Interview - Aydin Kilic

“If mining bitcoin was so easy, everyone would do it”

It’s a sunny spring afternoon in Paris, and we’re sitting in the quietly elegant lounge of the Nolinski Hotel, a fittingly refined backdrop for a conversation about an industry that’s anything but quiet. Bitcoin mining. Our guest is Aydin Kilic, CEO of Hive Digital Technologies, who joins us, dressed in a crisp all-black ensemble, Bitcoin tee, sleek Common Projects, and the kind of quiet confidence that suggests he’s as comfortable discussing terahash efficiency as he is navigating a Parisian restaurants guide (he asked us many questions about the local food scene). .

Aydin Kilic’s journey into crypto didn’t follow the usual script. He started in electrical engineering as a radio frequency specialist before jumping into Vancouver’s high-stakes real estate market, cutting his teeth on land development, distressed assets, and the hard math of cash flow. It was during the early wave of public crypto excitement in 2017 that he co-founded a small mining operation, Fortress, and watched Hive become the first publicly traded crypto company, an event that would eventually shape his trajectory.

From wiring radio towers to raising $20 million in a month to acquire a 2 MW mine and take it public, his path has been anything but linear. After weathering the 2019–2020 bear market as CEO of Fortress Blockchain, he joined Hive in 2021, just in time to help ring the bell at Nasdaq. Since then, he’s led the company through an Ethereum merge, two Bitcoin halvings, a custom ASIC collaboration with Intel, and a bold pivot into AI and high-performance computing.

This is a story about resilience, vision, and the quiet discipline behind the hash rate arms race, told from inside the suit, or rather, the black tee, of someone who’s lived it.

The Node: Hive Digital Technologies went public in 2017. Since then, it has survived two bear markets. How does a Bitcoin miner go through these events? 

Aydin Kilic: Discipline. Hive is a low-cost operator with the lowest G&A (general & administrative) per Bitcoin mined in the sector. Some competitors spend recklessly, private jets, oversized teams. You just have to check financial statements: cost to run vs. Bitcoin mined. High uptime is key. In a bull market, it maximizes profit. In a bear market, it’s your lifeline. Treasury and capital deployment matter too. And never—never—overpay for ASICs. That’s why we built ours. ASIC price (dollar per terahash) fluctuates, just like a commodity. When we started, S9 miners from Bitmain (2016) had 13.5 TH/s. Today’s S21 Pro miners are over 200 TH/s, 20x more. Hashrate is commodified.

Tell us more. 

There’s a physics-based ROI equation, which is output–ROI (in days)–versus inputs: Bitcoin price, network difficulty, electricity price ($/kWh), machine efficiency (joules/TH), and ASIC price. You can’t control price or difficulty. But you can control CapEx and deployment strategy. In December, we secured S21+ at $14/TH, while others were paying $21/TH, it’s massive difference. If you can’t mine cheaper than buying Bitcoin, don’t mine, just buy. Simple.

Is there an analogy between real estate and Bitcoin mining?

Yes, timing is everything. In real estate, a cap rate determines your ROI. But buying at a market peak with a low yield is risky. In mining, bear markets are the best time to scale when the dollar per terahash price for ASIC is low. And the advantage is that you can underwrite all your projections and cash flow models based on bear market economics. If you’re able to achieve a one-year ROI under those conditions, then when the bull market returns, that ROI could shrink to just six months. It’s quite similar to investing in real estate. For example, when buying a commercial building, investors often refer to the cap rate—a 3% cap rate yields a 3% annual return, while a 10% cap rate yields 10%. But  timing matters.

If you buy at the top of the market and secure only a 3% cap rate, and the market later drops, cutting the value of your property in half, that yield won’t be enough to recover your losses. Timing is critical. Real estate markets shift slowly, but crypto moves rapidly and dramatically.

That said, it’s important to recognize the macroeconomic variables beyond your control. Take the 2021 mining ban in China, it caused a sharp drop in hash rate, which was temporarily a good thing for miners outside of China. At a more local level, regulations can change county by county: one region might ban mining while another embraces it. One senator may support it, another may oppose it. This is a tough industry. Resilience and discipline are absolutely essential.

