03-19-2025 
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Tether has increased its stake in a prominent block reward miner while rumors abound that the U.S. military is about to embark on a BTC mining scheme.
- Tether boosts Bitdeer stake
- Bitdeer releases new mining rigs
- U.S. military to mine BTC?
- The mining math doesn’t work
On March 17, Singapore-based mining operator Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indicating that El Salvador-based Tether Holdings—the issuer of the market-leading stablecoin USDT—had increased its stake in Bitdeer from 15.9% to 21.4%.
Tether first took a stake in Bitdeer in May 2024, acquiring around 15.6 million shares for $100 million. Tether’s current stake in Bitdeer is now just under 31.9 million shares. For what it’s worth, that initial investment was handled by Cantor Fitzgerald (NASDAQ: ZCFITX), which not only claims to custody Tether’s $100 billion-plus in U.S. Treasury bills but also holds a ‘convertible bond’ in Tether.
Bitdeer isn’t Tether’s only foray into the mining business, as the controversial company previously made a September 2023 “strategic investment” in Northern Data Group, a German firm with a similar penchant for negative headlines.
Northern Data generated mining revenue of €32 million ($34 million) during Q4 2024—a significant boost from Q3’s ~€11 million ($12 million)—but the company appeared ready to ditch its mining operations last October in order to facilitate its transition to a “pure-play AI Solutions business.”
Last November, Northern Data CFO Elliot Jordan claimed there were “offers coming in from a number of different parties” regarding the mining ops, and the company said in January that this sale was “progressing well” but offered no specifics.
Tether also claimed to have “sustainable” mining operations in Uruguay “in collaboration with a local licensed company.” Tether allegedly expanded these LatAm operations to Paraguay and El Salvador, according to CEO Paolo Ardoino, but as always with Tether, it’s difficult to know the reality of the situation.
Bitdeer’s share price closed on March 18 down 9.5%, exceeding the rate of decline in BTC’s price. Bitdeer’s shares are now trading below $10—less than half their value when the year began—reflecting the bursting of the bubble that saw BTC hit a record high of $108,000 in early January in anticipation of crypto-friendly Donald Trump’s second go-round as U.S. president. Bitdeer’s shares hit their own record high above $26 around the same time.
Bitdeer’s February performance numbers show that the firm self-mined 110 BTC last month, down from 126 in January, a decline that was blamed on February having three fewer days. However, Bitdeer’s stash of BTC grew by 315 tokens to 1,039 over that same span. Bitdeer held only 594 BTC in December and 443 in November, indicating a firm embrace of a HODL’ing strategy.
New rigs, who dis?
Bitdeer’s Q4 financial report showed its revenue falling 40% year-on-year while the company booked a net loss of over half a billion dollars. Bitdeer blamed the poor showing on its stagnant hash rate growth following its decision to prioritize the development of its proprietary ASIC mining rigs.
On March 17, Bitdeer announced that these new rigs were finally ready for launch. The SEALMINER A2 Pro series features two models: the air-cooled SEALMINER A2 Pro Air and the hydro-cooled SEALMINER A2 Pro Hyd. Both units claim to offer higher power supply efficiency ratios (up to 97%) and enhanced stability.
In 2021, Bitdeer was spun off from Bitmain, a Chinese manufacturer of mining rigs. Late last year, Bitmain ASICs being imported by U.S.-based miners were held up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which slowly began releasing the rigs this month.
Depending on who you ask, the rigs were held up either because (a) CBP hates BTC or (b) Bitmain was using an affiliate (Sophgo) as a middleman to funnel the chips to Chinese tech giant Huawei, thereby evading U.S. export controls on high-powered chips from Taiwan going to China.
There have been reports that Bitdeer recently struck a deal with chipmaker extraordinaire Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NASDAQ: TSMWF) to manufacture chips in Arizona that will be used in Bitdeer’s mining rigs. Last October, TSMC scrapped a similar Arizona plan to build mining rigs for Bitmain after then-President Joe Biden’s administration announced it was putting Sophgo on its blacklist.
US military to mine BTC?
President Trump has vowed to make America the world’s BTC mining capital, in part by loosening environmental regulations. On March 17, Trump posted a message via his Truth Social account in which he instructed his administration “to immediately begin producing Energy with BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL.”
