Engineer Bert de Groot inspects the six bitcoin miners as they perform complex sums to win cryptocurrencyfilling the air with a loud moan along with a rush of heat.
That heat is now warming the greenhouse where the rows of tulips grow, cutting the leaves off the farmers. dependence in gas whose price has skyrocketed since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The servers, in turn, are powered by rooftop solar, which lowers the normally high electricity costs for mining and reduces the impact on the environment. Meanwhile, both the farmers and Groot's company, Bitcoin Brabantthey are gaining crypto, which continues to attract investors despite a recent dip in the market.
"We think that with this way of heating our greenhouse, but also earning some bitcoin, we have a win-win situation," flower farmer Danielle Koning, 37, told AFP.
The Netherlands' love of tulips caused the first stock market crash in the 17th century when speculation in bulb prices caused prices to skyrocket, only to then crash.
Now the Netherlands is the world's largest producer of tulips and also the second largest agricultural exporter overall after the United States, with many grown in greenhouses.
'
Improving the environment'
But the low-lying country is well aware of the effect of the agricultural industry on climate change, while farmers battle high energy prices.
Meanwhile, cryptocurrency mining requires huge amounts of electricity to power computers, creating an environmental impact amid global efforts to address climate change.
De Groot, 35, who started his business earlier this year and now has 17 clients, including restaurants and grocery stores, says this makes Bitcoin and tulips a perfect fit.
โThis operation is actually carbon negative, just like all the operations I build basically,โ says the long-haired de Groot, sporting an orange polo shirt with his company logo.
"We're actually improving the environment."
He also sells tulips online for bitcoin through a business called Bitcoinbloem.
The collaboration began when Koning saw a Twitter video Groot had made about bitcoin mining and called him out.
There are now six servers in his greenhouse, the exact location of which Koning asked to keep secret to prevent thieves from targeting the โฌ15,000 machines.
De Koning's company owns half of them and keeps the bitcoin they produce, while De Groot is allowed to keep his three servers there in exchange for monthly visits to clean dust and bugs from the server fans.
With a difference of 20 degrees Celsius between the air entering and leaving the machine, it provides the necessary heat to grow the tulips and dry the bulbs that produce them.
- 'Without worries' -
"The most important thing we get is that we save on natural gas," says Koning. "Second, well, we earn Bitcoin by running them in the greenhouse."
Huge energy costs have led some Dutch agricultural companies that often rely on greenhouses to stop growing this year, while others have even gone bankrupt, says Koning.
Meanwhile, the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who developed the idea of โโthe unpredictable but historic "black swan" event, has likened Bitcoin to the "Tulip Mania" that ravaged the Netherlands nearly 400 years ago.
This caused the prices of a single light bulb to rise to more than 100 times the average annual income at the time before the bubble burst in 1637, causing banks to fail and life savings to be lost.
The cryptocurrency sector is currently reeling from the collapse of a major exchange, with Bitcoin currently valued at around $16,300 a unit, down from a high of $68,000 in November 2021, but De Groot is not worried.
"I'm not at all concerned with the long-term value proposition of an immutable monetary system," he says.
"Bitcoin will last forever."
