For much of the past decade, the energy-intensive mining infrastructure that made bitcoin possible resided deep inside China’s hinterlands, close to cheap if heavily polluting sources of energy, where millions of bitcoin mining machines would crank out trillions in computations every second to solve the mathematical problems that power the Proof of Work token, and which generate generous rewards for the miners. All of this changed this year, however, when the double whammy of an ESG-inspired blowback against the miners’ high electricity consumption…