It’s quiet outside the afternoon Amanda Balon is walking around her family’s scenic 80-acre farm in Ridgway Township in northcentral Pennsylvania.

“This is our high tunnel area,” said Balon, co-owner of Big Maple Family Farm and executive director of Big Maple Farm’s Natural Therapies. “This is where we grow all of our greens and we start our plants so we’ve been working on getting all of our plants in the ground the last couple of days.”

But, Balon said, that peaceful summer quietness won’t last.

“It sounds basically like a jet engine,” Balon said, describing the sound that comes from a nearby Bitcoin mining site.

While Bitcoin may sound like something out of Silicon Valley, sometimes it comes from the rural woods of Pennsylvania. And when it does, it makes noise. In this case, Ohio-based Pin Oak Energy Partners operates a natural gas site in Ridgway Township, Elk County. Only now, some of that gas is being used on site to run generators powering supercomputers that mine for cryptocurrency. And those generators and cooling systems can create a lot of noise. 

It’s not what most residents are…