Simple Mining Makes Hashing Simple

If you hang around Bitcoin long enough, you start thinking in a simple loop: stack sats, never sell, repeat. For most people, that loop runs through an exchange. You wire in fiat, pay a fee, set up a DCA, and make a pact with yourself to not panic-sell the next time the price dumps.

Billy Boone thinks that loop can be smarter. As Director of Market Research at Simple Mining, he has reviewed more than a thousand investor portfolios. His job is to help people who already "get" Bitcoin shift from vibes and sentiment to math and cash flow, using hosted bitcoin mining as an allocation, not a lottery ticket.

And the origin story starts exactly where a lot of home miners burn out: a loud ASIC, an angry spouse, and a breaker that was meant for the washing machine.

Simple Mining did not start as a polished institutional host. It started in strip malls. Founder Adam Haynes (who now runs the company as CEO) launched a chain of cell phone repair stores in his early twenties. In the back of those shops, he and his team began mining Ethereum on GPUs. That setup pushed him into the rabbit hole.

"He started looking into Bitcoin, read The Bitcoin Standard, decided he wanted to pivot and go all in on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining," Billy explained. From there, things moved fast.

Adam met with a local utility, got their first 50 ASICs into a container on utility property, and then crossed paths with Nick (Simple Mining’s COO), a former pro baseball player who wanted to mine.

Nick joined, the operation grew, and by 2021–2022, the foundations of Simple Mining were in place: U.S.-based power, direct relationships with utilities, and a push to give clients an easy way to mine Bitcoin without flying hardware to some mystery warehouse in a country that most Americans could not spell.

Before he joined the team, Billy went through the classic "I can mine at home" phase. Behind him on our call sat an S21. It was off. For good reasons.

"It's obviously not running right now because if it was I would be sweating and it would sound like there's an airplane taking off in my office," he joked.

Before Simple Mining he had tried to make it work anyway.

Even with "free" power baked into his rent, uptime sat around 50%. The reward? Roughly ten dollars in bitcoin per month. "All the headache and the hassle and it just wasn't worth it." That is the moment a lot of people give up on mining and fall back to simple spot buys. Billy went the other way.

"Then I said, 'Well, if I want to do this, I'm going to have to work with somebody who has the infrastructure.' And then you discover that hosted mining is a thing." Hosted mining is the bridge between "I love Bitcoin" and "I do not want to live inside a data center." You own the machine; someone else handles the noise, heat, grid deals, and operations.

Billy shopped around. He did due diligence and jumped on a call with Nick, liked what he heard, and spun up his first machine. From there, he did what good clients sometimes do: he started pointing out all the things that they could be better at.

That constructive critique turned into a job. Today, he spends his days helping investors figure out how much hash rate makes sense in their wider plan instead of treating mining as a side quest.

Ask Billy what really matters for the future of mining and he does not start with machines or firmware. He starts with power. "I think that the most valuable thing, and this isn't necessarily just for the Bitcoin mining sector, will be the power portfolio," he said.

Zoom all the way down the stack and you hit a simple reality:

This is where Simple Mining leans in. They run roughly 150 megawatts of U.S. infrastructure today, at seven cents per kilowatt-hour in some cases. They are targeting 500 megawatts by 2026 and they sit in Iowa, plugged straight into the American grid capacity.

Billy is clear: at scale, mining is a power business with optionality. You can point that power at Bitcoin ASICs. You can point it at racks of Nvidia GPUs training large language models. You can split between both based on margins and policy. "That's going to be the edge: how many megawatts, how many gigawatts do you have under your belt?"

For a miner or data center, that portfolio becomes a "card in your back pocket" when large customers show up and say, "We want to set up a site with these specs." Simple Mining's job is to turn that card into flows that make sense for Bitcoin-first investors.

Most Bitcoiners know the feeling Billy described: "You want to accumulate as much bitcoin as you possibly can." The default path is simple. You go to Coinbase, Gemini, or a Bitcoin-only shop. You pay the fee. You DCA.

But two things bug him about that being the only move: You are always trading fiat for bitcoin at the spot price of the day. You are not adding anything to the “security budget” that keeps the network honest.

Mining flips that.

"You can either buy spot from an exchange or you can get exposure to bitcoin through paying the proof of work, which is the electricity barrier associated with accumulating bitcoin. And to me that sounded very attractive," he said. Instead of wiring in dollars and hoping price dips, you swap electricity and hardware for a stream of sats. At Simple Mining's sites, that hardware sits in a tax-recognized business.

This is where the math starts to look very different from a simple DCA. ASICs can be depreciated, often aggressively. Bonus depreciation still exists in U.S. law and can front-load write-offs. Operating costs (power, infrastructure, travel to mining conferences, even some education) can potentially offset mining income.

