Comparing the True Costs of Gold Mining in Africa With Those of Bitcoin Mining
When billionaire Elon Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment for its electric vehicles, the price of the crypto asset tanked. In justifying this decision, Musk cited bitcoin mining’s inefficient use of electricity as well as its impact on the environment. In fact, before Musk waded into this debate, many opponents of the crypto had repeatedly attacked bitcoin’s energy-consuming transaction confirmation process. The Bitcoin Mining Environment Argument As expected, bitcoin maximalists and crypto supporters have been pushing back against what they see....
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Hass McCook is a chartered engineer and freshly minted Oxford MBA. He has been researching bitcoin over the past several months and recently joined the Lifeboat Foundation's New Money Systems advisory board. This article is the second in a series on bitcoin's sustainability. Having previously examined the cost of bitcoin mining, here McCook seeks to quantify the economic and environmental factors involved in mining gold. Gold has been used for millennia as a means to project and protect wealth. As the data below indicates, 52% of all gold ever mined is used for jewellery and palatial....
For Bitcoin cloud mining, names quickly come to mind such as Cex.io or PBmining. But what about on the Scrypt side of the spectrum? Genesis Mining plans to change just that. Before going over what makes Genesis Mining stand out, what are some of the benefits of having your hash power the cloud versus setting up your own rig? Well, for one, you don’t have to set it up. Even for experienced miners, it’s a hassle to buy parts and assemble the parts; make sure everything is working, etc. After that, you have to somehow isolate the heat and noise coming from usually multiple graphics cards....
Cloud mining service providers have been facing hard times ever since the Bitcoin price dropped below $320. Whereas major Bitcoin cloud mining service providers had to shut down operations for an undisclosed amount of time, new companies started appearing all over the internet. XScrypt is one of those cloud mining companies, but it looks like the “company” has gone bust after multiple issues with payouts. Running a cloud mining company is not as easy as it may sound. Not only does a cloud mining operator need access to mining hardware — either self-hosted or remote — but there are tons of....
Bitcoin users in parts of Africa have an almost non-existent mining practice yet the virtual currency’s level of adoption is driving more Africans to its trade. Aside from a Ghanaian firm, Ghana Dot Com (GDC), which claimed it has launched the first Bitcoin mining facility in Africa in March, most mining efforts in parts of Africa are usually done on an individual basis or crowd mining with little or no chance of profitability. This is due to several factors. “I don't think anyone's doing any mining,” says Tim Akinbo, CEO of Nigeria-based TimbaObjects to CoinTelegraph. “Not with the power....
Data shows the public Bitcoin mining companies have been spending more excessively on administration, compared to other industries like gold mining. Average Public Bitcoin Miner Spends 50% Revenues On Administrative Costs According to a new blog post by Arcane Research, most BTC miners have only focused on minimizing direct production costs, and neglected indirect expenses […]