At Mining Disrupt Miami, held June 24–26, 2024, Alan Gallo opened his session with a story about a 17-year-old in Canada who bought a single miner to heat his family's coffee shop. Gallo, the business development and marketing manager for JSBIT, used that client and two others to make one argument: ASIC heat recapture lets mining become part of a business rather than the only business.
Bitcoin closed at $61,272 on June 24, 2024, the event's opening day; from the stage, Gallo put it "teeter-tottering around $65,000" and noted that some in the room had watched it fall the day before. Today it trades at $82,535. Gallo's case did not rest on price. It rested on what operators do with the heat their machines already produce.
The 17-year-old who turned a coffee shop into a mining farm
Gallo framed the session around partnerships, old and new, and around what people in the industry are doing to get through bear markets and do well in bull markets. JSBIT, he said, sells ASIC hardware and has done so for many years with its partners Bitmain and MicroBT, which helps the company understand what its clients are looking for wherever they are.
It's about speaking on what people are doing in the industry to survive bear markets and succeed in bull markets.
Alan Gallo · 0:26
The first story came from a client in Canada. Gallo met him when he was 17. The young man said he and his father owned a coffee shop and wanted to heat it with a miner. Gallo, who had just started in the industry, was happy to make the sale and sold him his first machine.
A few months later the client came back for 15 more, and he kept buying along the way. More recently he asked for 50 more, and Gallo asked what he was doing with them. Two years after the first sale, the client was 19. He and his father now owned six coffee shops, each running about 10 miners that heat the shop and its water. Gallo said the answer blew his mind: he had known people were doing this, but not how it played out. He then messaged as many friends, clients and connections as he could to find out what else they were doing.
Me and my dad own six coffee shops, each one running 10 or so miners, each one helping us heat the coffee shop.
Alan Gallo · 4:34
Why the bear market scars are real
Gallo did not wave away the fear in the room. When JSBIT first came to Mining Disrupt in 2022, he said, Bitcoin was roughly $21,000, coming off a high of $65,000. A lot of people picked up scars in that bear market, and from 2022 to 2023 the price did not rise much. JSBIT kept showing up, he said, because it was looking at the long term.
He set out the hardware prices as he saw them. Three years earlier, a 100 TH/s miner sold for about $80 per terahash, and he had heard of buyers paying up to $100 per terahash for the same machines, which still sold out. At the time of the talk, he said, 200 TH/s-plus miners were going for under $25 per terahash, yet buyers were not lining up. For many in that earlier market, it had been their first bull run, and they did not yet know what a bear market looked like. His answer to that fear was a set of options for using the machines inside another business.
Options to make mining part of your business rather than your only business.
Alan Gallo · 4:04
Growing fruits and vegetables through the off-season
The second story came from South America. A client there grows fruits and vegetables. Eight months of the year his business is solid, Gallo said, but for four months he cannot grow, and he had to let his team go.
He started buying used miners from JSBIT and used their heat to work through those four months, getting a head start on the season. That let him keep most of his people and keep earning. In Gallo's telling, the price of Bitcoin was not what drove the decision.
He is using heat recapture to grow fruits and vegetables.
Alan Gallo · 5:39
For this client, the miners served the farm. Mining was a tool for the main business, not the business itself.
They just saw an opportunity for their business.
Alan Gallo · 6:10
Heat as a product, not a byproduct
A third example came from Asia. A man there pumps the heat from his miners through a tube into a pool and uses it to grow fish. The stories do not end, Gallo said: whether someone has real estate, is growing fish, or is just trying to make ends meet, ASICs can be part of the business.
Gallo said he told these stories so that newer miners could find their confidence in mining again and rethink what the heat is worth. In each case the heat that would otherwise be vented was doing work: heating a coffee shop and its water, extending a growing season, warming a fish pool.
And shift their focus as a mindset by viewing heat as a positive outcome of mining rather than a negative one.
Alan Gallo · 6:45
A new manufacturer joins the JSBIT lineup
Gallo also used the session to announce that JSBIT was adding another manufacturer to its line of products. He stressed that the deal did not happen overnight: JSBIT had worked with the team for several years to understand its R&D process and to make sure its mission matched JSBIT's own.
He called the product excellence incredible and said the manufacturer's R&D ran over the course of months to produce the machines on offer. He added that this was not JSBIT's first Mining Disrupt.
Gallo closed with a line he credited to Michael Saylor: if you are not willing to hold Bitcoin for 10 years, do not hold it for 10 minutes. Once an operator decides what to do with a mining farm, or with the business it is added to, he said, the heat becomes part of the plan. He signed off the way he began: "Simply put, we sell ASIC hardware."