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While for bitcoin culture in general, bitcoin halvings are considered a celebratory event, for miners, things tend to be a bit stressful. As Bitcoiners around the world gather to celebrate block 840,000, miners are hunkering down and preparing for their reward for mining blocks to decrease by 50%, while the cost of their operations remains the same.
With the next bitcoin halving scheduled for April 19, one would imagine that Fred Thiel, CEO of Digital marathon entries, the world's largest publicly traded bitcoin mining company, might be worried. But after sitting down with Thiel just days before the halving, she doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat.
Why that?
One reason is that Marathon plans to generate alternative revenue streams using the heat emitted by its bitcoin mining rigs.
“bitcoin mining itself does something very efficient: produce heat,” Thiel told bitcoin magazine. “50% of industrial energy expenditure is spent heating things, so imagine if you could capture heat from bitcoin miners and bitcoin miners could get paid for it. “That would subsidize your electricity cost.”
During a fireside chat with Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) at the bitcoin Policy Summit, held on April 9, 2024 in Washington, DC, Thiel shared an example of how Marathon plans to use the heat its miners produce.
“One of the things we're doing in Nebraska is we're starting to heat greenhouses and grow shrimp using the heat from bitcoin mining as a byproduct,” Thiel explained to Senator Lummis.
“I think we'll start to see this as a way for people to grow protein in disadvantaged areas of the world,” he added.
Using the heat produced by Marathon miners is one of the ways Thiel seeks to change the perception of bitcoin mining from something parasitic to something productive.
This fits well with the fact that Marathon continues to improve its ability to use waste gases as fuel for its miners.
Towards the end of 2023, Marathon launched a pilot project mining bitcoins with energy derived solely from landfill methane, a gas that is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
The project was a success, according to Thiel.
“It was a proof of concept that showed you could successfully mine bitcoins using landfill methane gas,” he told bitcoin Magazine. “Landfill mining is very difficult, but we were able to show that it can be done quite successfully.”
Thiel expanded on these efforts in his conversation with Senator Lummis, bringing together the ideas that Marathon could produce this heat it plans to use while also having a positive impact on the environment.
“You generate energy with that by converting it into methane and then converting it into electricity and you create heat with the electricity,” he told Senator Lummis. “If you can take a waste product, turn it into energy, and put heat back into an industrial process, you do more for the environment than many environmentalists want. And at the same time, the cost of mining bitcoins becomes very small because the energy cost is low.”
