The value of Bitcoin keeps rising, recently setting a record when it broke $2,800 for a single Bitcoin. Despite its value, few people know much about this cryptocurrency. Those who do, however, are busy making a killing. One company is Iceland happens to be doing just that.
Bitcoin was created by a mysterious programmer who goes by the name Satoshi Nakomoto. Very little is actually known about this person. He claims to be a Japanese man born in 1975, but that’s not verified. What we do know is that he controls about one million bitcoins, making him worth more than $2.5 billion.
This currency was created to be a unit of value that exists outside the control of governments. The whole thing runs by transactions logged and verified by various nodes, then recorded on the “blockchain.”
The systems runs through mining, in which computers repeatedly verify and collect newly broadcast transactions into a new group of transactions called a block. This block them becomes part of the blockchain, and on and on it goes. The miners get paid by taking a small fee for the transaction and by taking a share of a new Bitcoin when one is created.
In the early days of Bitcoin, a home computer was powerful enough to mine bitcoins, but in those days Bitcoin had almost no real value. As the value of Bitcoin increased, server farms were created to mine Bitcoin, pricing out a lot of at-home miners. When it exploded in value in late 2013, it ended any prospect of someone mining from their home computer.
Considering the value of Bitcoin continues to set records, it’s given rise to an industry of companies to facilitate mining for home users through a server farm in another location. One such server farm is called Genesis Mining.
Genesis is based in Iceland and allows users to pool their resources to mine Bitcoin. When a new Bitcoin is created through their efforts, the users are rewarded with a share of the currency. Considering a single Bitcoin is currently worth about $2,800, even a small fraction can be lucrative (it’s important to note that this value is very volatile, and may have greatly increased or decreased by the time you read this).
The reason this company is based in Iceland is because they have very fast internet speeds, cheap energy, and a cold climate. The climate is important because these mining servers generate a lot of heat. The natural cold weather saves money on cooling costs, allowing the owners to bank more profit.
Some people worry about cloud mining because the history of Bitcoin is littered with people who have stolen or scammed people out of their currency. One famous example is a website called Mt. Gox, which was essentially a bank for Bitcoin. The owners of the website claim they were hacked, resulting in 750,000 bitcoins being stolen. At that time, that was worth more than $470 million.
The owners of Genesis assure people that they’re on the level. They’ve shared many pictures of their facility, and reviews from users have been positive. If you’re looking to get into mining cryptocurrency, this is a great way to harness the power of a server farm without spending the tens of thousands of dollars needed to create your own. If the value continues to increase as it has, you could become a very wealthy person.