It’s Time for Miners to Stop With the Gimmicks

If we should peg Bitcoin miners for any sins, let it be Wall Street’s most popular fare: marketing gimmicks.

Hive Blockchain (now Hive Digital Technologies) kicked off the public miner listing craze in 2017, after listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The subsequent flood of mining firm listings on U.S. exchanges allows any retail participant to get financial exposure to some 20-plus Bitcoin miners of various shapes, sizes and strategies. For investors not willing to hold crypto directly, these stocks are some of the best ways to participate in the industry’s growth.

Will Foxley is the host of The Mining Pod, and former director at Compass Mining and tech reporter at CoinDesk. This story is part of CoinDesk’s 2023 Mining Week, sponsored by Foundry.

While capital is useful, equity markets are not dissimilar to the token markets many miners disparage. Retail investors huddle in Telegram groups, poking and prodding for updates from each firm, urging one another to “hodl” the stock or trust the executives on the ground, only for the leadership team to dilute stocks to worthless drivel, purchase ASICs at the top or fail to hedge energy contracts (believe me, these are not uncommon occurrences). The real vice here: marketing.

Take the extreme case of Nasdaq-listed Sphere 3D’s $1.7 billion purchase of 60,000 NuMiners, a Bitcoin mining machine that seemingly appeared out of thin air in early 2022. Instantly dubbed the “Mountain Dew miner” by online detractors, the machine and company immediately raised eyebrows among mining folks who’d never heard of it.

Nonetheless, on the back of a press release, Sphere3D’s stock instantly pumped 40%. It was all an obvious falsehood, but markets moved regardless. And while we can’t pin down if any specific retail participant was injured, we can look at the data and make a fair argument: markets don’t get mining, and sometimes executives don’t either. The deal was canceled and prices came back to earth.

Read more: Eliza Gkritsi – Riot Platforms at the Heart of Texas’ Debate Over Bitcoin Mining’s Effect on the Grid

However, these sorts of gimmicks continue today. See, for instance, how miners have recently been leaning into AI and high performance computing (HPC) hype. It’s unlikely that many – if any – of these miners are really…