The humble dorm is a place for undergraduate students to study, chill out, make new friends, throw wild dorm parties, and of course, mine Bitcoin (BTC).
Blake Kaufman, a masters student in market research and self-proclaimed “data guy,” has connected an S9 bitcoin miner to the bitcoin network.
He won the S9 miner in a raffle at a Bitcoin meetup in central Michigan and immediately set about learning how to use it.
Blake has consistently turned up at every https://t.co/2Q6OuIwW4O event with at least one friend, tremendous attitude, and unmatched enthusiasm.
Nice that you won the S9 raffle!
Have fun with these KYC free sats and soak up the heat this winter! https://t.co/AQNzDjnDGC
— Mid-Michigan Bitcoin (@517Bitcoin) November 17, 2022
During a video call with Cointelegraph, Blake joked that he knew next to nothing about mining before the giveaway. The moment he won, he raced to the nearest place that offered a power cord and ethernet connection to try it out, his father’s office.
“We turned it on and never heard one [an S9] Before. And you know, when they start, they immediately crank it up to 100% and we’re all just in the room like – oh my god – that thing is loud! We ran it for probably two hours and walked into this office and it was hot.”
The hot and loud realization got his brain going. Michigan winter is fast approaching and his university is providing free electricity. Why not mine bitcoin from a dorm and use the waste heat? A small but audible hurdle had to be overcome. “How can we fix the noise?” he asked.
“I was just looking online on how to treat the S9 with noise canceling and this image of a cooler popped up on Pinterest. Me and my dad were like, ‘Let’s build it. Why not?’ So we bought a $5 cooler on Facebook Marketplace and had the pipes in our attic and spent about two hours drilling holes and it ended up working.”
The couple built the bitcoin mining cooler now housed in Blake’s dorm. The finished product would not look out of place in any college dorm and is “quieter, actually, than air conditioning,” he explains.
Two angles of the cooler cased bitcoin miner.
But aren’t there any rules at the university against something like that? Won’t the energy-hungry bitcoin miner hit the university’s electricity bills?
“So the miner has about 900 watts per hour, a mini fridge about 60 to 100 watts per day. Then it draws a fair amount of electricity. I looked up all the rules and it didn’t say anywhere that you couldn’t mine bitcoin or use a bitcoin miner. So if they say you can’t, I’d say, okay, you didn’t say I couldn’t.”
In short, Blake doesn’t break any rules. In addition, a miner in a dormitory in a large university with thousands of students is unlikely to arouse suspicion. It’s an ode to the famous adage, attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, that sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.
The ASIC S9 is now spinning, generating approximately 0.000001 BTC, or 100 satoshis – the smallest amount of a bitcoin – per block of bitcoin, which occurs on average every 10 minutes. It means “about a dollar a day” in fiat money. That’s a paltry amount, but not to be scoffed at as a student.
Blake’s total expenses for starting his bitcoin mining project were a cooler and some cables for less than $20, and he can probably reuse the cooler over the summer.
The inside of the mining cooler.
Incidentally, Blake’s next challenge is figuring out what to do when the weather improves and the mercury rises. Peak summer days in Michigan can reach 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius). As a result, the outside air temperature does not cool the miner, an important part of its operation:
“So I’ll have to come up with something, maybe put it in a box of ice cubes and then something like that. I do not know yet.”
Blake has already considered using the Bitcoin miner to heat his family’s home after graduation. The idea, Blake explains, is to experiment to see if he can offset gas costs at home and make it profitable. “It’s just unfortunate because our electricity costs in Michigan are $0.14 per kilowatt hour.”
Michigan’s energy costs are relatively high in the United States, as indicated by a darker purple color. Source: Chooseenergy.com
Electricity and heating costs are higher in Michigan than in energy-producing states like Texas. Using the waste heat from bitcoin mining could be a way to offset energy costs.
Related: The Bitcoin Shitcoin Machine: Mining BTC with biogas
In fact, harnessing the waste heat from bitcoin miners is a growing trend, particularly prevalent among home workers, or “chicken shack miners” as they are known. Bitcoin Gandalf from Braiins Marketing Team told Cointelegraph:
Chicken Shack miners are the backbone of the Bitcoin network hash rate. It’s amazing to see all the different ways they come to me. They do an invaluable service in keeping the hash rate decentralized.”
Armed with vast amounts of Bitcoin knowledge, Blake has since tried to overwhelm his classmates and even professors. Unfortunately, some of them believe that “Bitcoin is a scam”. He has made it his mission to set the record straight:
“I email these teachers and say, ‘Hey, what are office hours? Let’s talk. You can’t just come out and say bitcoin is a scam when there’s a bitcoiner in the room.”
Meanwhile, the S9 is floating around in his dorm room, contributing to a network that Blake strongly supports and generating 100% “free money”.
Well, “Besides the $30,000 in tuition I pay a year, but it’s 100% free electricity,” he joked.
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