Ever since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin has driven crypto-enthusiasts to look for innovative ways for mining Bitcoin. Initially, Bitcoin mining was pretty easy to do. People would log on to their PCs, join a Bitcoin mining pool, and let their computers do the rest. However, as its price increased, it attracted more miners to join the game, increasing the computational complexity of the blockchain. This made it more difficult to mine Bitcoin, resulting in miners employing specialized hardware to get an edge over others on the network.
How Does Bitcoin Mining Work?
Don't let the term confuse you. The act of Bitcoin mining is nothing like the physical act of exploring and searching for minerals. Perhaps the term gets its name because of how arduous the process has become and how miners have to rely on chance to secure new Bitcoin. Nevertheless, Bitcoin miners, which are essentially computers on the Bitcoin Network, are tasked with compiling and verifying Bitcoin transactions into chunks so that they can become a part of the blockchain - a global ledger containing all Bitcoin transaction records since its inception. If you want to start bitcoin trading then you can visit bitqt-app.com/de
Bitcoin employs the use of cryptography to ensure the integrity of the blockchain such that it prevents malpractice and fraud, allowing investors to conduct transactions securely.
Why is Bitcoin Mining so Power Hungry?
As part of Bitcoin Mining, miners are required to submit a proof of work, whereby they have to solve cryptographic puzzles to receive a Bitcoin as a reward. These puzzles can only be solved at random, as it would require many computers many years to solve if they use novice algorithms to solve them. This hit-and-miss strategy means that you can increase the likelihood of solving these puzzles if you increase the rate at which your computer tries combinations. And your computer can do that if you increase its computational power. However, this implies that you'll require more CPU or GPU cores, which increase the power demand.
How Can We Make Bitcoin Mining Greener?
Currently, Bitcoin mining has been developed onto an industrial level, where many groups are using specialized computing devices, called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), for the sole purpose of Bitcoin mining.
These devices are hooked onto the bitcoin network in rows, working in parallel to increase the cumulative computational power, far greater than conventional CPUs and GPUS. Depending on the scale of the facility and the number of ASICs used, the power demand varies but can be curtailed if one uses dedicated renewable sources of energy like solar and wind to meet power demands, thereby putting less stress on utilities and making the process greener.
This has the added advantage of reducing power costs as wind and solar produce inexpensive energy. However, this greatly depends on where you live and if you can support the initial investment required to incorporate these technologies.
An easier approach would be to monitor network complexity, given in total hash per second (TH/s). This rate signifies how difficult it is to solve the cryptographic puzzles required to make a transaction block on the blockchain. The higher the complexity, the more the computational power required to solve puzzles. However, this complexity varies depending on the miners on the network, and the way Bitcoins come into circulation.
Bitcoin is designed in such a way that each new transaction block gets added to the Bitcoin network every 10 minutes so that a steady supply of Bitcoins comes into circulation as rewards. If too many miners are on the network, they can perform more calculations hence make blocks quicker; hence the complexity needs to be increased.
Don't let this discourage you because you can monitor this complexity and optimize it such that you start mining when it goes down, increasing your chances of mining Bitcoin, thereby reducing power consumption and increasing profits.
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