 Bath houses are a 5,000 year old business. You can find them in every ancient culture. You'll find references to bath houses. It's an essential human experience. Jason Goodman wanted to recreate the life-changing experiences he underwent in New York's traditional Russian bath houses. I just moved to New York, going through a little bit of a rough time. I went to the Russian baths on Tenth Street, and I left there feeling better than I had in years. Something about being in the sauna, being in a 190-degree room. You're very present in the experience. You're right there, no matter what's going on in your noise machine. And so I just got really into sauna, cold plunge, not a spa, but more of the traditional bath house. So he started his own, in an old soda factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We built this place for the hardcore sauna heads, for people who are trying to optimize their performance, their longevity, their overall health. But while the bath house is designed to evoke ancient tradition, what's going on behind the scenes is cutting edge. Step behind the old school facade, pass the dryers in the back-of-house staff, and you'll find the pump room, where the waters piped into the baths are heated up to 104 degrees. But you'll also find something extraordinary. Computers submerged in fluid, serving dual purposes, heating the water, and mining Bitcoin. It kind of clicked in my mind. Bitcoin mining produces heat as a byproduct. I buy energy to create heat. He found YouTube videos of hobbyists using Bitcoin to heat their pools and hot tubs. Instead of cooling the computers with fans, they're submerged in a specially engineered biodegradable fluid that doesn't conduct the electric current, but does absorb the heat, which a heat exchanger transfers into hot water that moves directly into the pools. I was able to make hot water really easily. So then it became very apparent that this was gonna work. Bitcoin mining is really important. Let's design a system and scale it up. And it was very easy to do. Of course, Bitcoin mining wasn't designed for heating hot tubs. It was designed to facilitate a new type of digital money with a supply that no single entity can alter or control. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, and a central bank doesn't create new ones. Computers scattered around the world running the Bitcoin protocol do. They compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle that the protocol makes just hard enough to ensure it's solved roughly every 10 minutes. Solve the puzzle, unlock a block of transactions to be validated and added to the blockchain, earn Bitcoin. As the Bitcoiners say, tick tock, next block. The more computing power you have, the better your chances of earning. And more computing power means using more energy. Bitcoin miners are in a relentless, unquenchable search across the globe for the cheapest possible energy. It's like a sponge. Any excess energy bubbling up past the cost level, a bubbling to the point where it becomes cheap enough for them, they will soak it up. That profit-seeking drive for energy efficiency has caused Bitcoin miners to pop up in unexpected places like Goodman's Bath House, where he says the cost of heating the pools is about the same as it was before he plugged in the Bitcoin miners, but now with the added bonus of earning Bitcoin. A dream scenario would be that every hotel, every major residential building, every major office building, starts converting their boiler system or their heating system or their hot water system over to a system that we're using and you have a massively distributed, hard to control mining network. For Bitcoiners, keeping the process distributed and hard to control is the whole point. Bitcoin has many purposes, but to me the simplest is the most basic, which is it's an honest ledger. Why do people save? They want a store of value that's honest and cannot be manipulated. With no central bank, there's no way for indebted governments to print more Bitcoin and devalue its worth like they have with countless currencies worldwide. Bitcoin is truly the transformation of energy into monetary value in a way that cannot be corrupted because Bitcoin is not controlled by any human organization. Mining ties the world's first decentralized digital currency to the physical world. But Bitcoin remains borderless, seeking to exploit inefficiency wherever it can. Whether that's a Brooklyn bath house and 87,000 square foot facility on the outskirts of Atlanta, an unmarked warehouse in an industrial area of Venezuela or the small rural town of Washington, Georgia. Friendly community, probably as many cows as there are people. Mayor Bill DeGolien welcomed CleanSpark, one of America's largest Bitcoin miners to Washington because it allowed this town of 4,000 to buy energy at a bulk discount. They're buying a lot of power from the city and that helps the city. With what we're selling to CleanSpark, the amount of power they buy per month from us is more than all of our other commercial and residential customers combined. One of the great things about Bitcoin mining is you can be anywhere in the world. You could be in a small town in Georgia where the power we're using used to power a factory that those jobs left and moved overseas. So now you have a small community that doesn't have good opportunities. We've come in and we're using age and underused infrastructure and we're putting it back to use. It's the same thing that used to be used. It's just now being used for Bitcoin mining. Zach Bradford, the CEO and co-founder of CleanSpark, used to work in the clean energy sector. We actually selected Georgia for a couple reasons. One, business-friendly state, of course, is always a good thing, but also they're one of the few places in the US that's currently still building nuclear power plants. He says that the company gravitated to a state that relies on nuclear power, not only in search of profit, but to fulfill the company's ESG mandate to be carbon neutral. CleanSpark has five mining facilities in Georgia plus one in upstate New York powered by a hydroelectric dam. Here in its Norcross facility, CleanSpark is using a similar immersion cooling technique to what Goodman does in his bath house to cool its 4,300 Bitcoin miners. Here, the mineral oil absorbing the heat means that CleanSpark doesn't have to spend as much money powering a seat air-cooled the giant rooms where the computers are running. In the middle of the day in the summer, here in Georgia, right, 90 degrees, high humidity, air-cooled environments don't love that. We're removing that environmental factor where ambient temperature goes up and down and immersion is very much a flat line as compared to air-cooled