Greenhouse Heat and Nebraska Taxes From Bitcoin Mining

Twenty degrees Celsius. That is how much warmer the air comes out of a Bitcoin miner than it goes in, according to a flower grower in the Netherlands who now heats his greenhouse with mining machines. He told a Dutch news crew the setup runs on solar power and should save a lot of the gas the greenhouse used to burn for heat.

His story closed the second episode of the Mining Disrupt News Surge studio show, published on July 7, 2023. Bitcoin traded at $30,141 that day. Today it trades at $80,068.

The episode opened with the network itself. The host read an average block time of nine minutes and 42 seconds, a 14-day hashrate of 358.9 exahashes, and fees of about 23 sats per vbyte for a fast transaction. A node map showed 16,604 reachable nodes.

Then came Nebraska. The host played a hearing clip of the state's former head of economic development answering a senator's question about the mining industry. In her words, "we've actually seen significant benefits from this industry to date mostly from tax revenues and then job creation." Her numbers were for one facility over 12 months: $1.6 million in state sales tax, and $3.8 million for local taxing authorities. She said the local money helped the host community improve its regional municipal airport and work toward commercial air service. The facility and the town were not named in the clip.

The host's own read was simple. As he put it, "the only thing limiting a Bitcoin miner is energy production and your creativity to get it."

From there the episode crossed to Germany, to a company that makes spray bottles, aerosol cans and pump canisters. The factory runs entirely on solar panels, so it produces power whenever the sun is out, whether or not anyone is at work. Someone at the company decided to send that surplus into Bitcoin miners. The segment's point was that power coming onto a grid has to go somewhere, and miners give surplus solar a buyer.

The Dutch greenhouse took the same idea one step further. It also runs on solar, but it keeps the miners' heat and uses it to grow flowers year round. The host admitted it was not an idea he would have had when he first got into Bitcoin.

The episode was a round-up of news clips rather than a reported investigation. It gave no sizes for the German or Dutch setups and no dollar value for the power or the heat. What it did capture was the argument miners were making in the middle of 2023: tax receipts in rural communities, and a use for solar power that would otherwise go to waste.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.