Since long before anyone can remember, the big, fertile slopes of the Alazani Valley in eastern Georgia have been planted with grape vines. It's the heartland of wine-making in the country that invented it 8,000 years ago. But in recent months, the valley has been going through a new kind of ferment, because of bitcoin.
"You see that building there with the power line outside," says Bezhani Buzhaidze, pointing to an abandoned-looking, cinder block storehouse in his hometown of Telavi, the hub of Georgian wine country. "That's being turned into a data center for mining cryptocurrencies."
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https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2018/04/23/597780405/how-the-tiny-nation-of-georgia-became-a-bitcoin-behemoth
