It’s the foundation of our economy, so the more energy we can consume, the better. We need to be able to consume more energy, and the more efficient we can be with it, the better. Bitcoin miners are really pushing the envelope on efficiency; we’re talking about liquid immersion cooling and all these different technologies that are being pioneered by bitcoin miners. We’re talking about the future of industrial manufacturing and the future of data centers; it’s all in its infancy.
Bitcoin miners may be the unsung heroes of the digital age, pushing the innovation envelope and exploring the ends of the earth for untapped digital deposits. According to Gideon Powell, the chief executive of Cholla Inc., a Texas-based petrochemical exploration and investment, “bitcoin miners are quite like the wildcatters of the mid-century energy industry, building the modern world.”
Cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin, could become foundational for whatever comes next for humanity. It’s almost assured that in the coming decades, the internet and nascent tech like artificial intelligence and augmented reality will become even more intertwined with everything, and all of that takes energy.
Bitcoin mining is not just an additional source of revenue for existing and future energy producers and data mine operators, but also a site of technological process. Powell said bitcoin miners have been at the forefront of computer chip cooling and efficiency, like the liquid-immersion machines that are coming online. A lot of these advances could go from giving specially-designed bitcoin mining a slight edge in what Powell calls the “ultimate free market,” bitcoin mining, to finding applications across the data industry.
Powell believes that “bitcoin miners are the most fungible thing around,” and can go places that traditional high performance compute data centers cannot. He has set up shop in West Texas, land banking and working on the high voltage infrastructures, and really taking care of front-end items to ensure that high-performance compute customers can scale.
Bitcoin miners are also pioneers in a technical sense, pushing the absolute boundaries on bleeding-edge cooling tech and power management strategies. Everything they’re doing on bitcoin mining, from high-density compute to the different types of air immersion, direct-to-chip phasing – all of that is really being pioneered by the bitcoin miners.
Powell believes that “the more energy we can consume, the better,” and that bitcoin miners are “really pushing the envelope on efficiency.” He also believes that bitcoin miners are “pioneering with demand response” and “explaining the value proposition for grids and working to arrange [private-public] programs to incentivize grid reliability.”