What a ride

EDITORIAL

Talk about a rollercoaster ride that puts Six Flags to shame. In about five days we’ve gone from “Bitmain is abandoning its Rockdale project” to “they’re hooking their supercomputers up in about a month and will be mining two months after that.”

So what should we make of it all?

Probably that there’s no use getting too high or too low, especially when there are circumstances over which we have no control.

Bitmain is scaling back its plans. It probably won’t employ those 400 employees we were all looking forward to last July. Much of that is due to engineering challenges in hooking up many-decades-old power substations to devices so complex our grandchildren don’t fully understand them yet. (But they will).

Of course, the middle of last week it looked like a possibility Bitmain would be hiring zero. “Something” is a lot better than zero.

Where do we stand after the ride?

Bitmain still plans to coax bitcoins, and other forms of cryptocurrency, out of cyberspace in rooms that were built to coax aluminum out of bauxite.

“Coax” is not the right word for what happened at Alcoa for 56 years, of course. Just ask any former potroom employee. And there are lots of them about.

Rockdale-area residents are still counting on Bitmain to fill some of the void left by the twin departures of aluminum smelting and power generation, two industries upon which this area has relied since the Truman Administration.

For those 56 years we all followed the ups and downs of Alcoa and whatever power generation was named at the moment. We may not understand bitcoins and blockchains but we can understand things like metal markets and power prices.

And layoffs. Rockdale has lots of experience with those, unfortunately.

So when Bitmain announced large layoffs earlier this month it was understandable there would be some concern over how that affected its local plans.

Then some comments by someone who turned out to be a former Bitmain executive left the impression that the company wasn’t going to boot up its Rockdale project at all.

When paired with an announcement last fall that Bitmain was pausing its work at Rockdale for 45 days, it wasn’t difficult to believe the project was dead in the water.

The welcome accurate picture from Bitman’s project manager on the ground in Rockdale is this week’s page 1A story.

He says there never was a 45-day work stoppage here, that repurposing of the former potlines continued, that bitmining computers are moving in next month and actual mining is on the horizon.

Now, that rollercoaster just needs to keep going up.—M.B.