Quartz published a great report on one of the biggest Bitcoin mining operations in the world. It is located in Inner Mongolia, PR China. People in the region moved from working in local coal mines, often in difficult and toxic surroundings, to computer mining. The sad thing is that they get paid in fiat money and not in crypto. The owners of the machines, however, get paid in Bitcoin. This basically means that the workers work for free, as the value of crypto is worth more than the wages they earn. The workers want to buy bitcoin but the value of bitcoin rises exponentially faster than their fiat wages. They will never be able to save enough to buy the currency they are mining. Even sadder, arguably, are the working conditions. Conditions only seem marginally better than those experienced in the original coal mines.
"The firms that use the park tend to be chemical plants that emit high levels of pollution and emissions, according to Bitmain. The local government which oversees the industrial park declined a request for comment for this story."
This kind of centralized exploitation was one of the motives for the original creation of crypto but is now being used against the ordinary people for which it was invented. Crypto currency needs to be rethought to address and challenge the fact that people with fiat money still own the means of production. They have therefore more power to accumulate new capital and exploit those without the means of production. How this can be resolved is difficult. Decentralised currencies, I think, are only part of the solution.
