Imagine your house is falling apart. Not a pretty picture. Just imagine your house is falling apart. No water, no electricity. The kitchen is empty. Your family is barely scraping by. And yet you decide to splurge on what? A high-tech Bitcoin mining center. Sounds ridiculous, right?
Well, welcome to Pakistan in 2025. A country where the lights are out, the fields are dry, the economy is gasping for air. Yet, the government wants a strategic Bitcoin reserve. And it has some grand plans.
Islamabad says it will allocate 2,000 megawatts of electricity for this plant. 2,000 megawws. That’s enough electricity to power a midsize city. In fact, it is around 55% of Lahore’s electricity demand. Yet Pakistan wants it for bitcoins. The plan on paper is to use surplus electricity. But here’s a problem with that. There is no surplus. There is a massive shortfall. Pakistan is seriously short of power. So much so that there are daily power cuts and chronic shortages. The services are unreliable. The costs are very high and this disrupts the everyday life of citizens. Instead of fixing that, Pakistan wants to make it worse by diverting power to mine bitcoins. The moon the move is being marketed as a moonshot. Islamabad’s grand leap into the future. That is the promise. But it’s more like a nose dive into another mess. And for a change, the IMF agrees. That’s the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan’s bailout buddy, the one that turns a blind eye to Pakistani terrorism. But it is raising questions about their Bitcoin plan.
Apparently, the IMF wants clarity. And you don’t have to be an expert to see how skewed this is. A state struggling to power its hospitals is pledging electricity to digital tokens. And that’s only half the problem, the power crisis. The other half is this. Pakistan is also running out of water.
You see, mining one bitcoin takes around 16,000 L of water. 16,000 L for one Bitcoin. That’s enough to fill a small swimming pool. And Pakistan doesn’t have that kind of water to spare because look at the state of their rivers. Parts of the Chinab are drying up. Two of Pakistan’s dams are running low and this is according to Islamabad. Water in the Indus River system is down by 10%.
This is after India suspended the Indis waters treaty. A treaty that has survived four wars and many terror attacks. But not anymore. The Pelgam attack was the last straw. India pulled the plug and now Pakistan is flying blind in a water crisis. The timing could not have been worse. It is kharif season in Pakistan’s Punjab. That means sewing season for summer crops. Farmers are praying for a good monsoon, but that’s still a month away. So this water shortage is catastrophic. It is great to have big dreams. But dreams built on delusion, that’s a blueprint for collapse.
Pakistan does not have the basics. Not enough electricity to power its homes. Not enough water to grow its food. Not enough money to pay its debt. Yet it wants Bitcoin riches in any functioning state. This would spark outrage. Heads would roll. Such plans would be put under scrutiny and scrapped. But Pakistan is not being run like a country anymore. It is being run like a fever dream.
The leadership is drunk on the future and blind to the present. They’re begging for loans while hoping to become the next crypto capital. They say Bitcoin will save the economy. But how do you power a blockchain when the grid is collapsing? So here’s some hard truth for Islamabad. You cannot eat Bitcoin. You cannot irrigate fields with blockchain. You cannot attract global investors while you harbor terrorists. You have to fix the basics first. You cannot mine your way out of this misery.
big dreams. But dreams built on delusion, that’s a blueprint for collapse. Pakistan does not have the basics. Not enough electricity to power its homes. Not enough water to grow its food. Not enough money to pay its debt. Yet it wants Bitcoin riches in any functioning state. This would spark outrage. Heads would roll. Such plans would be put under scrutiny and scrapped. But Pakistan is not being run like a country anymore. It is being run like a fever dream. The leadership is drunk on the future and blind to the present. They’re begging for loans while hoping to become the next crypto capital.
They say Bitcoin will save the economy. But how do you power a blockchain when the grid is collapsing? So here’s some hard truth for Islamabad. You cannot eat Bitcoin. You cannot irrigate fields with blockchain. You cannot attract global investors while you harbor terrorists. You have to fix the basics first. You cannot mine your way out of this misery.
