A war is brewing among states to attract bitcoin miners, and new data shows that a whole lot of them are headed to New York, Kentucky, Georgia, and Texas.
Within the U.S., 19.9% of bitcoin’s hashrate – that is, the collective computing power of miners – is in New York, 18.7% in Kentucky, 17.3% is in Georgia, and 14% in Texas, according to Foundry USA, which is the biggest mining pool in North America and the fifth-largest globally.
A mining pool lets a single miner combine its hashing power with thousands of other miners all over the world, and there are dozens from which to choose.
“This is the first time we’ve actually had state-level insight on where miners are, unless you wanted to go cobble through all the public filings and try to figure it out that way,” said Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, who presented Foundry’s data at the Texas Blockchain Summit in Austin on Friday. “This is a much more efficient way of figuring out where mining occurs in America.”
But as Carter points out, the Foundry dataset does not account for all of the U.S. mining hashrate, since not all U.S.-based mining farms enlist the services of this pool. Riot Blockchain, for example, is one of the largest publicly-traded mining companies in America, with a huge presence in Texas. They don’t use Foundry, so their hashrate is not accounted for in this dataset – which is part of the reason why Texas’ mining presence is understated.
Though the dataset only captures a portion of the country’s domestic mining market, it does point to nationwide trends that are reshaping the debate around carbon’s footprint.
Many of the states ranking the highest are epicenters of renewable energy, a fact which has already begun to recast the narrative among skeptics that bitcoin is bad for the environment.
While Carter acknowledges that U.S. mining isn’t wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets.
“The migration is definitely a net positive overall,” he said. “Hashrate moving to the U.S. will mean much lower carbon intensity.”
Where did all the miners go
When Beijing decided to kick out all its crypto miners this spring, about half of the bitcoin network went dark practically overnight. While the network itself didn’t skip a beat, the incident did set off the biggest migration of bitcoin miners ever seen.
The Foundry dataset shows the biggest bitcoin mining operations are in some of the states with the most renewable – a game changer for the debate around bitcoin’s environmental impact.
Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power – which also tend to be renewable.
New York counts its nuclear power plants toward its 100% carbon free electricity goal, and critically, New York produces more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains. It was the third-largest producer of hydroelectricity in the nation, as well.
New York’s chilly climate – plus its previously abandoned industrial infrastructure ripe for repurposing – have also made it an ideal spot for bitcoin mining.
Crypto mining company Coinmint, for example, operates facilities in New York, including one in a former Alcoa Aluminum smelter in Massena, which taps into the area’s abundant wind power, plus the cheap electricity produced from the dams that line the St. Lawrence River. The Massena site, at 435 megawatts of transformer capacity, is billed as one of – if not the – largest bitcoin mining facility in the U.S.
New York was weighing legislation this year to ban bitcoin mining for three years so it could run an environmental assessment to gauge its greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers have since largely walked it back.
“Bitcoin mining in New York is actually very low in carbon intensity, given its hydro power, and, as a consequence, if New York were to ban bitcoin in-state, it would probably raise the carbon intensity of the bitcoin network overall,” said Carter. “It would be the complete opposite of what they wanted.”
Other states capturing a large share of America’s bitcoin mining industry include Kentucky and Georgia.
Beyond the fact that Kentucky’s governor is friendly to the industry, having just passed a law this year that grants certain tax exemptions to crypto mining operations, the state is also known for its hydroelectric and wind power.
Connecting rigs to otherwise stranded energy, like natural gas wells, is another power source. Although coal is also a big player in the energy mix, many mining operations there gravitate to renewables.
And then there’s Texas
Texas may rank fourth according to Foundry’s data set, but many experts believe there is no question that it is the leading jurisdiction for miners right now.
Some of the biggest names in bitcoin mining have set up shop in Texas, including Riot Blockchain, which has a 100-acre site in Rockdale, and Chinese miner Bitdeer, which is right down the road.
Orders for new ASICs – the specialty gear used to mint new bitcoin – show that tens of thousands more machines are due to be delivered in Texas, according to The Block Crypto.
The appeal of Texas comes down to a few big fundamentals: Crypto-friendly lawmakers, a deregulated power grid with real-time spot pricing, and perhaps most importantly, access to significant excess energy which is renewable, as well as stranded or flared natural gas.
