A bitcoin mine in Beaver County is hiring – no training required

In the shadow of a former steel mill, the sound of whirring computers is the sound of money.

The Midland Bitcoin mine is not your average mine.

“It’s digital currency mining,” said Mawson Enterprises COO Liam Wilson. “We’re using our computing power, as opposed to drilling into the ground and looking for oil or gas or what have you. We’re using our computing power to mine for Bitcoin.”

Metal hangers with triangular hoods on the side house hundreds of computers that solve algorithms.

“Basically, we provide our computing power, and by providing our computing power to a network, we are rewarded with Bitcoin,” Wilson said. “So that’s where I guess the term ‘mining’ comes from. If you dig in the ground and you hit oil, you’re rewarded in oil. We supply our computing power, so we’re rewarded in Bitcoin.”

Wilson explained cryptocurrency this way: “It’s basically you and I doing the transaction, as opposed to Chase Bank or a third party taking that transaction in the middle. It’s just you and I doing it. So the fees are very, very low .”

Mawson Infrastructure Group was born in Australia but is now headquartered in Midland to take advantage of something unique to the region: the Beaver Valley Power Station, a nuclear power plant.

Bitcoin mining requires more electricity than any other industry, according to Wilson.

“The US also has some fantastic power resources that we simply don’t have in Australia,” Wilson said. “And I guess the main reason we’re here in Midland is nuclear power.”

Wilson called nuclear power “fantastic.”

“It’s safe, it’s carbon-free. There’s not a lot of impact on the environment, and there’s an abundance of that, especially in Pennsylvania,” Wilson said.

Mawson, which is traded on the Nasdaq, is also developing a similar Bitcoin mine in Sharon, Mercer County. So far this year, Mawson has generated 1231 Bitcoin.

With this growth, the company wants to hire plant engineers, network engineers and maintenance technicians.

“I basically check all the uptime of all the devices on site,” said Dylan McKnight, describing his work as a Mawson network engineer. “I’ll make sure the network is healthy. If it’s not, nothing on the site will work, so I’ll check every single point of failure.”

Not only does Mawson hire locally, but Wilson also said they “don’t ask (applicants) for any training. They basically just need to come and have a positive attitude and we can teach them everything on the job.”

He called this “a big part of our ethos”.

The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, part of the Allegheny Conference on Economic Development, is working with companies like Mawson to see if it makes sense to locate in western Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh Regional Alliance President Mark Thomas said he believes “we will see more jobs like this because there is so much innovation happening in manufacturing that there is no existing workforce that is prepared for these types of jobs.”

As Thomas spoke, behind him was one of Pittsburgh’s past and present economic drivers: Coal.

Follow the Ohio River to Midland and you can see the future – industries like cryptocurrency.