BTC miners are in trouble—Can the pivot to AI save them?

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A quick look at the stock prices and Q4 earnings reports of some of the biggest BTC miners paints a scary picture. In some cases, they’re trading just above their pre-halving prices, and their earnings reports in Q4 of 2024 don’t offer much to be optimistic about.

Take Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), for example. Its stock price boomed post-halving, shooting from just under $3 to over $18 at its peak in November. However, it posted a Q4 loss of $265 million, and market uncertainty has caused its stock price to pull back to under $10 at press time.

While Core Scientific emphasized its loss is not due to cash outflows and is partly due to its dramatic stock price increase, the picture for miners across the board is less than rosy. Many have struggled to survive since the block reward halving in April 2024, and with record-low transactions on BTC and the failure of the anticipated bull market to materialize, many are scrambling for a new narrative to sell the markets.

In Core Scientific’s case, that narrative is artificial intelligence (AI). Along with its abysmal Q4 earnings report, the firm announced a new partnership with CoreWeave. It unveiled plans for a $1.2 billion data center with the AI startup, touting the potential for $10 billion in cumulative revenues. It called the expansion of its Denton, Texas center “one of the largest GPU supercomputers in North America.”

Can the pivot to AI save struggling BTC miners?

In short, yes, but it will fundamentally change the nature of their businesses.

We’ve often covered how BTC is based on doomed economics, so there’s no need to rehash that here. What we’re interested in is how miners can use their massive computing power to serve the emerging AI industry and whether Bitcoin can play a role.

Without getting into technical weeds, the big picture is this: AI models like ChatGPT and DALL-E require huge amounts of energy to train and run, and BTC miners who have survived this long have that in spades. Due to the intense competition involved in block-reward mining, firms like Core Scientific have energy-efficient computing power that few others possess, long-term energy contracts at cheap prices, and the ability to switch from ASICs to the graphics processing units (GPUs) AI requires with relative ease.

In a sense, they are ideally suited to partner with cloud-based AI startups like CoreWeave, a fortunate happenstance given their struggles with BTC block reward mining. So, yes, struggling BTC miners can pivot to AI. The real question is, if BTC is digital gold and the future of finance, why would they need this alternative source of revenue at all?

What scalable blockchain technology can offer AI

Why would timestamped, immutable records on a scalable public ledger be useful to AI firms? As it happens, ledgers like BSV solve several fundamental problems facing us as AI takes over the world.

Data Provenance and Integrity – AI models require vast amounts of data, but provenance is an issue. If the data is junk, the outputs of the trained models will be, too. 

Data sets can be timestamped and hashed on scalable public ledgers, ensuring they haven’t been altered or manipulated and making it much easier to trace problems back to their source.

Verifiable Trust – At the London Blockchain Conference 2024, Dr. Scott Zoldi of FICO highlighted the importance of trust and transparency in AI models dealing with credit scores. That applies equally to any sensitive area like finance, healthcare, and legal decisions, to name a few. 

Data related to model training and datasets, versions, parameter updates, and more can be recorded on scalable ledgers like BSV. This enhances explainability and allows regulators and other interested parties to audit models with ease.

On-Chain Computation – Computation could be split across multiple nodes and divided into smaller tasks processed by different miners. All of this would be incentivized by BSV micro and nano payments, making it potentially cheaper for AI model trainers and profitable for miners.

New Models – As mentioned in the last point, BSV micropayments can facilitate new ways to do things. Not only can they incentivize distributed computing, but they can also ensure creators get paid for their content if AI models train on them. 

Tiny payments can also incentivize Internet content creators to continue to create in an age where Internet browsers fall away and AI agents fetch answers, pictures, and videos for users. With the ad model dead in the water, something else will be required.

Bitcoin is the biggest distributed supercomputer in history

So, while Core Scientific claims it is building the largest GPU supercomputers in North America, the BSV blockchain can and will likely become Earth’s largest distributed computer. It can do so much more than the computing side of things, solving several key problems that AI companies, thought leaders, and regulators are grappling with.

Smart miners should begin pivoting back to the original Bitcoin protocol, realizing that the ledger itself is where the real value lies. Only BSV will be capable of serving this use case in the future.

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: It’s time for Bitcoin ecosystem to grow—here’s how