Stories · as read on the Mining station
From Waste Heat to Warm Coffee: The New Mining Revenue Stream
Alan Gallo of JSBIT shares how clients use ASIC heat recapture to heat coffee shops, extend growing seasons and farm fish.
Six coffee shops in Canada, each running about ten Bitcoin miners, and every one of those machines helping to heat the shop and its water. That was the first story Alan Gallo told at Mining Disrupt Miami, held June 24 through 26, 2024. Gallo is the business development and marketing manager for JSBIT, a company that sells ASIC mining hardware. On the event's opening day Bitcoin closed at $61,272.
Today it trades at $82,535. Gallo met the coffee shop client when he was 17. The young man and his father owned one shop and wanted to heat it, so Gallo, new to the industry himself, sold him his first miner. A few months later the client came back for 15 more.
More recently he asked for 50. By then he was 19, and he and his father owned six coffee shops. Gallo said that answer blew his mind, and he started asking every friend, client and connection what they were doing with their machines. He opened the session by saying it was about partnerships, and about what people in the industry are doing to get through bear markets.
In his words: "It's about speaking on what people are doing in the industry to survive bear markets and succeed in bull markets." He did not wave away the fear in the room. When JSBIT first came to Mining Disrupt in 2022, he said, Bitcoin was roughly $21,000, down from a high of $65,000. Three years before his talk, buyers paid around $80 per terahash for a 100 terahash miner. In 2024, he said, machines of 200 terahash and up sold for under $25 per terahash, and buyers still were not lining up.
His answer was a different way to use the machines. A client in South America grows fruits and vegetables. For four months of the year he could not grow, and he had to let his team go. He began buying used miners from JSBIT, used their heat through those months, and kept most of his people.
A third client, in Asia, pumps the heat from his miners through a tube into a pool and uses it to grow fish. Gallo asked new miners to change how they think about that heat, as he put it, "viewing heat as a positive outcome of mining rather than a negative one." He also announced that JSBIT was adding another manufacturer to its line of products, after several years of working with that team on its research and development. And he closed with a line he credited to Michael Saylor: if you are not willing to hold Bitcoin for ten years, do not hold it for ten minutes. For Gallo's clients, the miners earn their place twice: once in hashrate, and once in the heat that runs a coffee shop, a farm or a fish pool.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.