In the early years, many setups ran at a book loss even while they stacked real bitcoin. That loss can often be applied against other income. "After that's all said and done, you could have a net loss which you could pass through to maybe some other source of income," he noted. An important disclaimer: Billy is not a CPA, and none of this is tax advice. But he spends a lot of time cleaning up bad assumptions.

Right now, the IRS treats mined coins as income at the market value when the block is mined, even if you never sell. "Even if you don't sell the bitcoin, which is kind of a stupid thing. I'm not realizing, it's still in bitcoin terms. Why do I have to pay taxes on it?" He sees hope in people like Senator Cynthia Lummis pushing for changes so that simple payments and day-to-day use do not trigger capital gains on coffee.

On the mining side, his dream scenario is even clearer: "It would be huge if at some point in the future the government decides, 'Hey, we're going to stop taxing miners on the bitcoin that they're mining and the market value.'"

After all, Bitcoin is money and should be treated as such under tax law. Until then, Simple Mining is helping clients squeeze every legal drop out of depreciation and deductions while the hashrate keeps humming.

The phrase "hosted mining" still makes a lot of Bitcoiners flinch. Billy gets why.

Hardware vanished. Governments seized sites. Operators ghosted customers. Simple Mining was built as the anti-version of that.

"There was room for a company to step up and provide a premium Apple out of the box experience for clients and that was ultimately the origins and the mission that Simple Mining started with: to provide that experience for customers and make it extremely simple for them to just mine Bitcoin in a couple clicks."

That "Apple" line is not marketing fluff. It is a design constraint. You should not need to debug firmware, negotiate with utilities, or worry that your ASICs are racked in a sanctioned jurisdiction. You should click. The hardware should hash. Bitcoin should arrive in your wallet.

Behind that click sits all the boring work Billy enjoys: reviewing portfolios, stress-testing assumptions, sizing positions so people do not blow up during bear markets, and giving them traceable uptime instead of a hope-and-pray setup in an apartment.

One of the cooler angles Billy mentioned has nothing to do with ROI spreadsheets and everything to do with agency. As pools evolve, miners can do more than point hash rate and trust someone else's policy. Technologies like Ocean let operators bring their own block templates.

"For example, one of our clients has a DATUM server that they're running and they're constructing how they want their Bitcoin blocks to look and if they want to do filtering or no filtering or however they want to construct their Bitcoin block," he said.

That client buys hashers, hosts them in a Simple Mining data center, and wires them to their own template server. "If one of those hashers does end up hitting the golden number to win the block, then their DATUM server, whoever John Doe, whoever the Simple Mining client is, is going to have their name on the Bitcoin blockchain."

This is Billy's deeper point: mining is not just about "getting cheap coins." Miners guard the rules that keep Bitcoin's scarcity and neutrality real. In his view, the more everyday investors hold real hash rate through setups like this, the harder it is for any single pool, regulator, or company to steer things in a direction Bitcoiners hate.

Ask Billy what excites him most right now and he does not even hesitate. "I think that it's exciting to see that the United States of America, the USA, may start to make a considerable pivot into somewhat of a Bitcoin peg," he said.

He points out three advantages the U.S. already holds:

Add in a president talking about making the U.S. "a leader in crypto and Bitcoin," and the game theory starts to look very interesting.

But Billy is not blind to the other side of that. As more Bitcoin moves through KYC pipes, ETFs, and custodial rails, the risk of a "paper Bitcoin" world grows: one where huge volumes clear on internal ledgers that never touch the chain, while real scarcity sits somewhere else.

People already worry about futures, leverage, and derivatives that settle in fiat and never require real coins. Billy extends that worry to state capture.

"Could not Bitcoin start to become a central bank digital currency through how the rails are operated and how blocks are created and what transactions are allowed and not allowed inside of a block?" he asked. That said, he still thinks Bitcoin is more decentralized than most critics realize. But he can see two paths:

His answer? Keep real hash rate in honest hands. That means giving regular investors a way to own machines, plug into neutral pools, and fund the network's security budget.

Billy is under no illusion that mining is easy. "I think it's a brutal industry and the economics sometimes, particularly right now, are not the easiest. But that's proof of work. There's no bailouts."

That line could sit over the door of every data center on earth. Simple Mining's bet is that there is a big group of people caught between two extremes:

For those people, Billy wants mining to feel boring in all the right ways: clear contracts, U.S. infrastructure, transparent pricing, real machines, daily yields in bitcoin. More like a rental property that pays in sats, less like a casino.

In a decade where power grids, AI clusters, and blockspace are all fighting for energy, the investors who own a slice of honest hash rate will help decide what Bitcoin's security budget looks like as halvings continue to bite into the block rewards.

Billy Boone's job is to make sure they go into that fight with their eyes open, their spreadsheets correct, and their ASICs humming in Iowa instead of screaming in a laundry room.

If hosted mining is of interest to you, learn more about how to mine Bitcoin at simplemining.io