The 2022 Bitcoin Conference kicked off in Miami last week, and the mining industry took up almost half of the space at this year’s show, with several presentations.
1. There is no middle ground for miners
Today’s mining companies are scaling at an ever-increasing rate, and if the average miner is not cost-competitive and uses the latest and most efficient equipment, it will be difficult for them to keep up with these big players.
Mike Levitt, CEO of blockchain infrastructure firm CoreScientific: “The tightening of capital markets over the past few months has made it harder for miners between small and large miners to be profitable.”
To solve this problem, unless scale and efficiency are achieved, equipment may have to be reduced in size, trading flexibility for profit.
2. Geographical decentralization vs. ownership-level decentralization
In the meeting, what is decentralized mining discussed, does it refer to geographic location or mining equipment?
“Historically, we’ve seen decentralization as purely physical. However, when it comes to a 51% attack, what matters will not be the physical distribution of the mining rigs, but the ownership of the mining rigs. If you want to control 51% of the world’s computing power, you don’t need to concentrate on one location.” said Ben Gagnon, mining director of mining company Bitfarms.
From this remark, we can see that the ownership of computing power is the most important factor.
Note: 51% attack means that the attacker controls more than 51% of the computing power of the entire network. When this happens, the attacker will have enough mining power to intentionally exclude or modify the order of transactions, or even reverse them, causing double-spending problems.
3. Home mining and heating applications
As home mining becomes more and more popular, some cases of combining the heat generated during mining with other applications were also mentioned in the conference.
The owner of the Twitter account CoinHeated said that he is working with a whisky distillery. The distillery needs to preheat a lot of water, and the heat generated in the process of cooling the mining equipment can meet the needs of the distillery, thereby achieving a win-win situation. situation.
In addition, some people share the use of mining heat to heat swimming pools in winter.
4. Miners are pursuing the stability of mining
With China’s attack on the mining industry and the exodus of Kazakh miners, the international map of the mining industry has been greatly changed. Fred Thiel, executive officer of mining firm Marathon, sees stability as a major factor in finding new mining locations.
“When you put a lot of money into a place, it takes years to get your money back. The last thing you want is a bunch of people with AK-47s and jeeps saying to you: thank you for building these great devices, you don’t need them anymore, bye, Fred Thiel said.
Post time: Apr-22-2022