Miner Outflows, Riot and an Outback Gas Shed

A shed in the Australian outback, holding 66 Bitcoin miners and running on gas from wells that cannot reach the national grid. That was the last story on the Mining Disrupt News Surge on Monday, July 3, 2023.

That day Bitcoin closed at $30,652. On October 26, 2026 it stood at $80,299.

The host opened on the numbers: one Bitcoin for just over $30,000, block height 796,320, and a 14-day hashrate of 361.9 exahashes per second. Then the news. Glassnode had reported that miners sent a record $128 million to exchanges in a single week, equal to 315 percent of their daily revenue. Profitability was down more than 30 percent from a year earlier, and down over 80 percent from the 2021 peak. Yet the price had not moved. The host asked what that meant, with spot Bitcoin ETF applications being filed at the same time.

The second story was Riot. The company had signed a long-term purchase agreement with MicroBT for 33,280 machines, about $163 million, or $21.50 per terahash, to be built at a new facility in Pittsburgh and trucked to its Corsicana site in Texas. Riot had once chartered jets to fly machines in from overseas. Its chief executive said the deal de-risks the logistics. Delivery was set for December, with the machines raising Riot to 20.1 exahashes per second. The host put that at about five and a half percent of the network: "that is no small player in this space."

Then the outback. In Quilpie Shire, Queensland, Canadian company Bengal Energy was running a pilot on the mayor's sheep station. Gas comes out of the well, through a choke valve and a heating coil, into a generator. A three-phase cable feeds two racks of computers, a satellite links them to the internet, and teams in Brisbane and Canada watch it remotely. The company called it set and forget.

The host said he came to Bitcoin for the price, but that is now the least interesting part to him. Power produced where nothing else is going on is what holds his attention. The same article quoted Giga Energy's chief executive, who had run flare-gas mining in Texas since 2019. Oil producers, he said, first thought it was the most ridiculous idea in the world. By 2023, oil and gas conferences had a Bitcoin mining section.

The article also gave the critics their say: a study put Bitcoin mining's 2020 energy use above that of Austria or Portugal.

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