United Kingdom-based Bitcoin (BTC) mining firm Argo Blockchain just recorded the best quarter in its history, generating record revenues for three months straight. Yet despite the burgeoning cryptocurrency mining venture emerging in the west, the vast majority of Bitcoin production still takes place in China, where cheap, coal-powered electricity fuels an untold number of mining rigs. A recent report by Nature.com revealed that as much as 75% of Bitcoin mining takes place in China — news which must fall hard on the ears of Shark Tank and Dragon’s Den investor Kevin O’Leary, who recently labeled all Bitcoin mined with the …
Ethereum (ETH) miners are currently voting to expand the block gas limit from 10,000,000 to 12,500,000 gas, according to a recent tweet from Bitfly, the parent company of Ethermine pool. What is gas and the gas limit? Gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort required to send a transaction or perform other actions on the Ethereum blockchain. It is denominated in Gwei, or extremely small fractions of ETH. Block gas limit, in turn, is the threshold of gas that can be spent on the transactions featured within one block. How could this vote affect the network? …
In its third-quarter earnings release, Canadian cryptocurrency miner Hut8 announced that it surpassed its goal set earlier this year of holding 5,000 Bitcoins (BTC) in reserves through mining. Its Bitcoin balance now amounts to 5,053, for a total market value of $430 million. During the quarter, Hut 8 generated 50.34 million Canadian dollars (CA$) in revenue and CA$23.37 million in net income, up from CA$5.75 million in revenue and a loss of CA$0.90 million in the prior year's quarter. The company hosts a sizable fleet of Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC, machines used for Bitcoin mining. In addition, it deploys …
New York-based crypto-mining service provider Foundry USA takes the lead to become the world’s second-largest Bitcoin (BTC) mining pool after taking up a 15.42% share of the network. Data from BTC.com shows that Digital Currency Group-owned Foundry USA stands behind the pool leader AntPool by a hash rate of just 4,000 PH/s, which contributed to a 17.76% network share at the time of writing. The rise in the participation of American entities can be attributed to China’s recent blanket ban on crypto trading and mining activities. The ban forced a large-scale migration of local Bitcoin miners, who now reside in …
Over the last couple of years, the world has been grappling with the lack of semiconductors, which are the substances that conduct electricity between metals and isolates. The most famous semiconductor is silicon. If correlating this concept to electronic devices, then the key semiconductors are processors and other microcircuits that are present in almost all devices that people use every day, from smartphones to cars. In 2021, semiconductors hit a world record in terms of sales. Electronics production also boomed, with hundreds of millions of complex semiconductors being devoured by gaming consoles. The number of GPUs produced grew to unseen …