You mentioned building your own ASIC. You’re also looking at AI.  Would you say that Hive is  now more an infrastructure company than a mining company?

Absolutely, that's a great way to put it: fundamentally, yes,  Hive is an infrastructure company. Whether it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, or AI—we measure revenue in $/kWh. That metric is consistent across all workloads. Why? Because your cost in a data center, if you're a tier 3 data center or a Bitcoin mine, doesn't matter. Your power bill is always dollar per kilowatt hour. Let’s take round numbers: Ethereum mining once earned up to $0.90/kWh. Post-merge, GPU revenue dropped to $0.07/kWh. But the thing you have to understand in crypto mining, everything is asymptotic. An asymptote is a line that approaches zero but never does as time approaches zero, you know. Hash price is asymptotic, right? When hashprice goes in a bear market, it doesn't go to zero. It gets lower and then difficulty corrects and it plateaus. In the end, GPU mining was still competitive with Bitcoin’s $0.10/kWh. Then we moved 400 GPUs to HPC workloads, earning $1/kWh and with the new NVIDIA cards, it will be $2/kWh.  So, people will ask: why not just do AI? Because your CapEx is not the same: it is $30 million a MW for AI when it is $1 million for Bitcoin’s ASIC, right. And depending on the market, one has more volatility, so they're really good hedge against each other. We have a consistent cash flow. I know it's a lot but this is how we have to think about the business. If it was so easy, everybody would do it. 

Hive has long positioned itself as a sustainable mining company. What does sustainability mean in the context of Bitcoin mining?

Sustainability means a few key things for us.

First and foremost, we’re green energy-focused. Our sites are powered by renewable energy sources. For example, just five minutes from our facility in New Brunswick in Quebec,you can actually see the hydroelectric dam supplying our operations. In Sweden, we work with Vattenfall, whose name literally means “waterfall” in Swedish, again, emphasizing our commitment to hydroelectric energy. We used to operate in Iceland as well, using geothermal power, scaling between 4 to 8 megawatts over time. However, due to policy changes, we shifted operations. Now, our focus is on Paraguay, where the entire grid is hydro-powered. It’s an incredibly exciting development—we have 300 megawatts there. We acquired a 200 MW site that was 90% complete at the time, and now it’s fully operational and energized. It feeds two sites: one with 200 MW and another with 100 MW, all powered by sustainable hydro.

It is often said that bitcoin mining is not really tolerated by local communities. What is your experience? 

Beyond energy, sustainability also means supporting local communities.We love investing in the areas where we operate. In Quebec, we also reuse energy from our 30 MW Bitcoin mine to heat a neighboring 200,000 square foot industrial facility that manufactures swimming pools. Quebec winters are brutal, and this energy reuse is a great example of sustainability in action.

In Paraguay, our efforts extend to infrastructure and education. We met with the governor of the Cordilleras province and asked what the community needed most. The answer was simple: electricity. So we committed to electrifying 18 local schools. We’ve already completed four and will finish the rest this year and next. This is how we contribute meaningfully to the regions where we do business.

Lastly, we play a major role in grid stability. In Sweden, we’re the largest participant in national grid balancing. Our advanced software allows us to reduce strain on the power grid, minimizing the need for costly backup generators. We pioneered similar initiatives in New Brunswick as well.

All of these efforts, renewable power, energy reuse, community investment, and grid integration, are what sustainability means for Hive.

We’re currently in a phase where Bitcoin network activity appears quite low—mempools are relatively empty. How do you see that evolving? Is it affecting your operations? 

It’s true that mempool activity is low right now, but from a miner’s perspective, our focus is primarily on network hash rate and difficulty, and both are currently at all-time highs. That tells us there’s still an immense amount of computational power securing the network.