that has the fluctuations which are primarily tied to hot temperatures. Bitcoin mining's steady energy appetite could even solve solar power's biggest problem. Solar power generates the most power when the sun's up in the middle of the day. Well, it's also the same time most of us are at work or school or not at home. As a result, there's a lot of power coming onto the grid that actually isn't getting used or consumed. So you have a couple of choices. You have to find a place to store it. You have to find a place to consume it or you actually end up wasting the power. There's a huge amount of power that goes to waste. Solar farms often shut off panels to avoid overheating the grid, but Bitcoin mines can absorb that energy. Companies are building large solar mines around the country. So you've heard about the Green New Deal, right? So the government's gonna like basically monetize debt, create a bunch of new money to pay for like renewable infrastructure around the nation, right? And maybe other countries will do this. I guess what I would say is that Bitcoin's the real Green New Deal, okay? So Bitcoin subsidizes renewable energy because the projects are made profitable upon inception by the ability to monetize that energy right away and this acts as a bootstrap. So both foreign investors, donors, local investors, communities, the government, now it makes more economic sense for them to set up these renewable plants. So rather than monetizing debt, we can have the market kind of power this process. Bitcoin mining operations have located on oil fields to capture energy from natural gas byproducts that are unprofitable to transport through pipes and would otherwise be burned off on site. And energy companies putting miners in landfills to convert wasted methane gas into Bitcoin. But Bitcoin's critics still consider the energy that's going to mining to be a complete waste. Cryptocurrencies basically have no value and they don't produce anything. Environmentally wasteful cryptocurrencies. It's completely unnecessary online play money. It's a delusion, basically. It's like somebody else is trading turds and you decide I can't be left out. Some countries have banned Bitcoin mining. The Biden administration wants to tax it heavily. Goodman felt the backlash in Williamsburg when he announced that he was heating bath house with Bitcoin mining. Bath house in New York is under a lot of scrutiny from its customers right now. The Brooklyn spa is facing backlash after revealing their pools are heated by Bitcoin mining. I think that never left that social media world. It didn't spill over into the real world. Oh, we got a lot more support than we got negativity. Going through the comments myself, what I found is that the negativity seemed less educated than the positivity. Maybe that's my own bias. Bitcoin's energy consumption earned a New York Times front page story this April proclaiming that Bitcoin miners are energy hogs that cause immense pollution. The Times accused miners of exploiting Texas utility companies by selling their own energy back to them at high prices when demand spikes. But miners say the ability to sponge up and then release energy at a moment's notice makes the grid more reliable, which is why utilities partner with them. Texas Bitcoin miner Marshall Long explained how miners' partnerships with Texas's grid manager helped divert a summer blackout in a recent livestream. What makes miners particularly good is because I'm not only a large user, I'm a granular user, so I don't have to turn off my entire load at once. I can just turn off one miner or 200 miners or 2,000 miners in order to respond to certain things that are going on in the grid throughout the day. In September 2023, Texas grid managers recalled energy from local miners during an unexpected surge in demand. The miners shut down and the lights stayed on. Bitcoin miners are actually helping and not hurting. There's very few processes that can actually be a true flexible load. You have a factory and, hey, there's grid congestion and, you know, power's needed somewhere else. You don't shut the factory off midstream in the line or you risk ruining a product or a material so we can go away very quickly. We can act like a battery at times where there's risk to the grid. We can respond to that. Miners aren't shutting down during peak hours out of altruism, but because of market incentives. CleanSpark monitors energy prices on a minute-by-minute basis and shuts down the moment its operation starts to become unprofitable, freeing up power for the rest of the grid. What happens when there is no legal market? Welcome to Venezuela, where Bitcoin mining boomed thanks to the government subsidizing energy to near zero cost. Miners sponge up the free energy while widespread outages have become part of everyday life. Mining has survived here in a legal gray zone, which is why this major Venezuelan Bitcoin miner who fled to Miami asked us to keep him anonymous. But even in this gray market, Bitcoin forces energy innovation. This miner says he has taken responsibility for fixing power lines that the government failed to maintain. He says the government crackdown has intensified so much, and the bribes grown so expensive, that he's unwinding his operation. But Bitcoin is so decentralized and lucrative, it's nearly impossible to stop. China was home to three quarters of the world's Bitcoin mining industry until the Chinese government banned it for environmental and economic security reasons in June 2021. When the Chinese miners dropped out, there was more money left for those that remained. More profit drew more miners to participate, and within five months, the computing power backing Bitcoin was higher than ever. The US now leads the world in Bitcoin mining. In second place, still China. Bitcoin miners are servers. So who decides Instagram servers or the New York Times servers that are using those servers to make negative stories about Bitcoin? Who decides that that is immoral use and Bitcoin is immoral use? People hate Bitcoin for a variety of reasons. I think it mainly comes from a combination they don't understand its social value, so they think it's a waste and therefore they view it as a destructive environmental force. But once you understand it has immense social value and it's having a transformative effect on the way we use energy and on how much energy we use in terms of money, then you're forced to have a new set of facts and then you can make additional decisions. The choice America faces isn't whether to allow mining to exist or not, but whether to welcome it here in a vibrant market economy where it can bootstrap new energy sources and its byproducts can create economic value. Either way, TikTok, next block.