SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR — After becoming the world's first country to recognize bitcoin as legal tender Wednesday, El Salvador plans to build bitcoin mining factories that use geothermal energy from beneath its volcanoes, according Reuters.
"Our engineers just informed me that they dug a new well that will provide approximately 95 Megawatts of 100 percent clean, zero emissions geothermal energy from our volcanos," El Salvador's President wrote on Twitter, before adding that the country was "Starting to design a full bitcoin mining hub around it." Bitcoin is administered by a decentralized network of computers, according to Bitcoin.org.
New bitcoins are created when those computers solve algorithms which ensure existing bitcoin transactions are secure from fraud.
However, the process is energy intensive, and other countries are looking to move away from cryptocurrency mining.
A recent crackdown in China, the world's largest cryptocurrency mining location, has seen mines ordered to shut down in Xinjiang and Qinghai, according to the South China Morning Post.
The BBC reports that if bitcoin was a country, it would be in the top 30 energy consumers in the world.
Additionally, the bitcoin industry's total carbon dioxide emissions equal the exhaust from around 9 million cars, according to a March report by Bank of America, cited by Reuters.