The rebranding is complete. Bitcoin mining isn’t a parasitic drain on the power grid anymore. It’s a battery. Or, if you buy the latest logic from venture capital giant Paradigm, it’s a "grid asset." It’s a clever bit of linguistic gymnastics. It’s also exactly what you’d expect from people who’ve spent the last decade trying to convince us that burning coal to find imaginary numbers is the pinnacle of human ingenuity.

Paradigm’s argument isn’t new, but it’s getting a fresh coat of professional paint. The pitch is simple: Bitcoin miners are the world’s most polite guests. They eat massive amounts of electricity when nobody wants it, but the moment the grid feels a chill or a heatwave, they flip a switch and vanish. They call this "load flexibility." I call it a hostage situation where the kidnapper expects a reward for not pulling the trigger.

The math is where the cynicism really starts to itch. To make this work, you need a grid that’s fundamentally broken. Enter Texas. The ERCOT grid is the laboratory for this experiment, mostly because it’s held together by duct tape and prayers. In the Lone Star State, miners like Riot Platforms have turned "not working" into a blue-chip revenue stream. Last August, during a particularly nasty heatwave, Riot made more money from "curtailment credits"—basically payments from the state to stop mining—than they did from actually mining Bitcoin.

Think about that. We’ve reached a point where the most profitable thing a tech company can do is stop doing the one thing it was built to do. It’s a $31.7 million paycheck for turning off the lights. In any other industry, that’s called a failure. In crypto, it’s a "grid-balancing solution."

Paradigm wants us to see this as a symbiotic relationship. They argue that by providing a guaranteed, constant buyer for electricity, they encourage more wind and solar builds. Since those sources are intermittent, you need a "janitor" to soak up the excess when the wind blows at 3:00 AM. Bitcoin is that janitor. It’s a big, loud, thirsty janitor that never sleeps and occasionally demands a massive subsidy to stop mopping during the day.

But there’s a friction here that the white papers tend to gloss over. Power isn't just a commodity; it’s a life-support system. When a miner sets up shop, they aren't just "soaking up excess." They are raising the floor for everyone else. If you have a massive industrial customer willing to pay a baseline price 24/7, the local utility doesn't feel much pressure to lower rates for the family in a three-bedroom ranch. The "flexibility" Paradigm touts only kicks in when the system is near collapse. The rest of the time, the miners are just another mouth to feed at the trough.

Then there’s the hardware. Paradigm’s vision of a "virtual battery" ignores the physical reality of the machines. An ASIC miner isn't a battery. It doesn't store a single joule of energy. It converts electricity into heat and hashes. To call it a battery is like calling a bonfire a "thermal storage unit" because you can choose to stop throwing logs on it. It’s a one-way street. A real battery—the kind made of lithium or iron-flow—actually gives energy back to the community when the sun goes down. A Bitcoin miner just stops taking. There is a massive, fundamental difference between a contributor and a quitter.

The price tag for this rebranding isn't just measured in dollars or curtailment credits. It’s measured in the opportunity cost of what we could have built instead. Every megawatt diverted to a warehouse full of humming silicon in the desert is a megawatt that isn't powering a factory that makes something tangible, or a server farm that actually processes data people use. Instead, we’re subsidizing a financial flywheel that exists mostly to sustain itself.

Paradigm is betting that if they use enough fancy terminology, we’ll forget the basic physics of the situation. They want to frame the miner as a civic hero, a sort of volunteer firefighter for the energy sector. But the firefighter is also the guy who’s been running around with a flamethrower all morning.

It’s an audacious pivot. If you can’t fix the reputation of a power-hungry industry, just rename the power "stabilization" and send the bill to the taxpayers. It’s efficient, it’s sleek, and it’s deeply exhausting.

If we have to pay companies millions of dollars to stop using our shared resources just so the lights stay on, who exactly is the "asset" here?