How much will i make bitcoin mining
Asia correspondent chesh. From the outside, it looks like the sort of huge industrial site typical of West China. A dry, dusty corner of the country where 3, people are at work. But beyond the security gates at the main entrance, behind a padlocked and guarded door, is something entirely different: a secret Bitcoin mining farm. We are in a new Bitcoin boom - and this is the frontier.
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- www.makeuseof.com
- Is cryptocurrency bad for the environment?
- Texas Governor Eyes Bitcoin Mining to Fortify the Electric Grid
- Bitcoin mining centres shut in Kazakhstan as authorities blame crypto miners for outages
- How You Can Still Make Money Mining Cryptocurrency
- Bitcoin price news – live: Crypto market surges as Russia and Turkey explore cryptocurrency
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Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming — but the reality is a little more complicated. How much energy does an industry deserve to consume? Right now, organizations around the world are facing pressure to limit the consumption of non-renewable energy sources and the emission of carbon into the atmosphere.
As cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular, have grown in prominence, energy use has become the latest flashpoint in the larger conversation about what, and who, digital currencies are really good for.
On the face of it, the question about energy use is a fair one. This certainly sounds like a lot of energy. But how much energy should a monetary system consume? How you answer that likely depends on how you feel about Bitcoin.
If you believe that Bitcoin offers no utility beyond serving as a ponzi scheme or a device for money laundering , then it would only be logical to conclude that consuming any amount of energy is wasteful. If you are one of the tens of millions of individuals worldwide using it as a tool to escape monetary repression , inflation , or capital controls , you most likely think that the energy is extremely well spent.
Specifically, there are a few key misconceptions worth addressing. While determining energy consumption is relatively straightforward, you cannot extrapolate the associated carbon emissions without knowing the precise energy mix — that is, the makeup of different energy sources used by the computers mining Bitcoin.
For example, one unit of hydro energy will have much less environmental impact than the same unit of coal-powered energy. But its carbon emissions are much harder to ascertain. Mining is an intensely competitive business, and miners tend not to be particularly forthcoming around the details of their operations. The best estimates of energy production geolocation from which an energy mix can be inferred come from the CCAF, which has worked with major mining pools to put together an anonymized dataset of miner locations.
Based on this data, the CCAF can guess about the energy sources miners were using by country, and in some cases, by province. Furthermore, many high profile analyses generalize energy mix at the country level, leading to an inaccurate portrait of countries such as China, which has an extremely diverse energy landscape.
As a result, estimates for what percentage of Bitcoin mining uses renewable energy vary widely. Almost all of the energy used worldwide must be produced relatively close to its end users — but Bitcoin has no such limitation, enabling miners to utilize power sources that are inaccessible for most other applications.
Hydro is the most well-known example of this. In the wet season in Sichuan and Yunnan, enormous quantities of renewable hydro energy are wasted every year. In these areas, production capacity massively outpaces local demand, and battery technology is far from advanced enough to make it worthwhile to store and transport energy from these rural regions into the urban centers that need it.
Another promising avenue for carbon neutral mining is flared natural gas. The process of oil extraction today releases significant amount of natural gas as a byproduct — energy that pollutes the environment without ever making it to the grid.
But Bitcoin miners from North Dakota to Siberia have seized the opportunity to monetize this otherwise-wasted resource, and some companies are even exploring ways to further reduce emissions by combusting the gas in a more controlled manner. To be fair, the monetization of excess natural gas with Bitcoin does still create emissions, and some have argued that the practice even acts as a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry, incentivizing energy companies to invest more in oil extraction than they otherwise might.
But income from Bitcoin miners is a drop in the bucket compared to demand from other industries that rely on fossil fuels — and that external demand is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Given the reality that oil is and will continue to be extracted for the foreseeable future, exploiting a natural byproduct of the process and potentially even reducing its environmental impact is a net positive. Interestingly, the aluminum smelting industry offers a surprisingly relevant parallel.
Regions with the capacity to produce more energy than could be consumed locally, such as Iceland , Sichuan, and Yunnan, became net energy exporters through aluminum — and today, the same conditions that incentivized their investment in smelting have made those locations prime options for mining Bitcoin.
There are even a number of former aluminum smelters, such as the hydro Alcoa plant in Massena, NY, that have been directly repurposed as Bitcoin mines. How energy is produced is one piece of the equation. Once coins have been issued, the energy required to validate transactions is minimal. And that leads us to the final critical misconception: that the energy costs associated with mining Bitcoin will continue to grow exponentially.
This was the premise of a widely-reported study that was recently cited in the New York Times , making the shocking claim that Bitcoin could warm the earth by two degrees Celcius. First, as has become common in many industries, the energy mix of Bitcoin grows less reliant on carbon every year. In the U. And of course, as renewable options such as solar grow more efficient and thus more viable for mining, Bitcoin could end up serving as a serious incentive for miners to build out these technologies.
