Field Notes Week 168/520: Bhutan’s successful wager on Bitcoin and economic sovereignty
These notes are shaped by what I’m seeing, building, and discussing as our physical and digital lives continue to converge.
Welcome to this week’s Field Notes, a 10-year project of mine documenting humankind’s digital transition from the field. These notes are shaped by what I’m seeing, building, and discussing as our physical and digital lives continue to converge.
- Ryan
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News is surface-level. Signals live underneath. This section captures developments that hint at deeper shifts in how digital systems are being built, governed, and adopted — often before they’re obvious in the mainstream narrative.
Bhutan’s Bitcoin reserves, three years on
We are now roughly three years into Bhutan’s decision to mine Bitcoin using surplus hydropower and accumulate it as a strategic reserve asset. At the time, the country faced acute external pressure: tourism, its second-largest export earner, had collapsed during the pandemic, foreign currency reserves had reportedly fallen toward critical levels, and there were concerns about balance-of-payments strain.
Rather than immediately entering a conventional IMF restructuring pathway, Bhutan expanded its state-linked Bitcoin mining operations through Druk Holding and Investments, leveraging renewable hydropower capacity. Subsequent reporting in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera, and Forbes has noted that Bhutan drew on Bitcoin holdings during periods of foreign currency stress, including allocating approximately US$72 million in 2023 to fund a significant civil service salary increase.
Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay has publicly stated that Bitcoin reserves have supported fiscal stability and contributed to financing healthcare and environmental initiatives. The country’s economy is small, around US$3.5 billion in GDP, so reserve flexibility can have outsized macro impact.
The signal here is not that Bitcoin “solves” macroeconomics, nor that volatility disappears. It’s that a sovereign with surplus renewable energy treated mining as a balance sheet strategy rather than a speculative trade. The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly warned that widespread crypto adoption can heighten macro instability, weaken monetary transmission, and introduce fiscal risk. Bhutan’s experience complicates that narrative, at least in this specific configuration: state-controlled mining, renewable input energy, and opportunistic reserve deployment.
To me this is interesting as it raises a structural question: when small states experiment at the edge of the monetary system, are institutions reacting to volatility risk in general, or to a loss of policy centrality in particular?
Central banks revisit gold as a reserve anchor
Recent commentary from emerging market central banks suggests a renewed emphasis on gold accumulation amid ongoing currency volatility and geopolitical fragmentation. Several monetary authorities have publicly discussed maintaining or increasing gold allocations as part of broader reserve diversification strategies, particularly where exposure to foreign currency assets carries political or sanctions-related risk.
What stands out is not the headline volume of purchases, but the framing. Gold is increasingly described as a neutral reserve asset — outside the direct policy influence of any single sovereign issuer. In a period marked by sanctions regimes, capital controls, and currency management tensions, reserve composition becomes a quiet expression of strategic alignment.
The signal here is structural. Decisions about reserve assets shape settlement preferences and long-term trust assumptions in the global monetary system. While digital settlement technologies evolve, the underlying question of what anchors value remains contested. Gold’s reassertion in official discourse suggests that physical scarcity and political neutrality still carry weight in a fragmented landscape.
I’ll be watching carefully, reserve choices tend to reflect how institutions assess risk long before those assessments are visible in markets.
What it is
A technical conversation with Daniel Batten on methane, landfill gas, and the economics of Bitcoin mining as a demand sink for vented emissions.
What stood out
The distinction between vented gas and flared gas is more material than most coverage suggests. Vented methane enters the atmosphere unburned. Flared methane converts to CO₂, which is less potent over shorter timeframes. The argument here is not that mining is clean, but that combusting otherwise vented methane to generate electricity meaningfully reduces warming impact.
The economics are equally direct. In low hashprice environments, miners migrate toward energy with no competing buyer. Landfills and remote wellheads fit that description. Compute becomes a portable load that can monetise energy that would otherwise be wasted.
Why it lingers
This reframes Bitcoin mining less as a consumer of power and more as a buyer of last resort. In that framing, mining follows inefficiency. It does not create stranded energy. It arbitrages it.
If even a fraction of global landfill methane were captured and combusted through on-site generation, the emissions profile of the network shifts. The claim is ambitious. The mechanism is simple. Methane is converted. Heat is produced. Hashes are computed.
The true challenge is whether coordination, regulation, and capital can move as quickly as the thesis requires.
Digital assets now sit less as an idea and more as infrastructure in progress. As physical and digital life continue to converge, money and assets are doing the same. What was once framed as “crypto” is increasingly showing up as rails, balance sheets, and policy conversations.
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drive the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
This section captures developments at the edge of digital systems. New interfaces, tools, and capabilities that feel early, unfinished, or slightly ahead of their moment. I’m less interested in what’s impressive today and more interested in what might quietly reshape how people work, coordinate, and interact over time.
Recent reporting and industry analysis continue to highlight how Bitcoin mining is increasingly co-located with renewable energy sites, particularly where power is stranded in time or space. Hydroelectric oversupply during wet seasons, wind farms curtailed at night, and remote solar projects far from demand centres are being paired with modular mining operations that can switch on and off as grid conditions change.
The signal is not about speculation. It is about load flexibility. Renewable generation often produces power when demand is low or transmission is constrained. Traditionally, that excess is curtailed or wasted. Bitcoin mining introduces a buyer of last resort that is location-agnostic and time-flexible, converting otherwise idle electrons into a globally liquid asset.
Over the next decade, this reframes parts of the energy transition. Flexible computational load becomes a grid-balancing tool rather than a nuisance demand spike. The second-order effect is structural. Developers may finance marginal renewable projects with the assumption of a baseline offtaker in the form of mining, altering project economics in remote regions. Whether this strengthens grids or distorts incentives depends less on ideology and more on how these operations integrate with local energy markets and policy design.
“Clarity emerges at the edges, not the centre.”
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand is best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a publication that sat at the intersection of technology, ecology, and counterculture in the late 1960s. He later founded the Long Now Foundation, an institution dedicated to long-term thinking. Across decades of work, Brand returned to the same instinct: look to the margins. Innovation rarely begins inside established centres of power. It begins with builders, hobbyists, frontier communities, and unusual constraints.
The centre optimises. The edges experiment. Institutions protect coherence; the margins tolerate ambiguity. When something new is forming, it is usually clearer at the periphery, where the incentives are less settled and the rules less fixed. From the field, this is where early signals tend to cluster. Not yet dominant. Not yet formal. But directionally important.
