Bathhouse is a super-trendy spa located in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a new location set to open sometime in the near future in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. If its sans serif font and ultra-minimalist website don’t already scream New York City Elite, then the way it heats its pools absolutely shouts it from the rooftops: Bathhouse mines bitcoin to warm its baths.

In the endless battle whereby bitcoin supporters and crypto bros try desperately to prove that mining bitcoin isn’t demonstrably terrible for the environment, I didn’t expect a bougie spa to enter the chat, but here we are. Though Bathhouse first revealed it was heating its pools via bitcoin mining earlier in 2023 with an Instagram post, an October 24 X post from investigative journalist Paris Martineau has kicked up the conversation again, as she shared a picture of the Flatiron storefront alongside screenshots from Bathhouse’s website about its bitcoin baths.

Read more

• NASA Is Struggling to Open Its Asteroid Sample Container

• Pour One Out for the Banks That Invested in Musk’s Twitter

• Dancing With The Stars casting Sean Spicer is a big part of why Tom Bergeron left

• Dealership Charges Extra If You Pay In Cash And People Are Pissed

• Car With Homemade Dent Protectors Provokes Federal-Level Bomb Threat Response In Tennessee

So, I reached out to Linus of Linus Tech Tips, who has an at-home setup similar to Bathhouse’s, whereby his gaming PCs heat his pool and his pool cools his gaming PCs, to ask about the efficiency of such a rig.

“The larger the body of water and the higher the target temperature, the more ASICs or servers or other sorts of systems you might need in order to heat it,” he explained over email. “The calculation is fairly straightforward though. Nearly 100% of the energy from a computer or a mining device is converted to waste heat. That means depending on the efficiency of your heat capture (if you can pull from both the processors and power supplies somehow, for example), you could conceivably dump nearly all of the energy spent into a pool or hot tub.”

“You would never expect to achieve perfect balance between the heat output of your systems and the energy needs of your water and you would basically always have to top up with conventional gas fired or electric heating,” he pointed out. When I asked if Bathhouse’s energy-neutral claims had any veracity, he said that was a “complicated question.” He continued:

I’m no expert, but that doesn’t sound energy neutral to me.

I’ve been to Bathhouse once in 2021, as part of a birthday gift for my fiance. I shelled out a few hundred bucks for both the Day Pass (which can range from $40-$70 depending on the time you book) and a couples massage. The Day Pass requires you check in at a specific time, but you can hang out as long as you want, so it was incredibly crowded, with bodies lining the perimeter of all three pools, lounging prone on its heated marble slabs, and lurking in the dark recesses of its three saunas.

I haven’t been back since the spa transitioned to its new bitcoin baths. Kotaku reached out to Bathhouse for comment, but until I hear back I think I’ll hold off on returning.

More from Kotaku

• Paramount delays the next Mission: Impossible, which is no longer called Dead Reckoning: Part Two

• George R.R. Martin Still Isn't Sure He'll Be Done With Winds of Winter Soon

• These Are Your Favorite Dead Car Trends

• Golden Corral Is Moving Beyond the Buffet

• Turo Wants Customer To Pay $35,000 After Vandals Smash His Rented Car’s Windows

Sign up for Kotaku's Newsletter. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.