Nemo Semret

Does #Bitcoin use too much energy? Is it bad for the environment? What happens to mining when the price of #BTC changes? When hardware changes? All you ever wanted to know about the dynamics of #Bitcoin mining but never dared ask: arxiv.org/abs/2201.06072

Crazy. New women's world record. And two men break the 2 hr barrier.

Computer, respond with less glazing.

@ec0n1st Depends on your personal risk profile.

@nemozen Should we buy though?

hot take: OpenAI wants the government to force every citizen to buy their stock.

@martinplaut Do you not realize the image you posted is a cheap obvious fake? Look at the colors. Besides, the whole thing is idiotic. Abyssinia was an exonym. Like Germany/Deutschland, Persia/Iran, Nippon/Japan etc. For the non-idiots who are interested 👇 nemozen.semret.org/2021/11/how-ol…

Abyssinia was formally recognized internationally as Ethiopia in 1945, when the country joined the newly founded United Nations under that name. It had earlier been admitted to the League of Nations in 1923 as Abyssinia, and the name Ethiopia was adopted domestically in 1931

The day Abyssinia officially became Ethiopia, 1945

@jyn_urso 4/20? auspicious date. good luck!

My PhD defense will be a talk about my research on Bitcoin mining load flexibility and related energy modeling. Please attend! Date: April 20th @ 1PM ET Where: Georgia Tech, Sustainable Education Building 122 or online at shorturl.at/slOVK.

@KalKassa @DSBatten @BitcoinBirr Sure, let us know.

@nemozen @DSBatten That’s a great article Dr. Nemo I’ve shared it a few times @BitcoinBirr Would you (or someone from your team) like to speak at the next summit in Addis Ababa?

Preach @DSBatten !

@KalKassa @DSBatten Just noticed on the Al Jazeera video you said cost of mining one BTC in 🇪🇹 is $20k in sept 2025. Real cost is ~$80k, $40k in energy and $40k in hardware and infrastructure. This kind of stuff contributed to the backlash we're trying to survive. nemozen.semret.org/2025/02/on-rea…

@nemozen @DSBatten

@mnsrealx @DSBatten If planned correctly, Bitcoin mining can move. There is a long way to go to 100GW and a lot of stranded energy along the way. Bitcoin mining accelerates the process. Big picture 👇 qrb-labs.com/Electricity%20…

@nemozen @DSBatten Great! but my question is what would be the fate of those mining investments after the full transmission lines have been laid out? EEP have already paused all new mining licences & is saying it plans to gradually phase them out Wouldn't that be bad & unprofitable for the miners?

@bacha_debela @DSBatten And selling to neighboring countries is very good for profitability and strategic regional integration. But just like domestic consumption, it requires a lot of infrastructure which takes years. Selling to Bitcoin accelerates that.

@bacha_debela @DSBatten So far Bitcoin miners have invested about $0.5B to $1B in Ethiopia. The equivalent in AI would be about $10B. There are additional legal and business model challenges too 👇 nemozen.semret.org/2025/01/datace… So yes it would be nice. Until then Bitcoin is here generating $300M/yr right now

@bacha_debela @DSBatten x.com/i/status/19548…

@bacha_debela @DSBatten AI data centers and exporting to neighboring countries are both good. But require a lot more capital and time. The advantage of Bitcoin mining is that it can buy the energy that no one else can use yet.

