Don't Die Mining Bitcoin: Moonshot's Case for the Codes

Twenty thousand degrees Celsius. That is the heat of an arc flash, according to Ethan Ellenberg, founder of Moonshot, who builds switchboards, panel boards and control panels for Bitcoin mining sites and data centers. He spoke at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, June 24 to 26, and his talk had a blunt title: don't die mining Bitcoin.

Ellenberg came to mining from oil and gas, where he spent more than eight years on control systems for production wells, and then from data centers. Moonshot started when a client wired him a quarter million dollars for electrical panels and needed them in a week. His team wired them in a parking lot. He says the company has since deployed over 400 megawatts of electrical infrastructure. The seed money, he told the room, came from Dogecoin and Shiba Inu.

His warning was about the codes many sites skip. He put arc flashes at 5 to 10 a day, with 2,000 people injured each year. A survivor's average medical bill, he said, is $1.5 million, and litigation costs a company $5 to $10 million. "The heat from an arc flash is over 20,000 degrees Celsius, which is twice the heat of the surface of the sun," he said.

The causes he listed are ordinary: someone touching two phases, connections that work loose on a truck halfway across the country, a bad installation, and animals. Rats and snakes, he said, get into the gear, especially in West Texas.

Then the rules. Stamped engineering drawings come first. On one of Moonshot's first West Texas sites, the engineer moved two or four transformers by eight feet, and the extra wire and conduit cost a quarter million dollars. The National Electrical Code requires short-circuit current ratings on equipment, ground fault protection on anything over 1,000 amps, and a reduced energy setting for maintenance on systems over 1,200 amps. An arc flash study by a professional engineer runs $4,000 or $5,000 and tells crews what protective gear to wear.

His point was that every one of those steps moves liability off the owner and onto the record. "You're pushing the risk far away from you as the owner, right, and you're making your site more of an asset," Ellenberg said. A compliant site can be resold, and he said publicly traded companies look for certain things when a site moves into AI or high performance computing. A site that skipped the codes is a liability.

When Ellenberg spoke, Bitcoin traded at $61,272. On October 17, 2026, it traded at $81,451. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.