We've known about El Salvador šøš» mining and buying bitcoin for some years. They've been very open about it, and made Bitcoin legal tender to encourage citizens to use it.
According to the following article from Reuters, they mined 474 bitcoins since 2021, using geothermal energy generated by the country's Tecapa volcano - in other words, they turned free energy into money. The country says it has 5,750 bitcoins, most of them purchased
Meanwhile the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan š§š¹ started mining bitcoin in 2020 when tourism collapsed due to covid. They have surplus hydro-electric power thanks to the mountain rivers. They are believed to have over 13,000 bitcoins, and at current prices that equates to 30% of their GDP. From time to time they sell coins to pay for government services (education, healthcare etc). Two weeks ago when bitcoin passed $71,000, they transfered some coins to Binance to raise $66 million.
On Feb 15th 2024, the African country of Eithiopia šŖš¹ signed a memorandum of understanding with West Data Group's Center Service PLC of Hong Kong to commence mining bitcoin.
Eithiopia has cheap hydro energy (the source of the Blue Nile is in Eithiopia), and this has already attracted many private mining companies in the last few years. The Eithiopian government has obviously decided to get in on the action.
The Middle Eastern group of Emirates collectively known as United Arab Emirates š¦šŖ are famous for selling Liquified Natural Gas, plus the tourist and financial centre of Dubai. But in their quest for diversification, their Digital Asset arm has deals with several bitcoin mining operations which mine using cheap natural gas. They are secretive about how many coins they have, but the Hashrate Index has detected 400 megawatts of mining in UAE. That equates to 4% of the global hashrate.
Russia š·šŗ is suspected of mining bitcoin too. When the Nordstream pipeline, which supplied most of continental Europe with natural gas, was blown up, initially the Russians were forced to flare the gas coming out of the wells. Gas wells can't be switched off, and there is no pipeline to China yet. Russia then liquefied some of this gas to sell to China by sea. But some people suspect they are using surplus natural gas to mine bitcoin.
If they sell Liquefied Natural Gas to China, they are paid in yuan or Chinese goods. But if they mine bitcoin, they can sell it through brokers in Hong Kong for dollars, and use those dollars to get round sanctions to buy western tech via third parties.
I suspect the reason Bitcoin's price hasn't moved much for months despite record inflows into American ETFs, is that there has been sustained selling by the Russians out of necessity as the only way to obtain dollars.