An immense coal mine in Xinjiang flooded and shut down over the weekend of April 17-18. The blackout halted no less than one-third of all of Bitcoin's global computing power.

The Xinjiang accident highlights that Bitcoin is a creature of fossil fuels -- principally coal, the dirtiest of them all.

Overall, de Vries reckons that fossil fuels power around 70% of all Bitcoin mines worldwide, and that coal provides the vast majority of that share. "We now know for sure that one-third of all production runs on pure coal from a tiny place in China," he says. [...]

"The miners usually dislike renewables because they don't generate electricity all the time. They want to run 24 hours a day. [...] Green energy is a terrible match for Bitcoin," says de Vries. [...]

Miners are going to unusual places in search of the cheapest power that's also reliable -- and that's almost always fossil fuels. Since sanctions constrain Iran from exporting oil, Tehran is developing a new market inside the nation's borders by luring Bitcoin miners with super-low energy costs. By some reports, Iran now accounts for 8% of the world's Bitcoin production. Kentucky's rural coal fields are becoming a magnet for miners. Lawmakers in the Bluegrass State are proposing two sets of tax incentives: one for buying and upgrading existing power plants, and another break on electricity purchased from the grid, much of it produced from coal.

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