Major Thai telecom operator steps into bitcoin mining

Thailand-based mobile operator Jasmine Telecom Systems (JTS) announced last week its Bitcoin mining plans to become the largest miner in Southeast Asia by 2024.  

The Thai telco, which is a subsidiary of telecom operator Jasmine International (JAS), aims to install 500 bitcoin mining machines at its Jastel Data Center during the third quarter of this year. 

This step is considered rare, especially that several telcos are primarily interested in blockchain, yet few are concerned about cryptocurrency. 

“Now is a good time for JTS to invest in bitcoin mining, given its widespread adoption and the incident in China that caused the hash rate to drop to an eight-month low,” said Dusit Srisangaoran president of JTS.  

By the year 2022, the company will look to scale its mining operation ten-fold, installing a further 5,000 machines in partnership with the Jastrel Network at industrial locations around Thailand. 

After this stage, JTS will bring 50,000 machines online, scaling its operation 100-fold before the next bitcoin halving, that occurs almost every four years, or once every 210,000 blocks, and is next scheduled for 2024. 

JTS declared that it would bring “about 5 exahashes of power onto the network, which, even by the next halving’s standards, would be an impressive percentage of global mining power, and would make JTS the largest bitcoin mining operation in Southeast Asia.” 

This will lead the company to mine about 16,000 bitcoin per year. 

JTS revealed it plans to have a mining capacity of more than 5 exahash per second, or 5 percent of the total global mining capacity, making it the largest Bitcoin mining farm in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN. 

It’s worth mentioning that ASEAN include ten countries Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.