Hello and welcome to Business Daily. I'm Edwin Lane and today we're on the trail of the people mining for Bitcoins on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Iceland.

Bear walls, wires hanging down, racks and racks of computer equipment.

Everything you need for mining and nothing that you do not.

Stacks and stacks of processing power.

Mining for virtual currencies has become big business.

What about the massive amounts of real-world energy it consumes?

Right now, they're already using upwards of 15 to 25% of our

power in the city on a given day. Not only do they use a credible amount of power, but there's

an awful lot of unintended consequences that have never been dealt with. The physical reality

of the cryptocurrency business. Here on Business Daily from the BBC.

Some people call it a revolution. Since Bitcoin was launched nearly 10 years ago,

cryptocurrencies have generated excitement and skepticism in equal measure. Some people say they're

the future of money.

Others say they're just a fad for speculators. But whatever you think, there are now hundreds

of rival cryptocurrencies out there with names like Ethereum, Dash and Ripple. And in the last

couple of years, many have seen their values rocket. A single Bitcoin is now worth about

$7,000 and a half thousand dollars compared with a few hundred dollars as recently as 2016.

And that's made the business of creating new bitcoins, or whatever currency, you're interested

in, ever more lucrative. The process of creating new units of a cryptocurrency

involves devoting massive amounts of computing power to solving complex algorithms.

It's called mining. It's supposed to make generating new bitcoins difficult and limit the supply.

But in the last few years, companies have been setting up vast Bitcoin mines,

...