Hotmine CEO Oles Slobodenyuk couldn’t have picked a better place to pitch his product: a bitcoin mining rig that doubles as a home heating appliance. Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia, is famously cold in the winter, when subzero temperatures are the norm. So a few weeks ago, when Slobodenyuk took the stage at the Baikal Blockchain and Crypto Forum with one of Hotmine’s little white boxes in tow, he opened with a joke about the warm August weather. “I was told that in Irkutsk, the average temperature of the air is minus 2 degrees Celsius, so I brought a radiator with me,” he said. Eventually, Slobodenyuk told the crowd, ... (full story)