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. That’s why I think bitcoin miners are the modern-day wildcatters.
You might even call them modern-day wildcatters, or the explorers who search the ends of the earth for untapped oil deposits, said Gideon Powell, the chief executive of Cholla Inc., a Texas-based petrochemical exploration and investment.
Bitcoin miners may be the modern-day wildcatters, pushing the innovation envelope and exploring the energy exploration business. CoinDesk talked with Powell for our Mining Week series about the three components needed to build data centers, why he’s betting on West Texas as a mining infrastructure hub, and how crypto mining innovations bleed out into the rest of the silicon-based economy.
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.
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 progress. Powell said bitcoin miners are the most fungible thing around; they can go places that traditional high-performance compute data centers cannot. It’s just too risky.
Bitcoin miners are also pioneers in a technical sense. But I’ve never been sure if that stuff could be repurposed in other industries. Powell said the bitcoin miners were pushing the absolute boundaries on bleeding-edge cooling tech and power management strategies. Everything we’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 said bitcoin miners do a really good job of explaining the value proposition for grids and working to arrange [private-public] programs to incentivize grid reliability. That is their trump card, being able to drop gigawatts of load in real time. It’s a game-changer.
Bitcoin miners may not get all the credit they deserve when it comes to pushing the innovation envelope. They’re a bit like the gauchos of the South American pampas, only that the wildcatters’ business built the modern world, Powell said.