New way to mine cryptocurrency that don’t cost the Earth?
I once was a crypto miner. Back in the day I GPU mined on a medium scale for ethereum and other alt coins and also mined Bitcoin and litecoin with ASICS. As anyone who has mined will tell you the results often are….mixed.
Mining requires a big investment in hardware and a source of very cheap electricity. for example, running 20 graphics cards mining ETH in my flat in England I had a electricity bill of £520 per month! Later, me and my friend set up a medium sized ASIC farm in Taipei with around 100 Antminers and our monthly bill for electricity and rent was over 100 thousand Taiwan Dollars! And the amount of bitcoin you could mine at that time would barely cover that cost.
In late 2018 the mining crisis happened with the price of bitcoin going far under the cost of production for most mining operations. Even in places like mainland China with very low cost per KWH, mining farms went bust, with pictures of ASIC miners piled high in scrapyards doing the rounds on twitter and Linkedin. Nowadays the mining scene is divided between large farms who have enough saved funds to mine at a loss for the time being or small hobby miners who mine new coins using a few GPUS.
Is there a way to mine crypto that doesn’t have a huge upfront investment or use vast amounts of electricity?
blockchains are quite an interesting piece of technology, they allow anyone to provide “something” of value and be rewarded by people who find that “something” valuable directly in a p2p way.
Apart from providing hashpower to POW blockchains what other things, assets, services can you provide using your resources; Your brain, your computer hardware etc. and get a crypto income in a semi passive or passive way.
STEEM platform is a blogging site based around its own blockchain. you can produce content and be rewarded in the form of steem cryptocurrency
STORJ is mining based on distributed storage. you get paid cryptocurrency for providing storage of other peoples files in a decentralized cloud
Something I found quite interesting when I thought about these platforms is that it would be possible to “mine” content in the same way that you “mine” storage. If you could produce a video that was popular, you could turn it in to a blockchain asset and get paid directly by advertisers every time someone watched it.
one such project is the itera blockchain computer. It is a physical device which contains storage, it also lets the user upload videos to the blockchain which are automatically tokenized and made available to the public. Companies can “bid” for ads on that content and the uploader get paid all the money minus “storage fees” which are paid to itera computer users anyway.
So, the user can at the same time mine storage and mine any content they produce. the whole machine uses less than 65W of power which is 5% of the power needed to run the latest ASIC meaning no noticeable increase in electricity bills. It also uses the spare bandwidth capacity that many households pay for but never fully use.
From my research it appears that this machine will be released some time in 2020. It could herald a new era for the home miner.
Published at Mon, 09 Sep 2019 04:42:21 +0000
Bitcoin Pic Of The Moment
✅ This image from Marco Verch (trendingtopics) is available under Creative Commons 2.0. Please link to the original photo and the license. 📝 License for use outside of the Creative Commons is available by request.
By trendingtopics on 2019-03-15 11:36:06
