Upstream Data founder, president, and CEO Steve Barbour announced the company has officially pivoted from selling mobile Bitcoin mining datacenter solutions into the Toronto Real Estate market. The announcement comes after a Stacker News poster discovered a repurposed Hash Hut listed on Zillow for nearly $1 million CAD.
Steve Barbour explained the unexpected decision, telling The Bugle "It all started when the government started cracking down on intentional climate change. Government officials were seeing our Hash Huts and residential products like little black boxes all over Canada. They told us if we didn't cease operations immediately we'd be charged with one count of intentional climate change for ever product the company has ever sold. I was facing dozens of life sentences. In the face of that reality, it wasn't a very difficult decision to make."
Barbour was able to cut a deal with the Canadian government to avoid prison time and steep fines by agreeing to donate over 250 Hash Huts to the cities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal which the government has been using to house the homeless.
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Montreal - Hash Huts donated by Upstream Data awaiting deployment for use by the Homeless
Even after fulfilling the terms of his deal with the government, Upstream had plenty of Hash Huts leftover and no clue what to do with them. "I was sitting at our manufacturing facility trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with all these Hash Huts when I remembered a good buddy I used to play hockey with was a real estate developer in Toronto. I called him up and told him about my problem and he immediately had a solution." Steve said.
The solution was simple. Steve and his old hockey buddy loaded the Hash Huts into a truck they got for cheap at a government auction for trucks seized from the 2022 Trucker's protest and headed East to Toronto. When they got there, they put the Hash Huts down on small lots and green spaces between established homes and businesses then registered them on the Canadian MLS. Within hours, offers started coming in.
"At first we figured we'd make fat margin, albeit with a modest profit, on these new 'tiny homes' but we quickly realized the damage the Canadian government has done to the economy through money printing coupled with the demand for real estate in Toronto was going to make us filthy rich. So far, we've sold 14 Hash Hut homes in the greater Toronto area. The lowest price we've sold a Hash Hut home for was $900,000 CAD." Steve's old hockey buddy exclaimed.
When Upstream first launched, Steve was excited about building products that would help reduce wasted energy resources. Now he's helping reduce wasted real estate development potential in Canada's most expensive city.