As for mempool size or on-chain activity, those metrics naturally fluctuate. They’re influenced by many unpredictable external factors. You can observe trends, but you can’t reliably forecast them. That’s why we don’t over-index on them operationally. Now, transaction fees, outside of extreme bull markets, typically represent only a small portion of miner revenue, usually in the low single digits (1–3%). So, even if the mempool is less active, it doesn’t materially affect our bottom line.

Are you concerned about the long-term outlook if this trend continues?

We’re not overly concerned because long-term adoption continues to grow. Institutional investors are entering the space, which could mean fewer but larger transactions, as opposed to high-frequency retail activity. Either way, the block space continues to be utilized, it’s just evolving. Block rewards decreasing is simply part of Bitcoin’s design, as laid out in the white paper. That’s why we emphasize a core profitability metric: revenue per kilowatt hour. It reflects everything: block reward, Bitcoin price, machine efficiency, and network difficulty. The market self-regulates. Think of it like layers of an onion: some miners operate at 2 cents/kWh, others at 3, 4, or 5. Each has a different breakeven. Those with higher costs and older, less efficient machines are the first to get pushed out when margins tighten. Historically, and even post-halving, we’ve never seen mining revenues fall below 4 cents per kilowatt hour for any meaningful period. I had to do a detailed analysis on this during our 2019 fiscal audit, back when crypto mining was still considered novel by many auditors. The absolute low we recorded was about 3.5 cents/kWh, and even then, it only lasted a day. Today, even older machines have breakevens over 5 cents/kWh. Newer-generation machines are still performing around 10 cents/kWh.

So while revenue compression does occur post-halving, the broader dynamics of Bitcoin scarcity and growing adoption tend to push price upward over time, supporting long-term viability. Looking far ahead, when block rewards eventually reach zero, transaction fees will likely become the primary incentive. By then, in 100 years, mining will be highly industrialized and probably integrated directly at the point of energy production. But that’s a distant future.

How do you see Bitcoin adoption evolving in the future?

I recently saw several projects starting to put data on the Bitcoin blockchain which is novel right? It is mostly Bitcoin NFTs right now but what's important is that you're able to put specific data on the Bitcoin blockchain. This reminds me of my background in telecom, specifically wireless telecom. Back in the mid-2000s, everyone had flip phones. You could talk, maybe send a text or a grainy photo, but the cameras were terrible. Remember the Motorola Razr? At the time, I was working in a lab where we were developing 4G technology, streaming video and high-speed data. I remember us engineers asking, “Who are we building this for? None of these phones even need this much bandwidth!” We didn’t realize it yet, but we were building the foundation for the future. Then, the iPhone came out, and boom: everything changed. That’s the paradigm shift I see with Bitcoin now. The infrastructure—the rails—are already in place. Bitcoin is an energy-backed currency, which gives it real, intrinsic value. Now, with Lightning and other layer 2 solutions, we can transact more efficiently. We can also store information directly on-chain.

Eventually, someone will create a killer app that ties all of these elements together, layer 2 speed, security, on-chain data, and that will drive a whole new wave of Bitcoin adoption. Will that be next year? Or in five years? Hard to say. But it will happen. I’m confident of that. It’s the same with AI. The first GPT came out in 2018, ChatGPT version one, but it wasn’t that smart. It wasn’t very useful yet. But it laid the groundwork. Similarly, all of this Bitcoin infrastructure is setting the stage for much greater utility and transactional volume on the Bitcoin network in the years ahead.

As a miner, you’re obviously focused on Bitcoin but what’s your perspective on the current altcoin landscape? 

It’s a good question. What I find compelling about Bitcoin is that it has no CEO, no central authority. It’s the most robust, most decentralized network in existence. The total computational power securing it, depending on the day, is backed by over 10 gigawatts of distributed infrastructure. On top of that, you now have layer 2s, and the ability to embed data directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. That’s a powerful combination. As for Ethereum, personally, I think switching to proof-of-stake was a mistake. There was a narrative from U.S. regulators suggesting that staking tokens resembled securities. And to be fair, when you’re issuing tokens, distributing them to people, and those tokens generate yield—it does start to resemble how stocks work. That’s why I appreciate what Michael Saylor [Strategy founder] always says: Bitcoin is digital property. Proof-of-work is what gives it that property-like quality. Ethereum, by contrast, has a foundation with a visible leadership structure, Vitalik and a core group able to influence the network. It’s been subject to forks, like Ethereum Classic, and ultimately moved to proof-of-stake. That adds an element of centralization and unpredictability, which I believe makes it fundamentally different from Bitcoin.