In addition, miners are unlikely to continue expanding their mining operations at the current rates indefinitely. The Bitcoin protocol subsidizes mining, but those subsidies have built-in checks on their growth. However, the protocol is built to halve the issuance-driven component of miner revenue every four years — so unless the price of Bitcoin doubles every four years in perpetuity which economics suggests is essentially impossible for any currency , that share of miner revenue will eventually decay to zero.
We can expect some miners to continue operating regardless, in exchange for these transaction fees alone — and in fact, the network depends on that to keep functioning — but if profit margins fall, the financial incentive to invest in mining will naturally decrease.
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Nic Carter is a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, a Cambridge, MA-based venture firm investing in public blockchain startups, and the cofounder of Coin Metrics, a blockchain analytics firm. Partner Center.
Is cryptocurrency bad for the environment?
A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachuttes has asked six crypto mining companies, including Riot Blockchain, to answer questions about the impact of their operations on the environment and cost of electricity in the US. In separate letters to the chief executives of each firm, the group asks the companies to detail how much electricity they consume, their scaling plans and any agreements they have in place with local utility companies. They have until February 10th to reply. The group stops short of suggesting regulatory action could be on the horizon for the industry, but clearly the effect of cryptocurrency on other parts of the economy is something lawmakers are thinking about. That was on display in December when the Senate held a hearing on Stablecoins. Sign up.
Texas Governor Eyes Bitcoin Mining to Fortify the Electric Grid
Today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a small country. This certainly sounds alarming — but the reality is a little more complicated. How much energy does an industry deserve to consume? Right now, organizations around the world are facing pressure to limit the consumption of non-renewable energy sources and the emission of carbon into the atmosphere. As cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin in particular, have grown in prominence, energy use has become the latest flashpoint in the larger conversation about what, and who, digital currencies are really good for. On the face of it, the question about energy use is a fair one. This certainly sounds like a lot of energy. But how much energy should a monetary system consume? How you answer that likely depends on how you feel about Bitcoin. If you believe that Bitcoin offers no utility beyond serving as a ponzi scheme or a device for money laundering , then it would only be logical to conclude that consuming any amount of energy is wasteful.
Bitcoin mining centres shut in Kazakhstan as authorities blame crypto miners for outages
By Elmira Tanatarova For Mailonline. Kazakhstan , the world's second largest miner of Bitcoin , has shut down its crypto mines until the end of January. The state electricity provider KEGOC made the decision to cut the supply to the miners after millions were affected by power outages across three countries in Central Asia last week. Blackout across Central Asia last week left millions without electricity, which affected traffic control in several areas. Pictured, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
How You Can Still Make Money Mining Cryptocurrency
Tuesday, Greenidge Generation announced they will be taking over an old manufacturing facility in Spartanburg to build their own. Experts say this could bring new jobs, and potentially lots of economic growth, to the area. If you were wondering: what is cryptocurrency mining and how does it work? South Carolina has a huge amount of manufacturing jobs and factories, so if you are familiar with that, think of this in the same way. Lummus says the new crypto facility is hopefully just the tip of the iceberg.
Bitcoin price news – live: Crypto market surges as Russia and Turkey explore cryptocurrency
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Successful miners earn cryptocurrency as a reward, but Dr. Tennant said. When people try and make money through investing, Dr. Tennant said they are trying to buy low and sell for a profit.
There are countless ways to make money with computers, but right now there are few as interesting and potentially lucrative as mining for crypto currency. The decentralization of money has led to a digital gold rush, as individuals, mining pools, and full-fledged mining companies vie for the same blocks. So how do you stake your claim and mine your own minty fresh crypto cash? The first thing that you need to understand is that, just like rushing out to California, buying a pick, and riding your donkey into the hills, mining cryptocurrency is a bit of a gamble. Even the more obscure blockchains have thousands of miners racing each other to find the winning hash.
A company that uses massive computer server farms to mine the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is planning a data center in South Carolina. The upstate South Carolina city is about 75 miles southwest of Charlotte. A first phase is expected to open later this year, and expansions are planned through Greenidge says the data center will create 40 permanent technology jobs. State officials were not sure how much the jobs would pay. Greenidge did not respond to a request for more information. Cryptocurrency mining is an energy-intensive business.
Bitriver, the largest data center in the former Soviet Union, was opened just a year ago, but has already won clients from all over the world, including the U. Most of them mine bitcoins. Bloomberg -- New York State delayed a decision on whether to allow operations to continue at a power plant used for Bitcoin mining. Climate advocates have condemned that process for sucking up as much electricity as entire countries, while advocates say mines often run on clean power and can encourage the development of more green energy sources.
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