I was texting with family today, and they brought up mining bitcoin, more specifically, mining bitcoin in Texas.

While I have considered the undertaking of mining bitcoin in the past, that was many years ago. And then, I was looking at states in the US where I fantasized moving to in the future, and would compare their kwh rates and then do some back-of-the-napkin like math. But I don’t recall having ever considered Texas as an option,

In 2018, I visited a friend for the first time in Oregon and saw that they were mining ethereum. That is the first time I ever thought about mining cryptocurrency.

And then today I received that text, about Bitcoin mining in Texas. And it got me just a little bit curious.

A quick search using Perplexity and I my curiosity grew even more.

Not to advocate crypto or no crypto, but operating with the belief that primary cryptos will continue to rise in vale as our global economy continues to evolve, it got me curious about what the spread between the cost to mine bitcoin and the value of the mined bitcoin looked like.

So I went to Claude. And then I went to Perplexity. And I went back and forth from there.

Leveraging the two, I created a sound business analysis of mining Bitcoin in Texas.

I leveraged Claude for the overall structure of the plan, making the assessment, and then creating the business plan analysis.

And I leveraged Perplexity for real-time data.

Side note: it was neat to see, Perplexity opened up Pro Search prompting to me, and I am pretty sure I got my first glimpse of / engagement with DeepSeek’s r1 model.

I watched as in front of me, text came onto the screen, informing me of exactly what step of the thinking/evaluating/assessment the model was processing.

My initial prompt to Claude re: the business plan was missing a lot of details, and I had to go back to Perplexity to collect things like:

And I needed the historical performance of bitcoin over the past 5 years.

And using Austin as the location for the operation, I needed to know what the expected 2025 kwh commercial rate would be.

And I needed 2025 bitcoin miners:

I gave Claude the six miner models that Perplexity had given me.

Claude then starts to create the updated business plan, but alerts me that I am missing key specs that are essential to the analysis. Specifically, I was missing their power consumption and hash rates.

So I came back to Perplexity and asked:

I repeated this process, until I had the necessary information for all six models.

One other bit of key info these gave me was that some of the more complicated systems would require sophisticated cooling solutions. It made for a much more accurate final analysis.

I fed all of this data back into Claude and let Claude do its thing.

… cntd …

Claude gave me a very sound business plan & analysis. In it, Claude was operating under the idea that scale was irrelevant and it opted to build out a plan that would cost $1 million to build and execute.

It was REALLY neat to see Claude’s analysis of the potential opportunity.

I wanted to see it at a smaller scale though. So I asked Claude to redo it’s analysis, this time with a 10K (1%) scale, and the other with a 100K (10%) scale.

It was informative to see the different paths Claude proposed for each of the given scales.

I then asked for a 5 year financial analysis given the data available.

It only did this for the 10K and 100K scale. But I wanted to see it all together. So one additional prompt:

And it gave me this full business plan analysis, Bitcoin Mining Operation Business Plan Analysis – Texas Operations.

So what was the final verdict?

TLDR: Taking into consideration the current cost of commercial electricity in Texas and the current price of bitcoin, and projecting 10% increases year-over-year on both, Claude indicates that there is upside to mining bitcoin in Texas. But Claude also identifies there is also a risk. (Disclaimer: This analysis is an uncorroborated opinion and should not be taken as sound investment advice)

This was a fun exercise! I enjoyed stringing together two AI models to overcome each other’s limitations.

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Question for the reader: did the result of Claude’s assessment surprise you?