Now, regarding other proof-of-work coins, look, I think it’s great that they exist. Litecoin is a good example. But I’ll be honest: I’m a Bitcoiner at heart. I keep an eye on the rest of the ecosystem, but my real passion is Bitcoin. To me, it represents sound money for the future.

Would you say the amalgam between Bitcoin and the others is damaging? 

With many smaller tokens, what I often see is opportunism. People jump in hoping for a “100x” return or a quick win—“when Lambo?” kind of thinking. That’s not sustainable. If you want to day trade, I mean, fine but Bitcoin  is digital gold. It’s something you can bank for 10 years.  When I started investing in crypto in 2016, I tried all kinds of projects. There were ICOs in 2017, then NFTs, DeFi—you name it. Every single one of those altcoin bets either lost money or went to zero. The only assets that held or gained value for me were Bitcoin and some Ethereum I bought early on. In hindsight, if I had just bought and held Bitcoin, I’d be far better off.

How do you see yourself and Hive over the next five years?

Over the next five years, I expect Hive will continue navigating the industry’s cyclical challenges, as we’ve done in the past. By the end of this year alone, we’ll be operating 300 megawatts in Paraguay, with 25 exahash globally, representing roughly 3% of the total Bitcoin network hash rate. Even accounting for a potential 30% increase in network difficulty, we still project to mine over 10 Bitcoin per day. So in a way, I’m already describing where we’ll be in the next 12 months. Looking beyond that, we have a clear runway for further expansion in Paraguay. We’ve always evaluated opportunities in the U.S. as well, and while it’s hard to predict exact moves, we’re guided by one principle: if the opportunity scales efficiently and delivers a strong ROIC (Return on Invested Capital) for our shareholders, we’ll do it. It took time to find the right green energy setup in Paraguay, but we did—and it’s been a game-changer. I expect more innovation-driven growth like that in the years ahead.

We’re already working with hydropower in Paraguay, and I believe technologies like immersion cooling and vertically integrated infrastructure will become more common. Miners who demonstrate consistent uptime and operational excellence—like Hive—will increasingly partner directly with energy producers.

Do you think the bitcoin mining industry will evolve itself? 

To illustrate, imagine someone like Warren Buffett, not a Bitcoiner, but an energy investor. Or someone like Li Ka-shing. These are individuals who hold significant energy assets. At some point, they might realize: “Bitcoin is an energy-backed currency, and I have stranded energy—maybe I should monetize it through mining.” That’s when we’ll see a paradigm shift.

The industry has already changed dramatically. In 2017, we were seeing hundreds of millions raised. By 2021, that had grown to billions. Traditional financial players like investment bankers became deeply involved. Public market activity increased. And slowly but surely, banks began dipping their toes in. I believe the ecosystem will continue to mature. As with any new asset class, regulation and compliance will follow the money. Tax frameworks are developing, as we’ve seen in places like Canada, where cannabis became federally legal once the government figured out how to tax and regulate it.  As crypto exchanges become more compliant, we’ll see stronger brands emerge—platforms that haven’t been hacked or associated with shady behavior. A more regulated and secure exchange infrastructure will build trust, especially around fiat on-ramps.

All I can say is that the future looks bright, and that’s exactly why I’m in this industry. I’ve dedicated my career to it, and I’m surrounded by an incredible team. This isn’t a one-man show. Our CFO, Darcy Daubaras, is the longest-serving CFO in the crypto mining industry. Frank Holmes and I have both been part of Hive since 2017.Hive has enjoyed stable, experienced leadership. We’ve weathered the storms, scaled globally, and remained committed to innovation and sustainability. I truly believe the next five years will be our most exciting yet.