The Land of the Thunder Dragon—The Kingdom of Bhutan’s Crypto Mining Road The only neighboring country that does not have diplomatic relations with China is the Kingdom of Bhutan, a small country sandwiched between the Asian countries of China and India. Because it is located at the foothills of the Himalayas, lightning and thunder occur frequently. The Bhutanese believe that thunder is a dragon. It is shouting with infinite power. Therefore, the Bhutanese call their country the "Dragon Kingdom" and use the dragon as the main pattern of their national flag. The national anthem is also named "Thunder Dragon Kingdom". It’s hard to associate cryptocurrencies with Bhutan, once one of the world’s least developed countries. The source of the news that exposed this strange combination came from the discovery of the name of Bhutan’s state-owned commercial holding company (DHI) from the public list of bondholders after the collapse of two well-known crypto lending institutions, BlockFi and Celsius, during this year’s bear market. DHI said that amid this thunderstorm among lending institutions, because it has loaned out other assets for investment, all funds have been repaid. And as early as 2019, when Bitcoin was worth US$5,000, DHI had already started investing in Bitcoin mining. Therefore, DHI did not incur any losses. If all this is true, then Bhutan is actually the first state-level institution to directly own a cryptocurrency as a sovereign fund. Why does Bhutan, known as the last Himalayan kingdom, have such a deep connection with cryptocurrency? Tourism is one of the main sources of GDP in the Kingdom of Bhutan, and the Bhutanese government even stipulates that the minimum consumption per person per day upon entry is US$200-250. However, the Kingdom of Bhutan’s tourism industry alone cannot afford free medical care and free education for its citizens. The biggest feature of the Kingdom of Bhutan is its abundant water resources. The melting snow from the 6,000-meter snow-capped mountains in the north of Bhutan and the large amount of rainfall brought by the annual monsoon flow into the large and small rivers in Bhutan, making Bhutan extremely rich in water conservancy resources. The entire country seems to be located in a huge hydropower station. As early as 2016, Bhutan achieved 100% electricity coverage, which even neighboring India has not achieved. In 2021, Bhutan's national power generation capacity was 10.82 billion kilowatt hours, exports were 8.075 billion kilowatt hours, accounting for 15.6% of GDP, and hydropower profits accounted for 60% of the Bhutanese government revenue.The current survey shows that the water conservancy resources available in the entire territory of Bhutan are ten times those currently developed. Such huge potential and resource-rich clean energy has laid the foundation for Bhutan’s crypto mining. Hydropower resources are tantamount to a gold mine for Bitcoin miners. This neighboring country with rich hydropower resources is undoubtedly a good choice for Chinese encryption miners who have been hit in recent years. Bhutan’s trade data shows that between 2020 and 2021, chip imports from China and Hong Kong exceeded US$220 million. In 2022, the import volume even exceeded 15% of the Bhutanese government’s annual budget. These data may indicate that Chinese miners and Bhutan has been linked to the growth of crypto mining in recent years. BitDeer x Kingdom of Bhutan On April 14, 2023, Bitdeer Technologies, founded by Jihan Wu who left Bitmain, completed its merger with Blue Safari Group Acquisition Corp and was listed on Nasdaq in the United States with the stock code "BTDR". Not long after its listing, BitDeer announced its cooperation with Bhutan's DHI to establish a closed-end fund (the "Fund") with an estimated scale of up to US$500 million. The first phase of the fund construction project will raise 80 million US dollars, with a converted computing power value of approximately 20EH/s (accounting for approximately 5.2% of the global total computing power) The Bitdeer Q3 report in November 2023 shows that the GeDu data center in Bhutan provides Bitdeer with 100 megawatts of power generation, supports the operation of 30,000 mining machines, and will provide 3.3EH/S computing power for Bitdeer, and is continuing to expand. Thanks to the launch of the GeDu data center in the Kingdom of Bhutan, the number of Bitdeer's own ASIC mining machines has increased to 92,000. However, due to the seasonal factors of hydropower generation in the Kingdom of Bhutan, during the dry winter, even Bhutan itself may need to import energy from neighboring countries. Therefore, an agreement was reached between Bitdeer and Bhutan DHI that domestic demand will be given priority during the winter. , when power generation declines, mining operations may be shut down. The Kingdom of Bhutan’s exploration of the cryptocurrency market is also partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic that caused a major blow to the Kingdom’s tourism industry in the previous two years. Not only that, young people and professionals from Bhutan are immigrating to countries such as Australia and Canada at an unprecedented rate. The stagnation of economic growth has forced the Kingdom of Bhutan to seek new growth points in the field of digital economy. The current results show that the Kingdom of Bhutan’s bet on cryptocurrency has achieved initial success, bringing income to the country while also providing local benefits. Citizens create jobs. We have reason to believe that more and more underdeveloped countries may benefit from this decentralized cryptocurrency-Bitcoin. In a sense, these signs prove that the development of Bitcoin is galloping in the direction Satoshi Nakamoto hoped. Some of the above data and content come from Bitdeer public reports and Forbes reports $BTC $BTDR