Company name: Heat bit
Founder: Alex Busarov
Date of establishment: April 2020
Location of the head office: At a distance
Number of employees: 25
Website: https://heatbit.com/
Public or private? Private
In early 2020, Alex Busarov was stuck in his Shanghai apartment during COVID. To quell his boredom, he ordered an Antminer S9, a Bitcoin mining machine, to play with.
After plugging it in, he quickly learned two things: Bitcoin miners are noisy and they run hot.
While Busarov saw the earlier byproduct as an annoyance, he saw the latter as an opportunity.
Fast forward to the present and Busarov and his team are preparing holiday shipments of bitcoin miners working quietly and serving as space heaters (and also as air purifiers) – the flagship product for his company, Heat bit.
Additionally, Busarov has created a product that helps decentralize Bitcoin’s hashrate dangerously centralized.
“The first kind of value I saw in this was how you can use energy to heat your home and mine Bitcoin at the same time, but then the mission started to evolve when I realized how important the decentralization of Bitcoin mining is” , Busarov told Bitcoin. Magazine. “I think we are enabling the most resilient infrastructure that Bitcoin can run on.”
How Heatbit devices work
Heatbit devices are 24 inches high and 8 inches in diameter. They are cylindrical in shape and have a sleek finish.
Getting started with a Heatbit device is “just as difficult as connecting a Dyson device,” Busarov said.
After this, users only need to download the Heatbit app and connect the device to WiFi to mine bitcoin.
Once the device is running, using no more energy than a Dyson space heater and making no more noise than a humming noise at the volume of a whisper, it sends the hash power it produces to a standard mining pool, currently called NiceHash and soon to be Luxor. Users will also eventually be able to choose their own mining pool or search for Bitcoin blocks without being part of a pool, if they wish.
“Basically you can start without even knowing what a mining pool is,” Busarov explains. “But once you learn a little more or already know about mining pools, just fill in the details for the mining pool you want to join, or solo mine.”
Busarov clarified that the functionality to choose your mining pool or to mine solo is not yet enabled for all users, but it will be in the near future.
“It is not our intention to lock users into any particular pool,” he said.
When the device is on 24/7, it mines about 700 sats per day, which equates to about 20,000 sats per month – about $20 per month according to the price of bitcoin at the time of writing.
The earned sats are held in a smart contract until the amount reaches a certain threshold (currently between $10 and $20 worth of bitcoin) before being deposited into the user’s wallet address on the Bitcoin base chain.
Busarov is aware that some users are concerned about rising Bitcoin costs. That’s why he and his team are working on implementing Lightning.
“Lightning is definitely coming,” Busarov said. “It’s not possible yet, but it’s coming.”
Decentralization of the hashrate
As Busarov said, his original intention was not to create Heatbit devices to contribute to the decentralization of the Bitcoin hashrate. However, when he started thinking about how centralized it is in some ways, he recognized this deeper dimension to Heatbit’s value proposition.
“If you have five major mining companies and twenty known mining locations, if you want to damage Bitcoin, you know those twenty locations, right?” Busarov warned.
“Also, if the price of Bitcoin falls a lot, which sometimes happens, and the mining companies are over-indebted, they may no longer exist,” Busarov added regarding the risk of major mining companies going bankrupt.
“But people will still use the heaters because this way they don’t spend extra money to mine. They will still use their miners because they are not losing money, making it the cheapest way to mine.”
At first glance, Busarov’s claim that the home miners he built can play a legitimate role in supporting the Bitcoin network seems a bit hyperbolic, especially considering that the amount of hashrate that Heatbit devices currently produce is infinitesimally small compared to the amount produced by large mining companies. produce.
However, when you consider the size of the home heating market, Busarov’s claim seems a little more credible.
“About 200 million electric heaters are sold every year,” says Busarov, referring to the market Heatbit wants to conquer in the long term.
In the short term, however, Busarov understands that buyers in that market don’t necessarily have the money for a space heater like a Heatbit, which retails for $799.
“Most people wouldn’t buy an $800 space heater,” he explained. “We are investigating whether we can make a cheaper version so that we can sell more.”
However, prioritizing affordability has taken a back seat to the focus on quality and timeliness. Busarov and his team have put all their efforts into creating a durable and reliable device that they can ship quickly.
Built to last, ready to ship
The current version of Heatbit devices is the product of a tremendous amount of R&D and the sourcing of quality parts from over 70 different suppliers.
In other words, Busarov and his team have built a device that can take a beating. (Not that you have to beat your Heatbit device; we don’t tolerate Bitcoin miner/house heater abuse here at Bitcoin Magazine.)
“Today I was testing the devices for the latest batch,” Busarov said.
“I put one in the box and literally threw it around. “I threw it like UPS or FedEx would, and I pulled it out and found it didn’t break,” he added.
Busarov shared this information with a smile, which seemingly came half from my reaction to his story about how he tests the resilience of his products and half from the trust that many in the Bitcoin community have gained in him.
“When we started building, it took longer than expected,” Busarov explains, adding that he and his team were under pressure because customers had pre-ordered devices.
“Some people complained about a shipping delay and asked for a refund, and we refunded the money, but then a lot of people said, ‘Hey guys, you’re doing something great. We believe in you. Carry on,” he added.
“When people say something like that to you, you can’t stop. When there is so much faith and trust that people put in you, it gives you so much energy and motivation to keep going.”
Keep going. Busarov and his team did just that and ultimately created a reliable product that is now ready to ship a lot of.
The future of Heatbit
Busarov hopes that when major home appliance companies see what Heatbit has created, they will become interested in building similar products.
“I think once we show this is possible, more companies will start doing this,” he said.
“It will be really interesting if companies like Dyson and Samsung and the big electronics companies start looking into this,” he added.
“Imagine if Samsung starts producing home appliances – not necessarily space heaters – but other home appliances that mines produce on a large scale.”
Busarov has also been monitoring developments in the open source Bitcoin mining movement and been in touch with one of its leaders: Skot, the founder of Bitaxe. He looks at what he could get out of that move, while remaining mindful of the fact that he’s building a consumer product that puts safety first.
“I really like the open source Bitcoin mining movement, and I hope we can contribute to it,” Busarov said.
“That said, we have to be careful because heaters consume a lot of power and it can be dangerous for people to just play with them,” he added.
As a final thought, Busarov reiterated that he does not believe he is simply building an innovative product for the average consumer, but that Heatbit has a role to play in shaping the future of Bitcoin mining.
“Bitcoin mining is not about these huge warehouses that use a lot of energy and then these big companies have to sell the bitcoin they mine to pay for the energy they use and their operating costs,” he explained. “With home mining you don’t have to sell the bitcoin you earn.”