vaccines was “seriously at risk”.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned of a “catastrophic moral failure”, saying “the recent emergence of fast-spreading variants makes the quick and fair introduction of vaccines all the more important.”

But he added that this distribution could easily become “another building block in the wall of inequality between the world’s owners and non-owners”.

“With the use of the first vaccines, the promise of fair access is seriously jeopardized,” he said at a meeting of the WHO Executive Board.

While more than 39 million doses of various vaccines have now been administered in at least 49 higher-income countries, only 25 doses have been administered in one of the lowest-income countries.

“I have to be dull, the world is facing catastrophic moral failure and the price for that failure is paid for with life and livelihood in the poorest countries in the world.”

At the beginning of his speech, Tedros emphasized that developing and approving safe coronavirus vaccines less than a year after the virus emerged in China in late 2019 was an “amazing achievement and a much-needed source of hope”.

However, he added, “It is not right for younger, healthier adults in rich countries to be vaccinated before health workers and older people in poorer countries.”

“There will be enough vaccines for everyone, but right now we must work together as a global family to prioritize (those) who are most at risk of serious illness and death in all countries.”

Without naming names, according to Tedros, some countries and companies speak the language of fair access but continue to prioritize bilateral deals, bypassing COVAX, which is driving prices up and trying to jump to the top. “That’s wrong,” he said.

COVAX is a global program jointly led by an international vaccine alliance called Gavi, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, and the WHO. It was established to ensure equitable access to vaccines for every country in the world. The goal is to deliver 2 billion doses of safe, effective vaccines that have passed regulatory approval and / or prequalification by the WHO by the end of 2021.

The WHO urged wealthier countries that had pre-ordered millions of doses of coronavirus vaccines, such as the US, UK and Europe, to share some of those vaccines with COVAX so they could then pass them on to poorer countries.

Wealthier nations have been accused of “hoarding” more vaccines than they need, even though the vaccine supply is still in its infancy, as mass vaccination – which began in the West in December – is largely still in its first phase of distribution.

Tedros urged countries with bilateral agreements with vaccine manufacturers and controls of supply to “be transparent to COVAX on quantities, prices and delivery dates” and to share their own doses with COVAX once they have vaccinated their own health workers and older populations.