The Bitcoin Beacon
A rule in force since Aug. 1 diverts a slice of every approved miner’s output into a state reserve — a country buying bitcoin by taxing the machines it powers.
Kazakhstan has stopped waiting for a national bitcoin reserve to fill itself by purchase. Since August 1, under Government Resolution No. 638, the country’s largest licensed miners have been required to hand over 10% of the digital assets they mine, every month, to a state-run fund — coins that flow to the National Bank’s investment arm and into what officials call a national strategic crypto reserve.
It is a quietly radical design. Most governments that want bitcoin on their books either buy it, seize it, or mine it themselves. Kazakhstan is doing none of those. It is taxing the hashrate it already hosts, in kind, and keeping the coins.
The rule targets scale, not hobbyists. To fall under the “strategic mining” regime, an operator must run a data center of at least 150 megawatts and deploy rigs each clearing 150 terahashes per second. Those that qualify get something valuable in a power-constrained country — regulated, priced electricity access — and in exchange transfer a tenth of their net mined output to the Astana Hub fund each month.
“Net” is doing real work in that sentence. The handover is calculated after electricity and transmission charges, including value-added tax, so the state takes its 10% of what is left once the miner’s energy bill is settled, not of the gross block reward. The legal scaffolding came first: President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed the enabling decree on July 7, and the resolution operationalized it three weeks later.
Here the story complicates. The reserve’s mandate is not confined to bitcoin. Its charter reaches crypto derivatives and equity stakes in crypto companies, making it closer to a diversified state investment vehicle than a sovereign bitcoin stack in the mold El Salvador markets. The coins come in as bitcoin; what the fund becomes is a portfolio.
That matters for anyone reading this as a nation-state endorsement of bitcoin-as-money. A government collecting bitcoin and then holding it as one line in a basket of crypto exposures is making a financial bet, not a monetary declaration. The digital-gold logic — scarce, neutral, held for decades — sits uneasily beside a fund permitted to trade derivatives.
Kazakhstan became a mining heavyweight almost by accident. When China expelled its miners in 2021, a large share of that hashrate crossed the border to Kazakh coal and gas power, briefly making the country one of the world’s top mining destinations. The honeymoon soured fast: winter power shortages, grid strain, and a crackdown on unregistered operations pushed the government to license, meter, and tax the industry rather than tolerate it.
Resolution 638 is the next turn of that screw. Instead of merely charging miners for power, the state now takes a cut of their product — converting a volatile, hard-to-value industry into a stream of hard assets on the central bank’s balance sheet. For a resource-exporting economy used to monetizing oil, gas, and uranium, bitcoin becomes one more extractable output of the grid.
Two risks sit under the policy. The first is avoidance: the 150 MW / 150 TH/s threshold draws a bright line, and operators just beneath it, or willing to fragment, may structure around the strategic-miner designation to keep their coins. The second is price. A reserve funded by a percentage of mining output grows fastest exactly when bitcoin is expensive and miner margins are thin — and thinnest when a downturn would make the coins cheap to accumulate. The state is a forced buyer on someone else’s schedule.
Still, the direction is unmistakable. A government has decided that the most reliable way to accumulate bitcoin is to skim it from the machines drawing on its own power lines.
Why it matters: Kazakhstan is building a sovereign bitcoin position without spending a tenge on the open market — and showing every hydro- and hydrocarbon-rich state a template for turning hosted hashrate into a national asset.
Threshold, 10% handover, calculation method and effective date per Resolution No. 638 as reported by the sources above, August 2026. Informational only — not financial advice.
Free. Five minutes. No hype.
Subscribe free