"The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of down time and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power...."

"Appalachia, with its cheap electricity from coal, natural gas and hydro, was already attractive to bitcoin miners when China, which dominated world production, cracked down on such operations last summer, worried about the volatility of digital currencies.... [R]esidents in areas that initially welcomed crypto mining are now experiencing buyer’s remorse.... Craig Ponder, pastor at the New Salem Baptist Church... compared the noise to the jet engines he heard while serving in the military. He said that the noise can make it difficult for congregants to chat with each other in the parking lot after services.... 'In a rural environment, you have a very low ambient noise level anyway, so you walk outside and a creek is gurgling, birds are chirping, but there is not a lot of man-made noise. Once you take some of these bitcoin mining facilities, the noise carries, there is nothing to hide it or mask it,' [said a sound mitigation expert].... 'This is an industry that is on fire now, and a lot of people may not have known the noise the machines make; there are a lot of inexperienced people coming into the industry, and they are causing issues,' said [John Warren, the chief executive of GEM Mining, which owns 32,000 bitcoin miners]."

From "An Appalachian town was told a bitcoin mine would bring an economic boom. It got noise pollution and an eyesore. Supporters of the crypto plant promised an expanded tax base and job creation. What residents say they got was the constant din from massive computers and equally massive cooling fans" (WaPo).

This article is mainly about how noisy the "mine" is. There's a bit about how bad it looks — "like a German POW camp," according to a commissioner who regrets voting for it. I don't know why an article that's so negative about a business doesn't mention climate change. I mean, I can easily find other articles on this subject, but isn't global warming routinely shoehorned into news articles? It's strange to see it bypassed here. Did I miss a reference? 

Anyway, the noise problem is very sad, and the climate change issue is well represented in the comments section over there. Example: "And the environmental costs are astounding. I can't believe we're getting into this kind of thing when we're trying to cut back our environmental footprint. Crypto is a climate change villain, without offering anything back."