Tulips and bitcoin were both associated with financial bubbles in their day, but in a giant greenhouse near Amsterdam, the Dutch are trying to get them to work together.
Engineer Bert de Groot inspects the six Bitcoin Miners as they run complex sums to earn cryptocurrencyfilled the air with a loud howl along with a touch of warmth.
That heat now heats the greenhouse where rows of tulips are growing, reducing farmers’ reliance on gas, the price of which has skyrocketed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The servers, in turn, are powered by solar energy from the roof, which reduces the normally enormous electricity costs for mining and protects the environment.
Meanwhile, both farmers and de Groot’s company, Bitcoin Brabant, are earning crypto that is still attracting investors despite a recent market crash.
“We think that with this way of heating our greenhouse but also earning some bitcoin, we have a win-win situation,” flower farmer Danielle Koning, 37, told AFP.
The Netherlands’ love of tulips caused the first stock market crash in the 17th century, when speculative prices for flower bulbs sent prices soaring, only to collapse later.
Today, the Netherlands is the world’s largest producer of tulips and also the second largest agricultural exporter overall after the United States, with much of it being grown in greenhouses.
“Environmental Improvement”
But the low-lying country is aware of the agribusiness impact on climate change, while farmers grapple with high energy prices.
Cryptocurrency mining now requires massive amounts of electricity to power computers, resulting in environmental impacts amid global efforts to combat climate change.
De Groot, 35, who just started his business earlier this year and now has 17 clients including restaurants and warehouses, says this makes Bitcoin and tulips a perfect match.
“This farm is actually carbon negative, like all the farms I’m basically building,” says long-haired de Groot, who wears an orange polo shirt with his company’s logo.
“We are actually improving the environment.”
He also sells tulips online for bitcoin through a company called Bitcoinbloem.
The collaboration began when Koning saw a Twitter video de Groot had made about Bitcoin mining and called him.
Now there are six servers in their greenhouse, the exact location of which Koning wanted to keep secret to prevent thieves from targeting the €15,000 machines.
Koning’s company owns half of them and keeps the bitcoins they produce, while de Groot is allowed to keep his three servers there in exchange for monthly visits to rid the servers’ fans of dust and bugs.
With a 20 degree Celsius difference between the air entering and leaving the machine, this provides the heat needed to grow the tulips and dry the bulbs.
‘No problem’
“The most important thing we get out of this is that we save natural gas,” says Koning. “Second, we earn bitcoin by running them in the greenhouse.”
Huge energy costs have meant some Dutch farming companies, which often rely on greenhouses, have stopped growing this year, while others have even gone bankrupt, says Koning.
Meanwhile, the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who came up with the idea of the unpredictable but historical Black Swan event, has compared Bitcoin to the “tulipmania” that gripped the Netherlands nearly 400 years ago.
As a result, the price of a single lightbulb rose to more than 100 times the average annual income before the bubble burst in 1637, causing banks to fail and people losing their savings.
The cryptocurrency sector is currently suffering from the collapse of a major exchange – with bitcoin currently worth around $16,300 per unit, compared to a high of $68,000 in November 2021 – but De Groot is not concerned.
“I’m absolutely not concerned with the long-term value proposition of an immutable monetary system,” he says.
“Bitcoin will last forever.”
