Deniz 
After local homeowners complained, a Texas jury found the plant manager of a Marathon Digital mining operation close to Granbury, Texas, not guilty of twelve noise offenses.
In a case concerning claims that Marathon’s Granbury location operated at a high level capable of causing hearing loss, local outlet the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph reported on July 10, a six-person jury found Marathon’s site manager David Fischer not guilty.
Following a protracted July 8 TIME story including over 40 Granbury neighborhood residents claiming they had negative medical ailments they felt were caused by noise from Marathon’s facility, Fischer’s acquittal follows.
According to the United States National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Hood County Constable John Shirley claims to have recorded numerous readings in the past months where the site ran over 85 decibels—enough to cause hearing loss with long or repeated exposure.
But the claims of noise violations focused on Fischer, not on the bitcoin-mining company. According to Fischer’s attorneys, Marathon should be cited by Hood County for the claimed offenses; he wasn’t the appropriate person to cite.
Fischer’s lawyers also asserted at trial that Constable Shirley’s findings were overstated and that the noise from Marathon’s miners was not illegal because it was a permitted industrial site.
A resource-intensive procedure using specialized computers to solve cryptographic challenges securing the blockchain is bitcoin mining. Mining sites produce a lot of heat and must be cooled.
Some of Granbury’s neighbors said the noise the fans create to cool these mining rigs—a loud, low-frequency hum—and the presence of the mine are linked to heart troubles, chest pain, migraines, nausea, and tinnitus—often a ringing sound.
By the end of the year, a Marathon official told TIME, “We intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling,” a technique whereby the mining rigs are submerged in a fluid that keeps them cool.
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