I am assuming almost everyone has heard about Bitcoin. Recently one bitcoin value reached the 63,000 USD mark. Many of us have tried to mine Bitcoin some with success, sometimes not. If not, don’t worry. Today we will mine Digital Currencies with one of the largest cryptocurrency mines Genesis Mining Ltd. The company was founded by Marco Streng in 2014. They have two mining farms in Sweden and Iceland.
But how did all this get started It is widely assumed that Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto In the year 2009, Lazlo Hanyecz used 10,000 bitcoins to purchase two hot and juicy, Papa John’s pizzas, and that is considered the first bitcoin transaction. At that time the value of 10,000 bitcoin was 40 USD but today that would be around 280 million USD.
That’s an expensive pizza but let’s get back to Genesis Mining In 2014 on a visit to Iceland, Marco Streng found it perfect to start cryptocurrency mining. As Iceland has low rents, inexpensive electricity, and the cold weather is ideal for mining. He started mining in one of the sheds of an abandoned U.S military air force base from the second world war.
There are series of shelves full of computers and when they run at full speed, they are as loud as a jet plane taking off. There are tens of thousands working around the clock 24-7, 365 days a year. These computers are not the normal ones we used at home It consists of a mainboard with six GPUs. These GPUs are capable of executing some 3,200 32-bit instructions per clock which is 800 times more than a regular CPU. The company required thousands of GPUs. So instead of buying retail, the company purchased them directly from the manufacturers. At the Enigma facility in Iceland, the company developed the smart hardware monitoring software Genesis Hive. This finds faulty peripherals and recommends updates and alerts if there are sudden changes in temperature. The Enigma facility consumes energy equal to all of Iceland’s homes. So it has an electricity bill of 1 million USD per month. The number of Bitcoins is limit to 21 million and last will have mined by around the year 2140 Would you like to start cryptocurrency mining?
