There have been a lot of detractors of mining cryptocurrency. People are wanting to regulate mining as we do transportation due to the high energy usage and low return due to money required to go in to pay electricity bills. In January the Credit Suisse put out a report that claimed that nearly 80% of miners’ winnings, go back into funding electricity consumption.
I bought some ASIC miners “Application Specific Intergrated Circuit”. The miners are quite expensive and in order to keep these expensive bastards running, you have to keep an eye on them and make sure that your hashing power exceeds your electricity/rent/cooling costs. This summer I had to just unplug them all so as to not be flushing money down the toilet. With the drop in Bitcoin prices along with the rest of the market as a whole, it has become an investment that I just don’t know if I will be able to fully recoup at this time. I certainly paid for a couple of them at current Bitcoin prices, but unless we see prices back in the range of the peak in December of last year or unless profitability comes back up, I’m afraid that I have some really expensive paperweights.
I think that due to the high energy consumption of mining crypto, there are and will be many more bright people coming up with innovations that will deal with the energy needs of the mining industry as well as creating new and better solutions for the needs of energy for everyone. I see inventions that tie together all of the current methods like solar, wind, thermal, magnetism, and other new technologies that are not yet in the public’s eye or are still rolling around in someone’s head waiting to be made into a prototype.
It’s difficult to say where we are going, but we have to say where we want to be and work toward that place while the opportunity could still be available. It’s unfortunate that Tesla’s innovations in free energy, if they were indeed functional, were stopped by J.P Morgan before they could be implemented. What a world it would have been then and what would it look like now?