Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
I'm not sure what the point of a "strategic crypto reserve" is, though. With oil or a commodity like that, it makes sense because you have those things in case you need them for a particular use. What would the crypto equivalent be for the province?
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That's a very good question, and one that I am not yet decided on.
My sense, however, is that there is a connection between the desire for sovereignty and holding a crypto reserve. One that exists on an individual level, all the way up to the nation state (i.e. El Salvador).
When you've got a separatist undercurrent in our province, and a Premier willing to play to it, there is a non-zero chance that this gets seriously examined on the point of being able to tell Ottawa to F-off ALONE.
The less conspiracy addled point to make is that our gas trades at a severe discount to global best pricing. There are days we cannot give it away without paying someone to take it (wtf). Instead of bashing our heads in trying to get LNG to Kitimat, or KXL to Nebraska built, and getting nowhere, you build a massive data centre and consume the stuff right here, right now.
You end up giving a downtrodden but deeply entrenched and politically influential industry segment work (with subsequent taxation, local velocitization of currency, etc). You get to convert the discounted value of a GJ of Natural Gas into a higher value asset on an energy equivalent basis that is MUCH easier to stake/lever or liquidated and trade.
Pure speculation and spitballing here.
EDIT:
Ran some napkin math.
At current difficulty, 1 BTC takes an average of 266,000kWh to mine, equivalent to ~958 GJ.
Let's say Enmax Shepard has 60% thermal efficiency, you'd need about 1,600 GJ thermal from methane at standard conditions.
AECO spot price is about 1.59 USD/GJ, so you'd pay about 2,500 USD to mine 1 BTC. That 1 BTC trades for 98,255 USD... a 38x uplift in value on an energy equivalency basis.
So if you apply some of this BS math to reported resource estimates, it gets more curious.
Alberta's 2023 Natural Gas Stats fact sheet reports an estimated 1.373 trillion cubic feet of natural gas endowment. This is approximately 1,450 Billion thermal GJ.
Spot price as a gas commodity values that at ~2.3 Trillion USD... and if we could wave a wand to convert all of it to BTC without collapsing crypto or energy markets... that same heat potential would have a value of
89 Trillion USD!