Ethan Ellenberg ended his talk at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024 with the line that had also served as its title: don't die mining Bitcoin. The founder of Moonshot, a builder of electrical gear for mining and data center sites, used his time on stage at the June 24–26, 2024 event to explain the codes behind that line: where they came from, what they require of a mining site, and how following them moves liability away from the owner.
And most importantly, don't die mining Bitcoin, right.
Ethan Ellenberg · 12:46
From production wells to switchboards
Ellenberg studied mechanical engineering at the University of Texas and spent more than eight years in oil and gas, building control systems for production wells. In 2020 he moved to data centers, doing building controls and energy management for hyperscale sites. When China banned Bitcoin mining, he decided to mine himself and to start with at least five megawatts. He asked Compute North, which no longer exists, for power and was quoted five cents all in. The contract never came: Compute North had the power but not the pods, and told him it needed a thousand of them.
He put a pod design together with fabricators and sold none, but the requests that followed were for electrical panels. Ellenberg had worked at a UL 508A shop. His first client wired a quarter million dollars and wanted the order in a week; the shop he had lined up cancelled, the second had three people on staff for a job of about 600 man-hours, and Moonshot did not yet have an LLC. They hired electricians and wired the panels in the parking lot.
We did over $7 million with that client.
Ethan Ellenberg · 2:40
The money that started Moonshot came from his own trading. He said he turned $500 into $50,000 in Dogecoin, then moved into Shiba Inu.
And I turned it into $175,000, which that's what funded Moonshot.
Ethan Ellenberg · 3:10
Moonshot was founded in 2021. Ellenberg said it has deployed over 400 megawatts of electrical infrastructure, does work for Google and other hyperscale and AI data centers, and was building a 200 megawatt facility in West Texas. Its products include UL 891 switchboards, UL 67 panel boards, UL 508 control panels, ETL-listed PDUs and transformers. The company's aim, he said, is to build fast, build right and build compliant, because many panels on the market do not meet all the codes.
Where UL and the NEC came from
Ellenberg gave the room a short history of both. Underwriters Laboratories dates to 1894. William Henry Merrill Jr., an MIT graduate working for the Boston Board of Fire Underwriters, was tasked with overseeing construction at the World's Columbian Exposition, and concluded that insurers needed a code of standards for the equipment before they would underwrite it. The National Electrical Code followed in 1897. It is published by the National Fire Protection Association and, he said, came out of the great fire of 1871 and the need for installations to follow one standard.
What an arc flash does
Mining sites need those rules, he said, because they carry a lot of power. He put arc flashes, or arc explosions, at 5 to 10 a day, with 2,000 people injured each year; an injury means six to eight months of lost work, or death. The average medical cost for a worker who survives is $1.5 million, and litigation costs a company $5 to $10 million. A video of a test dummy caught in an arc flash would not play, so he described an incident he had heard of in which a worker touched equipment, it exploded, and his silhouette was left on the wall.
The heat from an arc flash is over 20,000 degrees Celsius, which is twice the heat of the surface of the sun.
Ethan Ellenberg · 7:02
He listed the causes: inadvertent contact, such as touching two phases; poor work conditions; loose connections, which he called a big one for gear shipped halfway across the country, since vibration can loosen them; improper installation; and animals. Rats and snakes, he said, get into gear, especially in West Texas.
The code sections he named
The first item a serious buyer looks for, Ellenberg said, is a set of stamped engineering drawings. On one of Moonshot's first sites in West Texas, the team sketched a layout and the engineer moved two or four transformers by eight feet.
That eight additional feet in wire and conduit cost a quarter million dollar change.
Ethan Ellenberg · 9:00
NEC section 110.10 requires short-circuit current ratings (SCCR) on electrical equipment, and a UL-listed shop must put an SCCR rating on everything it builds. Many builders, he said, never calculate the available fault current, although there are tools for it; he named an Eaton app that takes the transformer data. Sites with 3,000 to 3,500 kVA transformers need equipment rated above 65 kAIC, and since the code requires every piece of equipment to be rated above the available fault current, that means 80 or 100 kAIC gear, with longer lead times and higher cost.
He named two more sections. NEC 230.95 requires ground fault protection on all equipment over 1,000 amps, monitoring all three phases and neutral and tripping the breaker on a ground fault. NEC 240.67, added in 2017, requires systems over 1,200 amps to offer a reduced energy let-through setting, a maintenance mode that makes work safer for the operator. An arc flash study, done by a professional engineer for $4,000 or $5,000, produces the labels that state the PPE needed to operate each piece of gear. He also listed grounding studies for sites over 10 megawatts, coordination studies with the utility so the site does not see nuisance trips, and lockout and tagout procedures.
Asset or liability
Ellenberg framed the whole talk as one question for the owners in the room: is your site an asset or a liability? An unsafe site full of equipment that cannot be resold is a liability; a producing site with resale value is an asset. Owners who plan to move from Bitcoin mining into HPC or AI data centers, he said, will find that publicly traded companies look for certain things in that equipment.
Each step shifts risk. Without stamped one-line drawings, OSHA looks at the owner after an incident. With UL-listed gear carrying SCCR ratings, the liability moves to the shop that built it. With an arc flash study on file, the owner can show that crews had been told the proper PPE.
You're pushing the risk far away from you as the owner, right, and you're making your site more of an asset.
Ethan Ellenberg · 12:16
He closed on the industry's name: no arc flash incidents and no injured workers, and doing things right by taking these steps.
Bitcoin traded at $61,272 when Ellenberg spoke in June 2024 and at $81,451 on October 17, 2026. The conversation continues at Mining Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.