Tulips and bitcoin have both been associated with financial bubbles in their time, but in a giant greenhouse near Amsterdam, the Dutch are trying to make them work together.
Engineer Bert de Groot inspected the six bitcoin miners as they performed complex sums to earn cryptocurrency, filling the air with a noisy whine along with a blast of warmth.
That warmth was heating the hothouse where rows of tulips grow, cutting the farmers’ reliance on gas whose price has soared since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Photo: AFP
The servers in turn are powered by solar energy from the roof, reducing the normally huge electricity costs for mining and cutting the impact on the environment.
Meanwhile, both the farmers and De Groot’s company, Bitcoin Brabant, are earning cryptocurrency, which is still attracting investors, despite a recent crash in the market.
“We think with this way of heating our greenhouse, but also earning some bitcoin we have a win-win situation,” flower farmer Danielle Koning, 37, told reporters.
The Netherlands’ love of tulips caused the first stock market crash in the 17th century when speculation bulb prices caused prices to soar, only to later collapse.
Now the Netherlands is the world’s biggest tulip producer and also the second-biggest agricultural exporter overall after the US, with much grown in greenhouses.
However, the low-lying country is keenly aware of the effect of the agricultural industry on climate change, while farmers are struggling with high energy prices.
Meanwhile, mining for cryptocurrency requires huge amounts of electricity to power computers, leading to an environmental impact amid global efforts to tackle climate change.
De Groot, 35, who only started his business earlier this year and has 17 customers, including restaurants and warehouses, said this makes bitcoin and tulips a perfect fit.
“This operation is actually carbon negative, as are all the operations I basically build,” said the long-haired de Groot, sporting an orange polo shirt with his firm’s logo. “We’re actually improving the environment.”
He is also selling tulips online for bitcoin via a business called Bitcoinbloem.
The collaboration started when Koning saw a Twitter video De Groot had made about bitcoin mining and called him up.
Now there are six servers at their hothouse, whose exact location Koning asked to keep secret to avoid thieves targeting the 15,000 euro (US$15,812) machines.
Koning’s company owns half of them and keeps the bitcoin they produce, while De Groot is allowed to keep his three servers there in exchange for monthly visits to clean dust and insects out of the servers’ fans.
With a 20°C difference between the air entering the machine and leaving them, this provides the heat needed to grow the tulips and to dry the bulbs that produce them.
“The most important thing we get out of it is, we save on natural gas,” Koning said. “Secondly, well, we earn bitcoin by running them in the greenhouse.”
Huge energy costs have driven some Dutch agricultural firms that often rely on greenhouses to stop growing this year, while others have even gone bankrupt, Koning said.
Meanwhile, philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who developed the idea of the unpredictable but historic “black swan” event, has compared bitcoin to the “Tulipmania” that engulfed the Netherlands nearly 400 years ago.
This saw prices for a single bulb rise to more than 100 times the average annual income at the time before the bubble burst in 1637, causing banks to fail and people to lose their life savings.
The cryptocurrency sector is reeling from the collapse of a major exchange — with bitcoin worth about US$17,170 per unit, down from a high of US$68,000 in November last year — but De Groot is not worried.
“I have absolutely no worries about the long-term value proposition of an immutable monetary system,” he said. “Bitcoin will last forever.”
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