Stories · as read on the Mining station
Cyberian Mine's Plan to Heat Irkutsk
At Mining Disrupt Miami 2019, Rasmus Højland pitched hosted mining in Siberia and a plan to sell miners' waste heat to the city of Irkutsk.
A hosting company in Siberia wanted to sell its miners' waste heat to a city. Rasmus Højland of Cyberian Mine made that pitch at Mining Disrupt Miami in July 2019, when Bitcoin traded at $9,770. Today it trades at $81,859.
Before he spoke, the host called Cyberian Mine one of the most unique colocation facilities on earth, with customers shipping machines to it from abroad. Højland, from Copenhagen, told the room it was his first time on that stage and asked them to bear with him. Then he laid out the plan, slide by slide, in a little under six minutes.
Cyberian Mine, based in Germany and backed by a mining fund, hosted machines for retail and institutional customers in Siberia. It did not sell cloud mining. In his words, "We don't do cloud mining as we think there's too much scamming involved in that." Customers owned the machines, and the company ran them. He gave the all-in cost at the time as six euro cents, or seven US cents, and said the team wanted its mining to be fully green.
The plan for heat came next. The company's site was in Irkutsk, near a large dam. Højland said Cyberian Mine was negotiating with the local energy company to become a heating provider, warming water and sending it out to residents. He said the dam gave the company access to as much as a gigawatt of power, and that a new facility would be built by the end of the year.
He also spoke to small miners. A family could buy one machine and have it hosted, or ship their own, and the company would help with the paperwork and customs. He mentioned group buys in the community, KPMG as the company's accountants, and a legal framework based in Europe. He introduced the founders, Pavel and Max, and a head of mining, Tor, from Norway.
The goal, he said, was endurance: "our goal is to eventually be the last mine standing because of our favorable prices and so on." Lower costs were meant to come from immersion cooling, which he named as the next step. He closed by inviting the room to ship their miners to Siberia.
The figures in the talk are the company's own, from 2019. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.