The regulatory red carpet being rolled out for miners also makes the industry very predictable, according to Alex Brammer of Luxor Mining, a cryptocurrency pool built for advanced miners.
“It is a very attractive environment for miners to deploy large amounts of capital in,” he said. “The sheer number of land deals and power purchase agreements that are in various stages of negotiation is enormous.”
Some miners plug straight into the grid in order to power their rigs. ERCOT, the organization that operates Texas’ grid, has the cheapest utility-scale solar in the nation at 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. The grid is also rapidly adding wind and solar power.
“You just can’t beat the cost of power in West Texas, and when you couple that with a skilled power management company that can manage your demand response programs, it’s almost unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” continued Brammer.
Deregulated grids tend to have the best economics for miners, because they can buy spot energy.
“They can participate in economic dispatch, which means that they stop buying electricity when prices get high, so you have far more flexibility if you are active in the spot markets,” explained Carter.
Another major energy trend in the bitcoin mining business in Texas is using “stranded” natural gas to power rigs, which both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and makes money for the gas providers, as well as the miners.
Carter says that if this is fully exploited, flared gas in Texas alone could power 34% of the bitcoin network today – which would make Texas not only the clear leader in bitcoin mining in the U.S., but in the world.
Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi speaks at the opening night of the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 2024.
Rodin Eckenroth | Filmmagic | Getty Images
Intuit shares fell 6% in extended trading Thursday after the finance software maker issued a revenue forecast for the current quarter that trailed analysts’ estimates due to some sales being delayed.
Here’s how the company performed in comparison with LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $2.50 adjusted vs. $2.35 expected
Revenue: $3.28 billion vs. $3.14 billion
Revenue increased 10% year over year in the quarter, which ended Oct. 31, according to a statement. Net income fell to $197 million, or 70 cents per share, from $241 million, or 85 cents per share, a year ago.
While results for the fiscal first quarter topped estimates, second-quarter guidance was light. Intuit said it anticipates a single-digit decline in revenue from the consumer segment because of promotional changes for the TurboTax desktop software in retail environments. While that will affect revenue timing, it won’t have any impact on the full 2025 fiscal year.
Intuit called for second-quarter earnings of $2.55 to $2.61 per share, with $3.81 billion to $3.85 billion in revenue. The consensus from LSEG was $3.20 per share and $3.87 billion in revenue.
For the full year, Intuit expects $19.16 to $19.36 in adjusted earnings per share on $18.16 billion to $18.35 billion in revenue. That implies revenue growth of between 12% and 13%. Analysts polled by LSEG were looking for $19.33 in adjusted earnings per share and $18.26 billion in revenue.
Revenue from Intuit’s global business solutions group came in at $2.5 billion in the first quarter. The figure was up 9% and in line with estimates, according to StreetAccount. Formerly known as the small business and self-employed segment, the group includes Mailchimp, QuickBooks, small business financing and merchant payment processing.
“We are seeing good progress serving mid-market customers in MailChimp, but are seeing higher churn from smaller customers,” Sandeep Aujla, Intuit’s finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts. “We are addressing this by making product enhancements and driving feature discoverability and adoption to improve first-time use and customer retention.”
Better outcomes are a few quarters away, Aujla said.
CreditKarma revenue came in at $524 million, above StreetAccount’s $430 million consensus.
At Thursday’s close, Intuit shares were up about 9% so far in 2024, while the S&P 500 has gained almost 25% in the same period.
On Tuesday Intuit shares slipped 5% after The Washington Post said President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed “Department of Government Efficiency” had discussed developing a mobile app for federal income tax filing. But a mobile app for submitting returns from Intuit is “already available to all Americans,” CEO Sasan Goodarzi told CNBC’s Jon Fortt.
Goodarzi said on CNBC that he’s personally communicating with leaders of the incoming presidential administration.
On the earnings call, Goodarzi sounded optimistic about the economy.
“Our belief, which is not baked into our guidance, is that we will see an improved environment as we look ahead in 2025, particularly just with some of the things that I mentioned earlier around just interest rates, jobs, the regulatory environment,” he said. “These things have a real burden on businesses. And we believe that a better future is to come.”
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.