The buzz in Saint-André: An inside look at bitcoin mining in rural New Brunswick

Nestled between a junkyard and a cedar mill in the rural community of Saint-André is the spot where developers expect nearly one per cent of the world's bitcoin will be mined. 

For the last several months, the Vancouver-based company Hive Blockchain Technologies has been building four highly specialized warehouses that will host thousands of computers.

Those individual computers are known as "miners," and they run 24 hours a day to make their owners bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, a digital form of money that has risen in value and popularity around the globe in the last decade. Instead of a physical currency, bitcoin is strictly digital.

Bitcoin also operates without a central banking system. Instead, all bitcoin transactions are tallied on a digital ledger called the blockchain. 

Bitcoin mining operations like the one in Saint-Andre act as the bank for bitcoin, constantly tallying the worldwide transactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin mining operations are made up of hundreds, often thousands, of computers creating a decentralized banking network.

The reward for tallying those transactions is bitcoin. And the more computers a person or company dedicates to tallying those transactions, the more bitcoin is paid out.

That's why Hive has built bitcoin mines in Quebec, Sweden and Iceland, and is finishing construction in Saint-André.

Two of the buildings in Saint-André are complete, while technicians are now installing 100 metres of computers, stacked seven high, in a third.

Construction workers are heating the frozen ground and pouring the foundations of a fourth building, which Kilic expects will be completed in the first half of next year. 

Once completed, Kilic said, he expects the entire facility to mine about five bitcoin a day. 

Over the past year, a single bitcoin has been valued between $30,000 and $85,000 Cdn. 

Some people might assume such an operation would be more at home in Silicon Valley. Why build one in a northern New Brunswick community of fewer than 1,000 people? 

According to Kilic, the decision came down to four factors: a favourable tax rate, stable government, access to affordable electricity, and most important, the temperature.