Our History

Like many companies and people in the Bitcoin world, Barefoot Mining’s path to Bitcoin was less than direct.  In 2017, our founder, Bob Burnett received a phone call from an old acquaintance from the PC industry who was requesting help in designing and manufacturing GPU-based Ethereum mining equipment for a large farm. The next day, Bob and Keith Thomas, now President of Barefoot Mining, got together and devised a strategy to develop this equipment. From this effort a company called Divvy Systems was born.  Divvy Systems served the client from the original call and then began marketing its mining servers to others with very positive response.  However, most of the clients wanted not only to buy the mining equipment from Divvy Systems but they also wanted a hosting solution.  From this need another company called Barefoot Mining was born.

Shortly after starting in hosting, Barefoot Mining started to supplement its revenue stream by mining for itself.  Our first mining operation was launched in a warehouse in Nebraska and a second followed shortly after this in a data center in South Dakota. By mid-2018 the gravity of Bitcoin’s Black Hole started to pull, and Divvy Systems signed an agreement with Bitfury to become their U.S. Distributor and Service Center of Bitcoin mining equipment.  

Barefoot Mining’s focus soon shifted toward Bitcoin related activities, and as our first two mining sites began to approach their capacity, a search for new sites commenced. As part of this search, we realized that to minimize the overall vulnerability of our mining operations we needed to spread out more geographically and diversify the power sources we used.  Ultimately this led to the development of a new site located behind the meter of a private hydro-electric facility in South Carolina.  This site is called Bitflow and was done in partnership with two investment groups.  Barefoot has since self-funded two more sites in South Dakota and another operation called Red Horse Mining has been developed in partnership with investors and will be operational in Q2 of 2022. 

Barefoot Mining was led by three executives at its inception: Bob Burnett – CEO, Keith Thomas – President, and Denis Lueders, COO (Retired). All three are former executives with Gateway, Inc, one of the world’s largest and most influential personal computer companies in the world during the 1990s and early 2000s. They applied their technical and operational knowledge and their experience in an explosive growth industry to guide Barefoot Mining to a pioneering position in Bitcoin mining.  Barefoot believes that in the next few years Bitcoin mining will transition into a mature, mainstream industry. During this time Barefoot Mining will be aggressively securing energy and building mining sites to insure that it has a material long-term place in the Bitcoin ecosystem.