For years hosted Bitcoin miners have been forced to accept a frustrating tradeoff. When machines go, offline hosts typically offer compensation in the form of hosting credits, effectively a discount on a future bill. While that may sound fair on paper it often leaves miners under-compensated for the revenue they actually lost.
Abundant Mines says it has built a different model. During a recent interview with TheStreet Roundtable, Beau Turner, CEO of Abundant Mines, outlined a program called Hashrate Redirect that aims to make miners whole using actual mining output rather than billing credits.
Related: HIVE continues to expand production even as Bitcoin dumps
“When you get hosting credits instead of time where your machines are mining in most cases you are only receiving about half of the value that you would if your machines were just up and running the whole time,” he said.
The company decided to rethink that approach. Instead of issuing credits Abundant Mines redirects hashrate from its own machines to clients whose hardware is offline due to maintenance or extended repairs. “We actually decided to make our client whole for their downtime by redirecting the hash from one of our miners to them,” Turner said.
That idea became the foundation for Hashrate Redirect. When a client machine enters a maintenance cycle it is placed into a queue. Within days the client begins receiving Bitcoin mined by Abundant Mines equipment to offset the lost production.
“This is hash, not cash, as a form of compensation,” Turner said.
The program is costly and requires strict operational discipline. Turner acknowledged that providing redirected hashrate means Abundant Mines temporarily stops mining Bitcoin for itself. “It produces an opportunity cost,” he said. “Whenever we are providing the service we actually are not mining Bitcoin ourselves.”
That sacrifice is intentional. According to Turner the system creates strong incentives to maintain high uptime and efficient repairs. “If we are running a tight ship, and our repair process is smooth and efficient, we really do not have to do this much at all,” he said.
The approach also changes how miners think about predictability. Rather than hoping a facility meets uptime targets clients receive a safety net backed by the host’s own infrastructure.
“It is not just their machines that are earning income for them,” Turner said. “It is our own machines providing a safety net.”
For Turner and Abundant Mines, the goal is trust. By aligning its economics with client outcomes the company believes it can raise expectations across the hosting industry. “As more people see it it raises the bar on the entire industry,” Turner said.
