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Bitcoin could save Eskom
The Citizen
|April 01, 2025
NO PAIN, NO GAIN: OPPORTUNITY STILL EXISTS
If you had mentioned bitcoin mining to a power utility five years ago, you would have been laughed out of the boardroom. There's not much to laugh about now.
Carel de Jager, CEO of Silver Sixpence and a former Eskom engineer, ran some simulations to quantify what impact bitcoin mining would have had on Eskom's balance sheet. The figures are staggering.
Starting on 1 April 2020 and running three million bitcoin mining machines until the end of 2024, Eskom would have cranked out more than 406,000 bitcoin (BTC) – sufficient to pay off a new 2,000MW power plant costing about R31 billion in 279 days, and leave it debt-free.
This is somewhat less than the 506,137 BTC owned by MicroStrategy, or the 574,083 owned by BlackRock's newly formed exchange-traded fund, but would still make Eskom one of the largest single producers and owners of BTC in the world.
This story is from the April 01, 2025 edition of The Citizen.
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