Recently, I’ve been paying attention to an interesting Bitcoin news topic—a small country beneath the Himalayas has actually staked its national destiny on crypto mining.

This is Bhutan. Yes, the Buddhist country famous for its “Gross National Happiness,” that bans plastic bags, and only introduced the internet in 1999.

Over the past half year, there’s been a very interesting contrast in the crypto market: while governments around the world are hoarding Bitcoin, Bhutan has been quietly reducing its holdings. Falling from a peak of 13,000 Bitcoins to now just over 4,000, the story behind this is far more complicated than the surface numbers.

Why does Bhutan mine Bitcoin? To put it simply, this country holds a trump card—hydropower. Located in the southern foothills of the Himalayas, with many rivers and a large elevation drop, Bhutan’s theoretical hydropower potential is as high as 30,000 to 40,000 megawatts. But most of this electricity is tied up in agreements with India, so it can only be sold to neighboring countries at low prices in exchange for rupees that can circulate only within South Asia. It’s like holding a gold mine but being unable to get access to US dollars—long trapped by the “Rupee blockade.”

The turning point came in 2019. Ujjwal Deep Dahal, CEO of Bhutan’s sovereign wealth fund DHI—an electrical engineer who was trained at MIT—quickly seized an opportunity: using surplus hydropower that goes unused during summer to mine Bitcoin. The logic is very clear: cheap electricity + natural cooling conditions + an environmental philosophy fit perfectly, turning “wasted power” into “digital gold” and breaking through the foreign-exchange predicament.

In June 2023, the Bhutanese government used $72 million in Bitcoin reserves to give all civil servants a 50% salary increase. By December 2025, an even bolder move followed—injecting the entire hoard of up to 10,000 Bitcoins (at that time valued at about $1 billion) into a massive special-zone project called “Ghaleep Zen Mind City,” still in the blueprint stage.

How crazy is this? The estimated investment size for this special zone is $100 billion, while Bhutan’s entire GDP is only $3.4 billion. In other words, this investment is 30 times Bhutan’s annual GDP. Even more outrageous is that, according to a World Bank report, in 2022 Bhutan spent an amount equivalent to 9% of GDP just to import crypto mining equipment. A country putting out nearly one-tenth of its GDP to bet on Bitcoin—this could be the craziest gamble in human history.

What’s the cost? Foreign-exchange reserves fell from $1.27 billion in 2021 to just over $500 million. The current account deficit once surged as high as 34.3% of GDP. Bhutan took a walk right up to the gates of death.

Luckily, as Bitcoin’s price hit a new all-time high (now up to more than $76,000), Bhutan made it through the most dangerous period. According to the IMF’s latest report, Bhutan’s foreign-exchange reserves have increased significantly, and the deficit is expected to narrow sharply from 34.3% to 8.62%. That most painful “buying mining machines” period is finally over.

But there’s a hard-hitting question here: the country’s gamble won—what about ordinary Bhutanese people’s lives?

Youth unemployment fell from 28.6% in 2022 to 18% in 2025, which looks like an improvement. But the reality is that about 66,000 Bhutanese people (8% of the total population) live abroad, the vast majority in Australia. By comparison, globally only 3.6% of people live outside their birth country. For a small nation with a population of 800,000, this outflow rate is nearly twice the global average.

Unemployed Bhutanese youth can’t find jobs at home, so they go to Australia and Canada to make a living. In public remarks, the Prime Minister lamented: “We cannot ask civil servants not to resign, and we cannot stop people from leaving.”

The mining sites are highly automated, and the special zone is for serving foreign elites. No matter how hot the Bitcoin news gets, it can’t change a basic fact—Bhutan has jumped directly from an agricultural society to a financial one, missing the manufacturing and service industries that could absorb large numbers of jobs in between.

So this country is soaring in the crypto space, but its people are still struggling and being displaced in real life. The fate of the country and the fate of the people—sometimes they simply don’t move in sync.