Fifty Percent More Hash

Fifty percent more hashrate from the same machines. That was the promise Gary Testa, President and CEO of Engineered Fluids, made to a room of miners at Mining Disrupt Miami 2021, recorded July 20 and 21, 2021. Bitcoin was trading at $32,125 that week. Today it sits at $81,514.

Testa's argument was about heat. He told the audience that thermal management is the thing that gates a miner's performance, and that air is a poor tool for the job. In his words: "air, which apparently is free and surrounds us, also happens to be the least thermally efficient way to cool anything."

His company makes immersion fluids, including one it calls Bitcool. Testa said operators using it could raise hashrate fifty percent over stock. He said that pays off two ways. A miner with a fixed fleet gets more hash without buying more machines. A miner with spare power can put all of it to work, at a time when new miners were scarce.

He gave the room more reasons. Cheap power, he said, often sits in some of the hottest places on the planet, and he named Texas, Latin America and Asia. Immersion lets a mine run there without the weather setting its performance. He reminded the audience of S17 batches that failed at sixty or seventy percent, and said his fluid had zero percent failure on those units. No dust, no clogged machines, no cleaning, which he said matters most at remote sites where skilled staff are hard to find. Pulling the fans, he said, adds an extra ten percent to the bottom line and takes thirty seconds to clip the wires. And with no water used for cooling, a mine can go into places like the Middle East, where evaporative cooling may not be allowed.

Then he turned to overclocking. The limit, he said, is not the hash board. It is the stock power supply. Many of his customers immerse the standard unit, run the miner as hard as they can until the supply fails, and then fit a bigger one. A new power supply typically costs less than $100. And in his words, "what you find out is that you pay for that new power supply in like six days."

Testa also said older S9s were coming back into the market because they could be run profitably, and that more hashrate stretches the useful life of a miner and the return on what it cost.

His last point was about miners nobody has seen yet. He said immersion was already running four to five times ahead of what current miners need, so a facility built that way would not need new cooling when faster machines arrive.

These are a vendor's own figures from a short pitch, and they were not tested on stage. The question he put to the room, how much hash an operator leaves behind by cooling with air, is one any operator can check on their own machines.

The full story, with video of the session, is on Mining Disrupt dot com.