For centuries the map seemed to hand down a verdict: without size, without a coastline or without the classic resources, no prosperity was possible. Three nations —Norway, El Salvador and Bhutan— prove the opposite. They did not change their geography: they changed the way they looked at it.
The three stories that follow have different structures —oil, volcanoes, rivers— but the deep mechanism is identical. A raw resource that on its own is wasted or sold cheap is transformed into monetary energy: a form of value that is dense, portable and durable. That energy is stored and made to grow until it becomes long-term wealth, and that wealth ends up flowing back to the citizen. You will see this chain at the start of each country.
The order is deliberate: we begin with the most established and proven model in the world (Norway, which has been at this since 1969), move on to the most high-profile experiment (El Salvador, 2021) and close with the most improbable and elegant case (Bhutan, which has been mining since 2019). From the proven to the frontier.
If you change the way you see the problem, the problem becomes your greatest opportunity.
In 1969 oil was found in the North Sea. A small, cold country of five million people suddenly stumbled upon a fortune. The obvious temptation —to spend it— would have inflated the economy, made the krone more expensive and left a hangover once the crude ran out: the classic resource curse.
Norway did the opposite. In 1990 it created a sovereign wealth fund and settled on an almost monastic rule: the oil money is not spent, it is invested outside the country, and each year only a portion equivalent to the expected return (~3%) may be used. The capital, untouched, belongs also to those not yet born.
El Salvador carried a double stigma: small and, for decades, one of the most violent countries in the world. Fear was an invisible tax that drove out talent, tourism and capital. Its bet was sequential: without security there is no investment, and without technology there is no leap.
The drop in homicides —from about 51 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to some of the lowest figures in the region— reopened the country. On that foundation, in September 2021 it became the first state to declare Bitcoin legal tender, and it began to mine with the heat of its volcanoes: the Tecapa geothermal plant powering mining machines.
Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas, wedged between India and China, with around 800,000 inhabitants and a detail unique on the planet: it is carbon-negative. Its mountain rivers produce so much hydroelectricity that during the monsoon it has energy to spare. But that abundance held a cruel trap.
The summer surplus cannot be stored (electricity is not easily stored at that scale) and had only one buyer: India, at a fixed, low rate. In winter, when the rivers shrink, Bhutan had to re-import expensive electricity. Energy to spare for half the year, scarcity for the other half. Geography as destiny.
What if that energy that fit in no cable could be turned into something that does travel down a fiber cable: digital value?
In 2019, with bitcoin at around $5,000, the sovereign wealth fund Druk Holding & Investments began quietly mining with that hydroelectric surplus. The same energy, instead of being sold cheaply to a single neighbor, was capturing value from the global market. By 2024 the kingdom had accumulated close to 13,000 BTC —around 40% of its GDP—.
Export to India at a fixed, low rate set by contract, with a single buyer and only when there is a line available. Stable value but limited and dependent.
The same energy captures value from a global market, without asking permission or a cable, in an asset that moreover rose in value years later. Higher potential, higher risk.
And what about people's lives? Bhutan's gravest problem is the exodus of its young: by 2022 close to 10% of the population had left in search of better wages. In 2023 the government sold around $100M in bitcoin to double the salaries of civil servants, which stemmed the resignations in early 2024. The mines employ technicians and engineers, and the Gelephu Mindfulness City project seeks to anchor all of this in a new city. The treasury did not stay on a spreadsheet: it paid salaries and kept people.
The most common objection sounds reasonable: bitcoin uses enormous amounts of energy; that electricity should go to hospitals, factories or more exports. But that sentence hides a huge assumption: that someone, from the outside, knows what the best use of a specific resource is, in a specific place, at a specific moment.
It is exactly the error that Ludwig von Mises (1920) and Friedrich Hayek (1945) pointed out in planned economies. Mises called it the economic calculation problem; Hayek, the knowledge problem: the information relevant to deciding is not concentrated in one expert mind, but dispersed among those who live the problem. The distant planner lacks the local data —and that is why it fails—.
That is why mining bitcoin with stranded energy (the kind left over with no other profitable buyer) does not compete with the hospital: it is the energy nobody else wanted at that price, in that place, at that moment. The same holds for the Salvadoran geothermal heat that erupts whether it is used or not, or for the Norwegian crude that, without a fund, would have been squandered on immediate consumption.
Norway, El Salvador and Bhutan did not wait for better cards. They took what many saw as a limitation —crude that runs out, paralyzing violence, energy that fit in no cable— and designed a creative way out. Not to be copied blindly: to remind us that, in the digital age, the agility of the small can beat the inertia of the large.
The myth tells that Prometheus stole fire from Olympus and gave it to mankind. He did not give them gold or land or empires: he gave them a capacity. With fire came the forge, baked bread, the lit-up night and, above all, the ability to imagine a tomorrow different from today.
Knowledge is that fire. Norway did not grow rich by having oil —many have it and remain poor— but by knowing what to do with it. El Salvador did not change because of the geography of its volcanoes, but because of the idea of taming them. Bhutan did not overcome its isolation with a longer cable, but with a new way of looking at its own river. In all three cases the resource was already there; what was missing was the spark of understanding it.
When you light one torch from another, the first loses none of its flame. Shared knowledge is not divided: it is multiplied.
Hoarding it in a few hands snuffs it out; sharing it fans it. It is the only wealth that grows when given away, and the only lever capable of lifting a person out of poverty —economic and intellectual— without taking anything from anyone. Humanity does not advance by decree: it advances, naturally, when the fire passes from hand to hand.
That is why this essay is free. Not to show off generosity, but because locking up an idea contradicts its nature. Read it, copy it, improve it and share it. If a single person understands that their greatest limitation could be their greatest lever, the fire will have done its work.