Bitcoin Mining Can Profit From Garbage – Bitcoin Magazine
Powering bitcoin miners with literal garbage is an emerging trend in the mining sector as a crop of new companies focus on harnessing this abundant and otherwise wasted energy resource. Contrary to the widespread political narrative that bitcoin mining is destroying the planet, the efforts of these landfill miners show that nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, the net positive effects of these mining teams are enough to silence environmental critics forever. This article explores the early stages of companies building mining operations at landfills and looks at the potential opportunities that this resource – read: garbage – presents for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s New Junk Trend
Most cases of discussing dumps and bitcoin together usually involve very early adopters mining absurd amounts of cheap bitcoin on their computers and then losing or throwing away the hard drives that contained the fortunes. An early bitcoin miner is even planning an expensive landfill digging project to retrieve half a billion dollars in misplaced digital gold. Another landfill made headlines for its response to an unreasonably large amount of “incompressible foam” that a bitcoin mining company tried to dump.
Aside from these crazy stories, today’s bitcoin miners are targeting dumps for power to earn new bitcoins, not targets for retrieving old ones. Vespene Energy and XcelPlus International are two of the earliest participants in this new segment of the bitcoin mining industry. I’ve heard other similar projects currently building in stealth will join them after public announcements come in the next year or two. In a recent study on the environmental effects of bitcoin mining, the White House directly mentioned landfill focused bitcoin mining.
But not all approaches to landfill-powered bitcoin mining are the same. The wasps, for example, “use landfill methane to power bitcoin mining,” according to the site. This business model can quickly affect a non-trivial amount of methane emissions reduction on a large scale since landfill waste is responsible for approximately 11% of global methane emissions. XcelPlus, by comparison, uses plasma gasifiers to generate thermal energy and also earn disposal fees for the garbage it receives from landfills in addition to bitcoin mining rewards – a nice two-for-one deal!
Quantifying the global waste supply
So, exactly how abundant is garbage as a resource for bitcoin mining? The short answer is: very much.
Here’s some data to detail just how abundant the world’s supply of trash is:
Getting an accurate overview of how many landfills exist in the world is almost impossible (Google is absolutely no help). But there is a garbage clock that gives a real-time count of how much garbage is created every day. Dumps can be an energy bonanza for bitcoin miners.
North America has made headlines for becoming an emerging Mecca for bitcoin mining companies. So, for the purposes of this article, it’s worth noting that the United States alone is home to more than 3,000 active landfills and roughly 10,000 inactive ones. Canada has approximately 3,000 landfills of its own, according to a discussion paper published earlier this year. Both countries were listed in the top five garbage producing nations. And both countries ranked as the top two countries for waste production per capita.
The line chart below visualizes annual growth in the world’s total garbage input from estimates published by Smithsonian Magazine in an article asking when the world will reach “peak garbage.” The answer? Not soon.
Source
Advantages of Landfill Bitcoin Mining
Garbage has some unique advantages as a fuel source that readers should not overlook. First, its abundance opens up a huge opportunity for potential hash rate growth as landfill methane capture and plasma gasification infrastructure is installed. And the data cited in the previous paragraph confirms more than the amount of garbage. For another, landfills are globally distributed – garbage is everywhere. Like the distribution of the Bitcoin network itself, miners can go almost anywhere to turn trash into energy for bitcoin mining. Moreover, this form of energy is truly stranded and wasted, making miners not only a buyer of last resort for this resource, but also one of the only buyers. Landfill methane reduction in other ways is limited.
Finally, and most importantly, bitcoin mining in landfills provides the eco-friendly narratives surrounding bitcoin mining that counter seemingly non-stop climate activist criticism. Some reports label landfills as “super emitters.” Landfills are the world’s third largest man-made source of methane. And of the trillions of pounds of trash produced each year, some “extremely conservative” estimates suggest that barely 33% of the waste is managed in any kind of environmentally conscious way.
The stage couldn’t be better set for bitcoin miners to consume literal garbage and reduce methane emissions. XcelPlus, for example, directly touts the pollution reduction benefits of its form of bitcoin mining. According to their website, “The amount of energy consumed by the Bitcoin mining process is enormous, expensive and polluting… By funneling waste coal, trash and other hazardous waste streams through our XcelPlus Plasma Gasifier, it can convert 50 tons of waste per day into energy .”
It is not hyperbolic to say that this may be game over for environmental criticism of bitcoin mining.
The future of trash and bitcoin
Most of the headlines in recent years about miners using stranded energy resources have focused on conventional fuels such as solar, natural gas and others. But garbage production is almost endless, to the point that some analysts say we are “running out of space” to store it all. And now bitcoin mining companies are building and implementing technology to harness literal garbage as an energy source for mining. Not only is this a somewhat infinitely renewable resource (using the term in an unconventional but not inaccurate way), but powering the Bitcoin network with garbage also undermines environmental criticism of bitcoin since the benefits of limiting garbage emissions are indisputable.
Dump mining puts the ingenuity and creativity of bitcoin mining on full display as magical internet money entrepreneurs tap into energy resources that no one else will or can tap into. Soon, infrastructure for the honey badgering of money will be backed by actual garbage, making the world’s largest decentralized financial network more resilient than ever.
This is a guest post by Zack Voell. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
