Neighbors sue over loud Bitcoin mine

Hum from 300-megawatt facility allegedly causing stress, lack of sleep.

In Granbury, Texas, residents can hear the sound of money being made at all hours of the day, but it’s not making them rich. Instead, neighbors in the town southwest of Fort Worth say that the persistent low hum emanating from the Bitcoin mine operated by Marathon Digital has caused them stress, loss of sleep, and other unexplained ailments.

They filed a lawsuit in Texas state court Friday in Hood County alleging that the noise from the Bitcoin mine creates a nuisance that has ruined their quality of life. The environmental law group Earthjustice is representing a group of neighbors organized under the name Citizens Concerned About Wolf Hollow. The suit is seeking a permanent injunction to stop operation of the facility unless it can operate without producing disruptive noise.

The 300 megawatt Marathon Digital facility is located alongside a gas-fired power plant called Wolf Hollow II. Residents recently spoke out against a proposed expansion to upgrade the natural gas facility currently providing electricity for Bitcoin mining and releasing up to 760,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide per year.

Texas has become the epicenter of a rise in Bitcoin mining, with companies flocking to the state for its low taxes, vast land, minimal regulations, and multiple ways to profit from connecting directly to the electric grid. While some attention has been paid to Bitcoin by politicians worried about the increased power demand from crypto mining on an already stressed grid, noise pollution has come into focus as having the most direct effect on communities.

A Bitcoin, currently worth about $62,500, can be purchased on a cryptocurrency exchange such as Coinbase using digital wallets. To keep transactions secure, a computer algorithm assigns a unique identifying code to a set of transactions known as a block. Bitcoin “mining” is when computers, operated round-the-clock by Bitcoin miners like Marathon, generate an endless series of random numbers before guessing the correct code to validate the block. Each time they do this, the miner such as Marathon receives 3.125 Bitcoins as a reward.

At the Granbury facility, a mix of liquid immersion and fans prevent more than 20,000 computers from overheating. But those fans are loud enough that neighbors say the noise has disrupted their lives, and according to Earthjustice, more than two dozen individuals “suffer direct health impacts due to the constant noise pollution,” including vertigo, hearing loss, migraines, fatigue, anxiety, and tinnitus.

Earthjustice’s lawyers are planning to request a jury trial to rule on whether the Bitcoin mine qualifies as a private nuisance by infringing on homeowners’ rights to free use and enjoyment of their property. A judge would then decide whether to issue the permanent injunction.

“If you’re constantly being denied a good night’s sleep, or you’re constantly having to deal with the noise in the background, that’s an unreasonable impact,” Rodrigo Cantú, senior attorney at Earthjustice, told Inside Climate News.

Marathon Digital said it has already converted 30 percent of computers at the Granbury site to quiet liquid immersion cooling and intends to convert half of the computers by the end of the year. In an email, a company spokesperson said that “sounds from our operations are within the normal range experienced every day from a variety of sources.”

Moreover, the company is “not aware of any scientific basis to conclude that our operations are causing any health problems,” the spokesperson said.

But for the neighbors closest to the facility, the noise continues to cause significant disruption.

Danny Lakey, 55, lives about 600 yards from the Bitcoin mine. “We used to sit out on the porch and watch the sun go down every day,” he said. But now he and members of his family cannot relax in this way anymore because it’s too loud, he added.

Inside the house, Lakey can still hear the fans humming. His sleep quality has suffered, and he worries that the stress caused by constant noise is having a multiplying effect on his wife’s diabetes, making her overall health worse.

Lakey renovated a mobile home on the property for his daughter. But after she moved in with her husband and their son, Lakey said his grandson suffered four ear infections that they believed were caused by the Bitcoin mine’s fans. It was so bad that his daughter moved her family to Missouri, and Lakey said his grandson hasn’t suffered an ear infection since.

“We wanted to remodel the house so that our kids could live there, which they can no longer do,” Lakey said.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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