Bitcoin Mining - A brief overview
Bitcoin Mining
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency mining is now a huge industry, but things are changing.
Initially, miners were individuals, perhaps earning a few dollars for each coin, often on their home computers in their spare time. Some still do this, especially when they choose to mine the lesser known and not so valuable coins.
Nowadays however, the value of Bitcoin has risen hugely and Mining for Bitcoin and also, Ethereum and Litecoin, has become big business. It is now thought to be only profitable for large specialist operations, in purpose built data centers. These are full of state of the art, dedicated high end CPU systems, costing millions of dollars to build and install.
But it goes much further than just the owning and the deploying of the hardware and computing power. Bitcoin Mining consumes huge amounts of electricity and gives off a great deal of heat and carbon. For a digital currency system that was meant to radicalise and bring fairness to the financial and wider world, it is conversely, nowadays not at all eco-friendly in it's production technique.
Therefore, as you can imagine, just for the cost of the electricity consumed alone, Bitcoin mining operations are not really viable for most individuals, or even new companies coming on the scene.
In addition, Bitcoin mining gets harder every 4 years, as the number of available coins is intentionally halved, therefore making it literally as difficult as gold to discover. The next halving event is due in May 2020. Read more about Bitcoin Halving.
Go Green
The Ethereum Network is currently undergoing a huge change to shift its ETH coin production from "proof of work" to "proof of stake". What does this mean? It is huge. Proof of work means stopping the high energy consuming Mining activity. The resulting new ETH version 2.0 token therefore looks set to become a very much greener Cryptocurrency option in the future.
Further reading: Ethereum - Proof of Work changing to Proof of Stake .....
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