Two weeks after electricity prices rose 15% in Turkey, a new professional mining equipment store opened on July 13 in Istanbul – the country’s business hub.

Starting a mining equipment business in a country where electricity is expensive doesn’t seem intuitive. But the Phoenix Store, Bitmain’s sales partner in the Middle East, had calculated before opening its second store in the region. Phil Harvey, Phoenix CEO, stated that their main goal with the Istanbul business is to educate the Turkish crypto-friendly community about crypto mining. Customers can then purchase mining equipment and hosting services that operate in Canada, the United States, or Russia. Mining in Turkey is just not feasible.

“It’s like you want to invest in gold mines,” he said, “you can come here and invest in a gold mine, but it won’t be in the back yard. It will be outside. “

Cointelegraph Turkey sat down with Phil Harvey after his presentation to learn more about the crypto mining landscape following China’s mining raid.

“China needs to maintain the current rate of growth for domestic projects,” Harvey began, describing the tough process. The country needs to improve several areas, such as reducing its carbon footprint, in order to receive funding from the IMF or the World Bank:

“The industry that is easiest to lower prices overnight is the gray area industry. About 68,000 gigawatts of electricity were immediately removed from China by simply saying no to bitcoin mining. “

That’s a significant source of income, but even that pales in comparison to the amount of money the IMF or World Bank is investing in China on projects like the Road Initiative. “So it was an easy decision for China to get rid of these miners and reduce their carbon footprint,” added Harvey.

While some miners have announced plans to move to cold climates like Canada, Harvey believes half of what is lost to China’s crackdown will never come back online:

“Because these are old machines that have been in the warehouse for years and are only 50 percent manufactured and still work. But now it makes no economic sense to take these things off and move them around. “

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The maximum value of this machine could be anywhere from $ 150 to $ 200, and it would take roughly the same amount of money to move. “There’s no point,” he said, “that’s why I’m saying half of what we lost online.”

Harvey expects regions like Russia and Kazakhstan to increase their market share in the mining scene by adding new machines to the network, but he has no plans to open new stores in those countries next year. After Dubai and Istanbul, Phoenix only wants to open one store in London. “We’re not going to expand into stores outside of these three locations,” he said.