As part of a move to expand into supercomputing and deal with the excess heat that is a byproduct of bitcoin mining, BitFury Group, a bitcoin infrastructure provider and transaction processing company, has purchased Allied Control, which makes cooling systems for supercomputing and data centers.

One of the main issues with bitcoin mining is that it is energy-intensive work that produces a lot of heat as a byproduct. So much so that there has been speculation on both bitcoin blogs and more mainstream media that heating houses could be a way to put this currently wasted heat to good use. But such an application is likely some way off, and dealing with excess heat remains problematic in the meantime.

There is no one accepted amount for how much energy is needed for bitcoin mining, nor how much heat is generated as a byproduct. However as Izabella Kaminska wrote in the Financial Times last year, "Bitcoin's biggest problem, by a distance, is its carbon footprint.