Last week, we talked about Finland.

And how Bitcoin miners there are using excess nuclear energy not just to help secure the network and mine Bitcoins…

But to heat thousands of homes through the long Nordic winter.

But here’s the thing: This idea isn’t limited to Finland. It’s (slowly) happening in America too. 

Enter a guy named Tyler Stevens.

From Rockets to Radiators

Tyler cut his teeth in aerospace. Fresh out of grad school in mechanical engineering, he landed at United Launch Alliance—the government’s answer to SpaceX.

There, he worked on rockets.

Well, a rocket.

And then, in 2024, he watched the rocket he’d spent two years building finally launch… stayed up until 1 a.m. to see it fly… slept six hours…

And quit his job the next morning.

Why? Because he saw bigger potential in Bitcoin. Specifically, the heat it throws off.

Every watt that runs through a Bitcoin miner eventually turns into heat. This heat isn’t a waste product, says Tyler…

That heat is a product.

So Tyler did the most obvious thing he could imagine: he started a company—Exergy—to turn Bitcoin miners into heaters. Furnaces. Boilers. Water heaters.

In other words: to decentralize hash rate by bringing it into the home.

Millions From Thin (Cold) Air

When I was in Helsinki, I saw how district heating could integrate with Bitcoin mining.

Tyler’s arguing the same thing can work here in the U.S.—even without lots of nuclear energy.

He recently ran the numbers in Alaska. Heating bills are so expensive, the federal LIHEAP program and Alaska’s own heating assistance funds together pay out between $25–45 million a year to cover fuel costs.

On a per-household basis, that works out to about $600–$3,000 annually. (With the highest amounts going to remote communities that still rely on diesel or heating oil.)

Tyler argues that, even at the conservative end, Alaska could save roughly a third to a half of its current subsidy budget given the “Bitcoin rebate.”

Alaskans still get the heat they need, plus maybe a trickle of Bitcoin for their trouble, and the state treasury keeps millions that would otherwise be burned up in diesel fumes.

Why This Matters

For years, Bitcoin mining was a game of scale—warehouses, flare gas, silicon races.

But efficiency improvements have plateaued. The next leap won’t come from bigger data centers. It’ll come from smarter integrations.

Consider:

• Half of the world’s energy use is heat.

• Comfort heat alone (homes, water, pools, offices) is hundreds of times larger than Bitcoin’s current energy footprint.

• Even capturing a sliver of that demand could double the network’s security—while making everyday heating bills cheaper.

Here’s the part I like most about this idea.

Heat into Gold

Bucky Fuller once said that pollution is just unused resources. Waste only exists because we haven’t figured out how to harvest its value.

He wasn’t just trying to sound clever.

He was making a point about design. Nature has no waste stream—one organism’s leftovers become another’s food. Dead trees turn into soil. Carbon dioxide feeds plants. Even volcanic ash eventually fertilizes forests.

During the industrial age, people didn’t really think this way. Waste was just waste. Smoke poured from factories, slag heaps piled up, scrap metal was discarded.

Take aluminum, for example.

In the 1930s it was treated as trash once a plane wing or soda can was finished.

Fuller saw this was crazy.

Aluminum, after all, is virtually infinitely recyclable.

Also, while smelting a metric ton of fresh aluminum costs about 15 MWh in energy (enough to power an average U.S. home for 16 months), recycling it takes about 5% of that.

Today, roughly 75% of all aluminum ever produced is still in use today. There’s no such thing as waste—you just put it in the wrong place.

That’s the lens Tyler is using when he looks at Bitcoin miners. Critics see waste heat and excess power draw. Tyler sees a product that pays for itself.

Instead of venting that heat into the air, we can route it into boilers, water heaters, and radiant flooring.

The result is heat you’d be paying for anyway—now subsidized by the Bitcoin network.

It’s a complete inversion of incentives.

Just The Beginning

When I left Finland, I wrote: “Sometimes adoption doesn’t look like a bull run. Sometimes it looks like rye bread.”

This is often how new ideas spread. Quietly. Unnoticed. Through boring stuff. Like pipes, floorboards, radiators. Through systems that already exist.

Heating you can trust. Security you don’t notice. Baked into daily life.

That’s one of many surprising new loopholes in the new rules of money.

And it’s just getting started.