Five years ago, Robert Warren was staring at the door of his second bathroom in a Denver apartment, listening to the scream of a Bitmain S9 ASIC miner running on apartment power at 800 watts.

His wife, standing behind him, had not signed up for this. Neither had the neighbors.

Warren, now a Bitcoin mining industry veteran and Head of Research and Education at Bitcoin Park, shared the story at Bitcoin Takeover 2026, as the opening act for a larger argument: that Texas has become the only place on earth where the full potential of Bitcoin mining can be proven out, and that the work happening there today will become the template applied everywhere else. “For the first time, the network had come to life for me,” Warren said of those early days mining in the apartment. “And it was currently drying my laundry.”

The S9 didn’t stay in the bathroom. It moved to a balcony enclosure built from a sheet of plywood — a design Upstream Data CEO, Steve Barber had shared online — and then into the laundry room of the house Warren eventually bought, where it pumped waste heat into the HVAC return. That tinkering phase produced the Bitcoin Miner’s Almanac, a guide Warren wrote, he noted jokingly, before AI writing tools existed.

The journey from that 14-terahash machine to the 30-foot wall of S19s at Riot’s Rockdale, Texas facility, where Warren later worked, wasn’t just a change in scale. It was a change in the nature of the problem. “We were solving for the problem of this building is a thousand feet long,” he said. “How do I correlate the size of my transformers to the size of my cooling infrastructure?”

Warren traced the conditions that made the first wave of retail Bitcoin mining possible: depreciated S9s hitting the secondary market when S19s arrived, a community of tinkerers on Twitter and Telegram who swapped designs and shipped pallets of machines to each other, COVID-era restlessness as the catalyst, and the open internet as the connective tissue.

Those same four factors — talent, money, catalyst, and attractor — then appeared at industrial scale. The catalyst the second time was Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) attempt to get the EPA to compel miners to disclose their machines, contracts, and vendors. The industry responded by sending Pierre Rochard to the Rockdale site with a CO2 monitor to show that Bitcoin miners produce no carbon emissions.

“Power is fundamentally human flourishing,” Warren said. “There is no rich, low-energy country on earth. There will never be a rich, low-energy country on earth.”

Texas, he argued, is where that thesis gets tested at scale. Its independent grid, ERCOT, is unlike any other in the world. The demand to connect to it keeps growing. And the concentration of miners, infrastructure builders, and energy operators there means the frameworks being developed will eventually reach places that don’t yet have Texas’s advantages.

Warren is already pointing to what comes next: the Texas Energy & Mining Summit on May 20-21.

Watch his full presentation:

KEYWORDS: Bitcoin mining, Texas energy, innovation, technology, cryptocurrency, energy efficiency, industry evolution, talent pool, infrastructure, sustainability YOUTUBE LINK: https://youtu.be/jnWSNffKu-0