Money Backed by Energy | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

At the BTC Prague stage, our panel dug into something that doesn’t get enough attention: the state of Bitcoin mining in Europe, why energy is the real bottleneck, and what it will take for this continent to stop being a bystander in the global mining landscape.

Europe’s Energy Trilemma

If you know anything about mining, you know it starts with energy. Europe is wrestling with the same energy trilemma every other region faces — we want energy that is secure, cheap, and abundant. For years, cheap Russian gas gave us a comfortable illusion of stability. Then that disappeared, and we were left exposed. We’d made ourselves dependent on external geographies while simultaneously shutting down reliable baseload generation like nuclear. Germany is the most glaring example — three perfectly operational nuclear plants decommissioned right when we needed them most.

What filled the gap? Intermittent renewables — wind and solar — which are fine in a free market, but not when they’re propped up by subsidies and forced onto consumers through hidden levies on electricity bills. The result is a grid that struggles with frequency management, ballooning costs during peak demand, and a phenomenon that should alarm everyone: negative electricity prices are quadrupling every year across spring, summer, and autumn months in Europe. Energy nobody wants, going to waste — while miners could absorb every joule of it.

Bitcoin Mining as a Grid Solution

This is where Bitcoin fits into the puzzle. Mining is uniquely positioned as a buyer of first and last resort. It’s an opportunistic actor that can absorb excess generation, stabilize grid economics, and reduce the need for subsidies. In Texas and across North American grids, large miners are already participating in demand response programs — curtailing operations during peak demand and consuming stranded power during oversupply. That model works. Europe just hasn’t embraced it yet.

Large-scale mining in Europe virtually doesn’t exist. Germany is essentially impossible — prices are too high. But there is a growing pocket of interest around stranded energy: rooftop solar owners with 40–60 kilowatts they can’t sell back to the grid at a fair price. That’s a real and growing market, even if it’s not megawatt-scale facilities.

Scale Isn’t Everything

There’s a misconception that mining has to mean 100-megawatt industrial facilities. It doesn’t. Some of the most attractive energy opportunities exist at smaller scales — underutilized substations, small communities, off-grid stranded resources. I’d even argue that scale can be a disadvantage in mining: finding large blocks of attractively priced power gets harder as your appetite grows. Smaller, distributed operations can access energy that big players simply can’t reach.

Decentralization Starts at Home

The growth of devices like the Bitaxe — with an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 units manufactured and sold — and home Bitcoin heaters that ship heat as a primary product and mining as a bonus, are doing something important. They’re bringing new people in. People who thought they missed the boat. People who just want to heat their home and stumble into understanding what proof-of-work actually means.

That matters for resilience too. If large facilities go offline, the people who never unplugged their small miner keep the network moving. And open-source firmware means you can actually audit what your machine is doing — something that should matter a great deal when you consider that proprietary mining hardware has previously included remote kill-switch capabilities. A government can pressure a company. It can’t pressure a protocol.

Strategic Blindness

Europe is the only major economic bloc that has made no statement about Bitcoin as a strategic asset. No reserve discussion, no hash rate ambition, no acknowledgment that mining infrastructure is a matter of economic sovereignty. The recent blackout in Spain was a painful demonstration that betting everything on renewables without solid baseload is not a policy — it’s a gamble. That pain may finally force the conversation Europe has been avoiding.

What gives me hope