In 1634, the unlikeliest of financial bubbles unfolded. Tulip Mania, as it was called, drove the price of some fashionable tulip bulbs to extraordinarily high prices. At the peak of Tulip Mania, in February 1637, a single tulip bulb could sell for 10 times the annual salary of a skilled worker. But not long after that, the bubble burst, and tulip prices collapsed.
Now, Dutch growers are using something else associated with a financial bubble in their tulip greenhouses: Bitcoin.
Flowers and Bitcoin
Mining Bitcoin is a very energy-intensive process — in fact, this is a big part of why Bitcoin is considered by some to be a major environmental issue. Bitcoin's emissions are comparable to that of a smaller country, and despite efforts to make it more sustainable, energy consumption remains a problem.
Much of this energy is also lost as heat. So engineers in the Netherlands thought, "Why not at least try to make use of this heat." This isn't the first attempt of this nature (other miners have used heat byproducts to warm up a swimming pool, for example), but Bert de Groot had something different in mind: he wanted to use the heat for a tulip greenhouse.
Read more at zmescience.com