We now have official EEP data that shows Bitcoin mining has nearly doubled Ethiopia’s annual net transmission grid expansion rate Even more importantly, it has catalyzed an unprecedented level of new construction activity never before reported by EEP at this scale. Consider this context: Delivery of power to rural Africa, alongside combatting youth unemployment is one of the two biggest political changes in sub-Saharan Africa. Bitcoin mining has just demonstrated it can be a viable solution for one of them Let's dig in. Ethiopia made $220 million from Bitcoin mining in 2024/25 which is expecting to increase to $312 million this year (source: capitalethiopia.com/2025/11/02/eep… This electricity would otherwise have been wasted Why? Although Ethiopia has the capacity to generate 6 Gigawatts from the new dam, Ethiopian Electric Power (EEP) hasn't yet built the transmission lines to supply all that electricity generated. So, in the meantime the dam authorities sell electricity to Bitcoin mining companies. These electricity sales to Bitcoin miners were 67% of EEP's total Foreign Exchange revenue last year, vastly improving profitability. source: birrmetrics.com/ethiopia-elect… What do they do with that unexpected extra profit? EEP has stated repeatedly that the revenue from Bitcoin mining is used to support "infrastructure expansion" and "rural electrification" source: eep.com.et/?article=ethio… News channel Aljazeera recently confirmed "Ethiopia doesn't yet have the distribution network to take electricity to 1/2 the population...The idea is the fees paid by the Bitcoin miners will go towards funding the expansion of the grid." source: youtube.com/watch?v=mqie7b… Significantly, EEP's own data shows revenue from Bitcoin mining supported EEP's 2024/25 fiscal year * 28,571 km new power lines built * 8,700 substation bays installed Source: birrmetrics.com/ethiopia-elect… Bitcoin mining revenue has already almost doubled EEP's rate of energized network buildout from ~358 km/year average to +662 km last year. But more important is what is in the imminent pipeline: the 28,571 km of new power lines is larger than the entire size of their grid! source: eep.com.et/wp-content/upl… Let's be clear, we cannot say that "Ethiopia build more than their whole grid in a year" because not all of that new capacity has been fully energized yet, so that would be an apples-for-oranges comparison. But it is still an unprecedented rate of new construction. The good news is that the bulk of this infrastructure constructed but not yet fully energized is not “waiting years”, it is in active commissioning right now and is expected to come online progressively over the next 12–18 months. Source: Birr Metrics (EEP’s 2025/26 budget announcement) birrmetrics.com/electric-power… When that new network is fully energized, the increase in the speed of energized network buildout will not be 2x. It will be substantially higher, potentially more than 10-20x the historical average as the backlog comes online. Read that last sentence again. A forecast 10-20x faster buildout of Ethiopia's electrical grid. Rural electrification of Sub-Saharan Africa is a key strategic focus for over 20 global institutions and development banks, including the UN, World Bank, IRENA, African Development Bank, and Rockefeller Foundation. It is even explicitly one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 7), where Target 7.1 calls for “universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services by 2030.” Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 85% of the world’s people still without electricity (mostly in rural areas), making this one of the biggest global priorities. How Ethiopia is achieving this should be one of the biggest stories at the UN right now. Far from “taking renewable power away” from people, Bitcoin mining’s use of otherwise wasted renewable energy is catalyzing the accelerated delivery of electricity to rural Africa. Bitcoin mining has created a pragmatic solution to an issue that has plagued powerful global institutions for decades. If you are still gaslighting Bitcoin mining in 2026 (based on early studies, now been widely debunked), you are no longer just uninformed. You are perpetuating harmful myths that slows down power delivery to people living without electricity.

@arctotherium42 It's not just the search ranking, they actually remove pages from the index x.com/i/status/19705…

You might say "it's OK, it's the Internet, even if you're kicked off the major platforms you can make your own website/forum and people can find you"... except Google also changed their search algorithm to avoid non-mainstream sites and sources. x.com/arctotherium42…

Master thread on the 2015-2022 closure of the Internet, the process by which every major Internet platform went from broadly open with a few basic guidelines to strict narrative enforcement, often with the collaboration of govts and outsourcing moderation power to NGOs.

@brave @googlesearchc yup x.com/i/status/20373…

After I tweeted this, for a brief period a few pages got indexed. Now it's completely gone again. By contrast, @brave can find them. @googlesearchc please re-index nemozen.semret.org. Search console is stuck on "crawled not indexed".

Dear @Google @googlesearchc , now that free speech is cool again, can you please put my blog back in the search index? It was removed after a post criticizing Biden administration foreign policy @bing for comparison:

@RunwithBitcoin Anyway, good luck with the book. Looking forward to getting my copy ;)

@RunwithBitcoin Ofc, your underlying point is valid, in terms of what I would consider the "real" market value (which is somewhere between the two curves, as the black market has an illegality premium), the ETB has been losing about 15-16% of its value relative to USD per year.

50 days left until the All or Nothing Campaign on Geyser ends! Today we were working on the Ethiopian Chapter. In 2022, $1= 52 ETB, today it's at 137. The chapter talks a bit about #bitcoin , food, coffee and a traveler who asked me if I had traded my freedom for an idea.