Would you sell your home to buy more Bitcoin? Perhaps some readers would.
Would you sell your house and downsize while driving down your living costs, to acquire more Bitcoin? I’m certain that some of you reading this have already done just that.
How about the extreme and borderline insane? Would you sell your family home and move into an off-grid trailer-come-Bitcoin-mining-science-project, where you inject all of your time and intellectual capital into stacking as much Bitcoin as possible?
I scour the world looking for interesting Bitcoin stories and scoops, and I’ve met one individual who has done just that. And we’re calling him Off Grid Steve.
Hopefully, Steve’s actions will inspire you to tinker a little more with Bitcoin, and at the very least, it will stretch your imagination of what Bitcoin can and will achieve.
Steve is a warm, rough and ready, middle-aged bloke who runs a small business in the UK as a systems engineer. I was fortunate enough to meet Steve at a Bitcoin Conference in Edinburgh in 2022, when he first told me about his plan.
“I’m going to work out how feasible it is to heat my home with heat from Bitcoin miners which consume electricity from solar panels and batteries, ” he shouted at me over the din of bagpipes in downtown Edinburgh.
The off-grid trailer, or caravan, is all part of a larger mission, he explained — one we will delve into in this article.
I reunited with Steve this Spring, in a sleepy suburban English town that shall remain nameless. Steve picked me up in Slough, outer London, and drove me to his caravan in his brand-new Tesla. Not a very low-time preference purchase, I teased him.
However, an electric car means no reliance on petrol stations. All the power that Steve consumes at home or on the road has to be made at home.
Mining for Profit and Heat
In Steve’s toasty home, I quickly learned how he kept it so warm. Solar panels cover every inch of roof, as well as the shipping container which also doubles as his workshop. Even in the bleak British winter, the panels generate enough electricity to power up the following: two ASIC miners, household appliances such as his kettle, a few TVs and Steve’s home office, batteries, and the rack of servers in the shipping container.
On a summer’s day, Steve makes about $15 a day by simply mining Bitcoin with the sun’s rays. But the genius innovation, and a space we will see tremendous growth this decade is what Steve does with the excess heat from the miner.
When the sun calls in sick for days on end—a common occurrence in the UK—there are two large batteries that Steve keeps charged. However, he has overbuilt the solar capacity by a factor, as shown by the drone shot.
One ASIC runs 24/7 in the shipping container, and the heat from that miner pumps under the floor of the caravan. In said cold and wet winters, Steve says one ASIC will keep the entire house at 14 Celsius or 57 Fahrenheit. That’s uncomfortably nippy, so he moves the second miner, which has tentacles. Steve’s mother knits the woolen, insulated miner tentacles which direct heat into other parts of the house, as shown here:
Steve has christened the tentacle attachment device and casing for the ASIC, a Hush Box. Hush, because the lead lined casing almost silences the noise generated by the Bitcoin miner.
If you have seen or played with a Bitcoin miner before, you’ll be aware just how much heat and noise these things generate. The noise is effectively useless, but the heat could help to solve many Northern Hemisphere countries’ energy crises in the coming years.
Here’s a diagram of the heat distribution of just two miners. In the Spring and Summer, Steve channels the heat to the outside because, were the ASICs to channel the heat indoors, it would create a sauna.
I’ve reported on Bitcoin miners implementing creative solutions for heat previously: from a Bitcoin miner heated swimming pool to Beef Jerky that’s dried and cured by miner heat, to a timber mill in Scandinavia that dries logs with Bitcoin miner heat. Steve’s solution is one of the most slick, DIY setups I’ve seen that are comfortable enough to live with. Incidentally, Steve shares the mini caravan with his partner and two daughters.
Plus, it’s a pilot project. Steve is four years into his eight year plan. He wanted to see and understand if it is possible to heat a home and be paid for the privilege. So far, the numbers are looking good: he has consumed zero electricity from the grid since February—which means no electricity bills, while his heating bill is zero, too.
For the next four years the plan is to expand the operation to other small caravan style homes in which Bitcoiners can live off grid in small, warm and Bitcoin powered communities.
Buying Bitcoin in the United Kingdom vs. The States
It’s important to note that while the United States is an excellent Bitcoin stacking destination, across the pond it’s borderline impossible to buy a whole coin.
Steve sold his family home in 2022 to stack and purchase the goods for the Bitcoin project. He did his best to lump as much fiat as possible into the hardest money known to mankind, with some left over to buy a mobile home, solar panels and two S19 ASIC Bitcoin miners.
It took Steve months to accumulate the Bitcoin that you can buy with Swan Private right now:
*I’ve been researching this for eight years. I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s my money, I would like to invest for the future. You can walk into a casino, take £50,000 on your credit card and bosh it on black.*
Steve criticizes the UK regulators for making it easy to put the equivalent of one whole coin on a credit card in a casino, but buying small digits of Bitcoin is heavily regulated.
The future of Bitcoin and “waste” heat
I gleaned two things over the course of this adventure. One: as Bitcoiners, we’re going to win. There are plenty of Steves around the world—maybe you are one of them—Bitcoiners mad enough to give up something and doggedly work on Bitcoin-based solutions while fighting, evangelizing, and building a better future.
And two; we’re scratching the surface of what can be achieved with Bitcoin mining “waste” heat. Imagine a world in which homes and hand dryers, office towers and institutions are heated by Bitcoin, it might be closer than we think.
And what if, Heaven forbid, we are all wrong about Bitcoin? Let’s parry that question to Steve, because he’s in far deeper than any of us:
“Well, you can spend every day worrying about what might happen, or you can get on with your life. So I figure if the worst comes to the worst, and we are all wrong for some reason, I’ll just get up tomorrow and carry on with a new plan. That’s basically it, isn’t it?”
A stoic and bittersweet response. Fortunately, we are right about Bitcoin. Better still, there are Bitcoiners like Steve all over the world who continue to tinker, test and take Bitcoin’s technology to the limit. Swan calls these people the Intransigent Minority.
Joe Nakamoto
If you’d like to know more about Steve’s project, check the YouTube video, “He sold everything to go Off-Grid.” Since filming the mini documentary, Steve is now selling, or at least consulting for Bitcoin miner heat projects under the BTCHushBox brand, https://btchushbox.com/.
Joe is a research and interview journalist and polyglot who left mainstream reporting at Oxford Business Group and Bloomberg Professional Services in 2021 to pursue real, first-hand Bitcoin reporting. In 2024, he left Cointelegraph to pursue Bitcoin video journalism worldwide under the moniker Joe Nakamoto. He moonlights as an MC at Bitcoin and crypto conferences but spends most of his time creating mini-documentaries for his YouTube channel.
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