Brooklyn Bathhouse Users Outraged by Bitcoin Mining Water Heating

Bathhouse Utilizing Bitcoin Mining Rigs to Heat its Spa

Users on Instagram and Twitter have been debating a bathhouse in Brooklyn, New York, after it announced that it is utilizing Bitcoin (BTC) mining rigs to heat its spa.

In a June 21 Instagram post, Bathhouse detailed how Bitcoin mining rigs running at their Brooklyn location produce heat as a byproduct, which is then taken by heat exchangers and used to heat the pools through a circulating system in three steps.

The process of creating valid blocks that add transaction records to Bitcoin’s public ledger, known as the blockchain, is called Bitcoin mining. This process requires a great deal of energy, which is often sourced from fossil fuels, leading to increased carbon emissions and worries about its ecological impact.

In January of 2022, an estimation was made that the Bitcoin mining network was responsible for producing 42 megatons of carbon dioxide, which accounted for 0.08% of the global total.

Instagrammers who follow the Bathhouse account were not all convinced by the concept. Annalarranaga, one of the users, commented, “This makes me less of a fan of Bathhouse. I’m now wondering who is extracting this cryptocurrency, who is profiting from it, and if I support that. We need to have full disclosure.”

Another user asserted that people who frequent the Bathhouse desire “heat that is clean and unaltered for their salt baths, not that heat which is polluted.” On the contrary, some took pleasure in the contempt that other users had for the pools warmed by mining, while at least one person was pleased with them, exclaiming, “I believe this is a great way to heat the pools and I’m going to check out this place due to this.”

Reactions to Carbon-Neutral Bitcoin Mining

Despite Bathhouse’s example of carbon-neutral Bitcoin mining, there are still those who are concerned about the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, leading to negative reactions from them.

CleanSpark has acquired two Bitcoin mining campuses for $9.3M.

This isn’t the initial occasion that the warmth produced by Bitcoin mining has been reused to save energy. In Europe, miners have come up with imaginative approaches to reuse the warmth created by solving legitimate Bitcoin blocks. In Norway, Bitcoin miner and data center Kryptovault utilizes the hot air produced by Bitcoin mining rigs to dry out cut logs.

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