Last year, I decided to buy an old broken bitcoin miner off of eBay and take some high resolution bitcoin miner images and upload them to my Unsplash profile. The idea was that the world needs more Bitcoin images to use for pretty much anything they want without having to pay me any sort of royalty because…ya know…fuck intellectual property and the whole belief that ideas should be monopolized via state regulation.

My Bitcoin images consistently get downloaded and used so I am glad that I put in the effort to make the images but another reason I bought the miner is because these S9s are basically becoming e-waste as more efficient bitcoin mining hardware becomes available.

While that might be a problem for most industries, Bitcoiners are incredibly resourceful, highly creative, and absolutely savage entrepreneurs. Bitcoiners literally THRIVE on the opportunity to convert waste into value.

Since bitcoin miners are energy and resource scavengers constantly on the prowl for ways to convert waste into sats.

Bitcoin miners are using energy waste like wasted oil flare and animal methane to mine bitcoin.

Some miners are even using the surplus heat from bitcoin mining to heat their homes, offices, driveways, and much more.

There's even an initiative of UK based bitcoiners that are buying old laptops and decommissioned school computers to build bitcoin nodes for people in parts of the world where node hardware is more expensive and thus less available.

While all of those are amazing and noble initiatives, I have wanted to use old miner housings to make all sorts of cool stuff to upcycle bitcoin mining e-waste into something of value. My first project is a bitcoin miner lamp or “lantern”. This can be used as a desk lamp, a nightlight in your kids room, or you can hang it from the ceiling in your garage or bitcoin pub.

No matter your own individual application, here's how I built my own cypher punk ceiling light out of an old bitcoin miner.

First off you will need a bitcoin miner housing. I chose the S9 because of their shape and they're getting really cheap to come across. If you have some connections, you can get them for basically free.

Here’s what I used.

The assembly was easy. All I did was run the light cable into the housing and screwed in the light bulb and everything was done.

In order to hang it, I used a simple D-ring from Home Depot but any hardware you have access to will suffice.

All I did was turn it on and I had an awesome little cypherpunk lantern made out of upcycled bitcoin e-waste.

This is just my own DIY project but I am sure that someone with a lot of S9s lying around could easily turn their likes of e-waste into sats if they wanted. They could even sell kits to plebs who want to make their own iteration of a "cypherpunk hash lantern”

Cypherpunks code. Bitcoiners upcycle bitcoin waste into value.

Stay the course, plebs. We are winning.