Leaving aside the cognitive dissonance of ‘clean coal,’ Trump’s declaration follows last week’s announcement by Lee Zeldin, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), of 31 Historic Actions to Power the Great American Comeback. These actions include “Reconsideration of Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that improperly targeted coal-fired power plants.”The same day that Trump posted about his coal plan, Michelle Weekley, who works at crypto ATM operator Byte Federal, tweeted, “I think the DoD [U.S. Department of Defense] is going to start mining bitcoin.” She separately tweeted that her original tweet had been liked by Jason Lowery, a major in the U.S. Space Force, a branch of the military created by Trump in 2019.
Weekley also screenshotted a March 16 tweet that Lowery apparently deleted, in which he was asked why he’d changed his profile picture (which now shows a prominent U.S. flag). Lowery told his questioner to “[g]ive it about 3 weeks and it should become more obvious.”
Lowery is the author of Softwar: A Novel Theory on Power Projection and the National Strategic Significance of Bitcoin. The book argues that BTC should be viewed as “an electro-cyber security technology rather than a peer-to-peer cash system”, as originally described by Satoshi Nakamoto in the 2008 Bitcoin white paper.
In Lowery’s view, BTC’s proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism can not only make it difficult for miners to turn a profit, but it can also “serve as a mechanism through which people can physically secure digital resources by imposing prohibitive physical costs on others in, from, and through cyberspace.”
(Whatever ‘digital resources’ Lowery is referencing, they better be small. The artificial bandwidth constraints imposed on the original Bitcoin in 2017 by developers like Greg Maxwell don’t allow much in the way of storage. One only has to recall the rage that greeted the introduction of Ordinals on BTC in January 2023 to understand that bandwidth limitation.)
Regardless, Lowery believes BTC is a strategic asset and nation states will compete with each other to acquire great quantities of it and then “project physical power against each other through cyberspace.” To do so, these nations will have to develop their own mining ops, either on their own or via close ties to commercial operators.
On March 11, Lowery tweeted a video of Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) (formerly MicroStrategy) founder Michael Saylor engaging in his usual mix of bafflegab, gobbledygook and pomposity, in a speech dedicated to the concept that BTC is “a Digital Defense System.”
For what it’s worth, Softwar has been described as “incoherent gibberish” by Lowery’s critics. (Saylor’s critics have similar feelings regarding his own ramblings.)
Budget neutral or budget neutralizing?
To be clear, nobody has offered anything other than pure speculation regarding any DoD mining plans. Weekley’s original tweet offered only screenshots of cryptic comments by BTC diehards (like Saylor) who would love to see the federal government do something—anything—to reverse BTC’s fiat price retreat.
This brings us to Trump’s plan for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which, for the time being, consists of only roughly 200,000 BTC in the government’s possession. However, Trump’s executive order establishing the reserve called on his Commerce and Treasury secretaries to “develop strategies for acquiring additional Government BTC provided that such strategies are budget neutral and do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers.”
So would DoD launching a BTC mining operation qualify as budget neutral? Not likely. For one thing, the upfront costs of establishing a mining operation capable of competing with the incumbent giants like MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) or Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) would be massive. Where that cash would come from is unclear.
Given the support that mining execs such as MARA CEO Fred Thiel have shown Trump—Thiel was an invited guest at the March 7 ‘Crypto Summit’ at the White House—there’s the possibility of DoD contracting with U.S. miners to produce ‘Government BTC’ but adding another stakeholder to the BTC mining math just doesn’t compute.
As of March 17, the full cost—including the need to continually replace mining rigs as rivals deploy newer, more powerful gear—to mine a single BTC was just over $89,000, while the token’s price was just over $82,000. That means miners are currently losing $7,000 on each BTC they generate from their efforts. Is this really a path the government wants to go down (as in off a cliff)?
How bad is mining economics? In its February performance update, Bitdeer revealed that “certain customers have requested to delay their final payment for SEALMINER A2s due to lower Bitcoin price.
Furthermore, they have also requested alternative purchase options for future generations of SEALMINER machines.” With customers cutting back, Bitdeer will “redirect SEALMINER A2s previously allocated for external sale to self-mining to avoid idle inventory.”
Remember, kids, you only have to add one letter to ‘bullish’ to make ‘bullshit.’
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