How to Create New Cryptocurrency

AUSTIN, Texas - May 20, 2021 - PRLog -- Dedicated Bitcoin Mining Operations Are A Lucrative Yet Energy Intensive Industry

With Bitcoins currently trading somewhere between $57,000 and $64,000, there is a big financial incentive for potential "miners" to jump in and try their hand at earning Bitcoins.

But Bitcoin mining does not come for free. Successful mining operations depend on fast computer hardware and lots of electricity to perform the "proof of work" required to compete against other miners on the network to "win" the next available set of 6.25 Bitcoins that the system puts up for grabs every ten minutes or so.

While many so-called casual miners elect to turn on the mining function in their Bitcoin control panel and hope for the best, professional Bitcoin mining operators first make a careful assessment of their return-on-investment before jumping in, to ensure that the statistical chance of winning Bitcoins (and profits earned) exceeds the high cost of electricity and computer hardware needed to run a successful crypto mining farm at scale.

That's why many large-scale operations (often described as the size of airplane hangars jammed to the gills with networked computers) are typically located in geographical areas with low-cost energy sources, places that traditionally attract energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum smelting.

Iceland, with its renewable hydroelectric and geothermal power sources, fits the bill, and as recently as four years ago, nearly 8% of the world's large-scale Bitcoin mining operators were based there. But over the last four years, China has emerged as the dominant country for Bitcoin mining; it's now estimated to be home to 70% of the world's large-scale Bitcoin miners.

As we discussed in part 1 of this article series, what makes Bitcoin mining's high energy use especially egregious is that it doesn't provide any useful work (outside of earning coins). Bitcoin doesn't help astronomers look for asteroids that could impact the earth, it doesn't help identify useful drugs that could fight infectious diseases; neither does it help train AI systems to converse in other languages, nor can it help teach self-driving vehicles to recognize bicyclists or pedestrians crossing the road.

Adding insult to injury, the annual energy used by Bitcoin mining is staggering. Cambridge University researchers estimate that worldwide Bitcoin mining operations consume just north of 115 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, and that a single Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as 680,000 credit card transactions or more than 51,000 hours of watching YouTube.

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