Brian Snyder's favorite story from the early days of Bitcoin mining involves a real estate agent and a breaker panel. In Phoenix, he and his team toured office space rather than commercial property, looking for leases with power included. With the agent standing by, they opened the panel and counted breakers to work out how many miners would fit. It worked for two or three months at a time. Then the landlord kicked them out, and they moved on to the next office.
Snyder, CEO of Kaboomracks, told that story at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, held July 25–27, 2023, in a talk that ran from home PCs and garages to a cooling technology he said had not been shown in ASIC mining before. Bitcoin traded at $29,144 on July 25, 2023. On October 17, 2026 it traded at $81,466.
From Laptops to ASICs
Snyder started mining in 2012, toward the end of the GPU era, as FPGAs and ASICs arrived. He walked the room through the earlier history. In 2009 and 2010 no special hardware was needed; a PC or laptop could mine at around 20 kilohashes a second, when Bitcoin had no value. By the end of 2010 and into 2011, GPU mining took over, with home builds such as GPUs mounted in egg crates.
I started Bitcoin mining back in 2012
Brian Snyder · 0:19
FPGAs came around 2011. They were far more power efficient than GPUs but short-lived; he pointed to Butterfly Labs units on his slide. Then came ASICs, which he said have dominated ever since, at around 200 times the power of GPUs. As the network moved from gigahashes to terahashes and petahashes, money came into the market and miners went looking for larger deployments.
Office Leases, Data Centers and Heat
The Phoenix office leases were one answer. Data centers were another, and a popular one at the time. Miners did not need to spend capital on infrastructure; they put their money into machines and paid around 20 cents per kilowatt-hour. Warehouses needed a build-out, and with little hardware available, that path was slower.
we would actually overheat data centers
Brian Snyder · 4:02
Data centers were not designed for ASICs running 24 hours a day, he said, and his team was constantly fighting the air conditioning. They built rack-mount shelving for S9s or S3s and deployed it in data centers in Washington, where power was cheap, and built server enclosures for GPUs to keep the heat moving out.
Purpose-Built Facilities and Containers
Around 2015 and 2016, he said, the industry moved to purpose-built facilities, designed from the ground up for airflow, with circuits planned to run at 100 percent. He showed photos of a build in Washington from about 2016. Kaboomracks has an engineering team that models facilities in 3D, and he showed one designed that way.
Then there are mining containers, such as Bitmain's units, which he described as simple and quick to erect. His caution was about the electrical code. The Bitmain container he discussed is compliant with the 2017 National Electrical Code, he said, but in states other than Texas, Minnesota and a few others, operators need to meet the 2020 code, which means service entry ratings, an energy-limiting maintenance switch and other features.
we've got a kit and solution and a pathway for you to take that cheap N5 that you bought and get it up into 2020 compliance
Brian Snyder · 6:03
He pointed buyers to Tim, Kaboomracks' lead engineer. He also noted the rise of hosting as a service, as home miners were pushed out of their garages by residential power rates, and said Kaboomracks offers hosting for small and medium miners. With a managed site, he joked, you don't hear the noise, and your wife doesn't hate you for running an ASIC in a garage at 200 degrees.
Current Cooling Options and Their Limits
Snyder listed the cooling technologies already in use: two-phase immersion cooling developed by Bitfury, deployed in Georgia; Bitmain's hydro cooling; MicroBT's Whatsminer hydro deployments, which had been presented earlier that day; and single-phase immersion. He called them great technology but limited in other ways, chiefly by capital cost and the expertise needed to run the facilities, which he called a barrier to entry.
Apart from two-phase immersion, he said, these are old ideas. Water blocks have been around almost as long as computers. What has changed is that chips are getting smaller and denser, which makes cooling them more important.
He mentioned one newer approach, an active cooler that uses a piezoelectric agitator and frequencies to move air off the chip and extract heat at higher volume. His verdict was that it is extremely expensive and not practical for ASIC mining.
The Force Physics Micro-Channel Array
His announcement was a partnership with a company called Force Physics to adapt its technology to ASIC mining. On his slide, a traditional heatsink sat beside a Force Physics micro-channel array. He said the large heatsink handles about 1.9 watts per square centimeter.
these arrays can do close to 31 watts per centimeter squared so you're looking at a magnitude of cooling potential almost 20x that of traditional Technologies
Brian Snyder · 9:04
Those are his figures from the stage. He said Force Physics had already built practical applications for edge cases such as 5G cell towers.
The modified machine was on the Kaboomracks booth. He called it the first ASIC fitted with Force Physics technology and said it had been run in Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature reached 126 degrees and the chips held stable at 78 degrees Celsius. He invited the room to the booth to see it.
The full session is on the Mining Disrupt YouTube channel. Mining Disrupt 2027 runs March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.