₿itcoin mining
and the intrigue about it as a business
This morning I came across an interesting post by Fred Krueger on X,
And it reminded me of a video I recently watched by a YouTube channel, More Perfect Union. I’m not particularly fond of their channel, but I do value doublethink. Oddly, his post and an X space conversation about record worldwide energy usage both led me back to thinking about this video.
Every few months, a headline drops about Bitcoin mining "destroying" some town in Texas.
This episode featured the Browning family, 80-somethings living 70 miles outside Dallas, getting pounded by a constant low-frequency hum from tens of thousands of Bitcoin mining rigs. The video had everything: noise pollution with 24/7 ASIC hum allegedly hitting 100 dB inside homes, energy usage of 300 megawatts (enough to power Austin), water draw up to 1.5 million gallons a day at some sites, and the usual local politics where companies pay less for power than residents while politicians pocket mining PAC money.
If you didn't know better, you'd think Bitcoin mining was part coal plant, part nightclub speaker stack, and part Bond villain lair. The Browning's neighbors talked about headaches, horses losing weight, and property values getting crushed. Behind it all, giant companies like Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms are pulling power and cutting checks to politicians who call Texas "the crypto capital."
If you're anti-Bitcoin, this is gold. If you're pro-Bitcoin, it's a stress test. So let's actually think through what's happening here.
The energy numbers always sound scary. Cambridge University says Bitcoin uses about 188 terawatt-hours of electricity a year. That's "more than Egypt." Sounds apocalyptic until you remember the global banking system uses more, the global gold industry uses more, and always-on Christmas lights in the U.S. use about half as much. Here's the thing though: those other systems are locked in and aren't getting more efficient over time. Bitcoin is.
If you think Bitcoin is pointless, then yes, 188 TWh is wasted. If you think having a network that can't be censored or inflated away is valuable, then 188 TWh is what it costs to run it.
Mining doesn't actually "steal" energy. This gets skipped in every TV segment, but Bitcoin mining chases the cheapest possible energy. We're talking remote hydropower in Sichuan during rainy season, natural gas flares in West Texas that would otherwise just burn into the atmosphere, stranded geothermal in Iceland. In Texas, ERCOT's market structure lets miners get paid to shut off during demand spikes. The video calls this "evil profiteering," but it's literally how the grid balances load with every large industrial user. Steel mills, data centers, and Bitcoin mines all get the same deal: turn off when the grid is stressed, get paid for freeing up capacity.
During Winter Storm Uri, some miners sold their pre-bought power back to the grid at high prices. That's demand response working exactly as designed. The only way to see that as immoral is if you've already decided Bitcoin itself is immoral.
The noise and water problems are real, but they're local problems. Let's be honest about this: ASICs scream. Fans run nonstop. Big air-cooled mines sound like an idling jet engine. Water cooling can be worse. Riot's 1 GW site in Corsicana is projected to use 1.5 million gallons a day.
But these are engineering and zoning issues, not fundamental Bitcoin problems. Noise gets solved with better soundproofing, proper setbacks, and industrial zoning. Water gets solved with immersion cooling that recycles fluid in a closed loop, plus siting facilities away from stressed water basins. If a mine is making its neighbors sick, that's a failure of site planning and permitting. That's on Marathon Digital, not on the protocol itself.
The political angle is the same story we've seen before. Yeah, the Texas video plays up politicians taking donations from mining PACs. Bad optics for sure, but also just America being America. Swap "Bitcoin mining" for "oil refining," "data centers," or "Amazon fulfillment" and you get identical beats: rural towns desperate for tax base welcome industry, industry gets sweetheart power deals and tax breaks, locals get some jobs and some headaches but a smaller piece of the pie than they hoped for.
You can and should hold these companies accountable without throwing out the entire protocol they happen to run.
Here's the question nobody wants to ask: Is Bitcoin worth the resources it takes to secure it?
If your answer is no, then no amount of mitigation will matter. Every watt and every drop of water looks like waste. If your answer is yes, then the goal isn't to shut it down but to make it cleaner, quieter, and better integrated into communities. And Bitcoin can be cleaner. A lot cleaner.
The energy use is actually the point. This is the counterintuitive part that people miss. Mining's massive, competitive energy use is why no single entity can control Bitcoin without spending insane amounts of money, why the network is secure against nation-state attacks, and why it's costly to rewrite history. That's by design.
If Bitcoin used "almost no energy," it would also have almost no security budget. It would be cheap to attack, easy to censor, and pointless as a global settlement layer. Mining being a "terrible business" is a feature, not a bug. It keeps margins low, competition high, and capture expensive.
What about the Browning family? You can believe in Bitcoin and still think the Brownings deserve peace and quiet. This is where Bitcoin maximalists blow it by pretending every complaint is just FUD. Sometimes it really is just a bad neighbor problem.
You fix it by moving ASICs indoors with proper sound baffling, setting real zoning restrictions, and using immersion cooling instead of 100 dB fan walls. Bitcoin doesn't need to make 80-year-olds miserable to work. It just needs to be mined somewhere with cheap power, low cooling costs, and space.
Bitcoin mining is messy and energy-hungry and can be a terrible neighbor. It's also one of the most important systems humanity has built in the last 50 years. Electricity goes in, sound money comes out. No central bank, no gatekeepers, no bailouts.
If you want to fight noise pollution, water waste, or crony energy deals, I'm with you. If you want to use that fight to kill Bitcoin entirely, count me out. Because Bitcoin without energy is just a PDF of the whitepaper, and that's worth exactly zero sats.