内容摘要：In 2018 Muzarabani played for Derbyshire's second XI and, in the next week, impressed enough in Northamptonshire's reserves to be taken on.

In 2018 Muzarabani played for Derbyshire's second XI and, in the next week, impressed enough in Northamptonshire's reserves to be taken on.

But not all are convinced. "They've been a good corporate neighbour," says Dresden's recently elected mayor, Brian Flynn, about the mine. "I'm pro-business, whether it be Greenidge or local agriculture… I think it's important to have a mix of both industry and recreation."Legal battles like the one in Seneca Lake are bringing home the realities of an industry that at first glance might seem contained to banks of data servers, removed from the real world.

Bitcoin "miners" – who are not actually extracting anything from the earth – verify transactions by solving extremely difficult cryptographic problems that require powerful computers. In return, they are rewarded with Bitcoin.As the price of Bitcoin has shot up to its current value of around $100,000 (£75,000), ever-increasing amounts of computing power have been needed to win crypto rewards, shutting out smaller miners in favour of large collectives and companies.As well as the hum, mining's energy use has environmental impacts. A Harvard study published in March in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature Communications found that Bitcoin mining exposes millions of Americans to harmful air pollution each year - and that 34 Bitcoin mines consumed a third more electricity than the city of LA. (There was some pushback from the crypto industry to the study, which was called The environmental burden of the United States' Bitcoin mining boom.)

According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, mining globally uses approximately 0.7% of global electricity consumption.That has a knock-on effect on local energy prices, which is also provoking a backlash in some areas.

In 2017, Bitcoin miners flooded into Plattsburgh, New York – a city of about 20,000 people a couple of hours to the north of Dresden – because of cheap hydroelectricity rates. "We were getting Bitcoin applications from operators all around the world," says the city's mayor at the time, Colin Read.

Yet they used so much power that electricity rates shot up. Within a year, some residents were paying up to 40% more during winter months, Read says.In the classic tradition of UK-EU negotiations, though, there is heavy briefing from sources on both sides that it's "going to the wire". Will there be a deal to allow

in each other's countries? Sir Keir Starmer has insisted that such a scheme would not amount to a return to pre-Brexit freedom of movement, and that itin which young people would be able to move abroad for up to two years (the EU has been pushing for stays as long as four years to be allowed).

As I write I'm told only an "agreement in principle", not the real final deal, will be ready for Monday.Will the French (who sources are referring to when they talk diplomatically about "coastal states") relent on