As temperatures crept above 37.8 degrees Celsius on a July day, air-conditioners across Texas churned overtime and demand on the U.S. state's electricity grid flirted with a new demand record: 80 gigawatts, nearly double the daily average.
But at a recently setup bitcoin mine in West Texas, the computers were turned off, with only a trickle of power flowing to keep the lights on and the air cool.
As electricity prices hit $5,000 per megawatt hour on a hot day, it was no longer profitable to run the machines that compete to verify blocks of data and win new bitcoins, with the energy costs outstripping the value of the cryptocurrency produced during those expensive midday hours.
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