The annual spring rains bring many changes to southwestern China’s Sichuan province. Downpours transform the mottled landscape into lush emerald, while azaleas bloom and migrating cranes and storks begin the long journey back north. The rainfall also brings trucks stacked with computers to hydropower dams, where entrepreneurs can tap cheap electricity for mining bitcoin—the arcane process that accumulates the cryptocurrency using huge amounts of computing power to solve equations.
