www.asicminervalue.com
I know miners. The trend is to Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work. Proof of Work is very energy intensive. Proof of Stake is where a transaction is taking place and you are asked if you think that transaction is valid. If you say yes and is valid then you get a slice of that coin. If you are wrong, you lose the coins you staked as incorrectly said was valid. One wrong declaration can erase many, many slices.
I am just starting to look at options and I am open to any other suggestions. Crypto currency in general is something I am interested in learning more about...
When I first started, it was the oddest thing to literally be printing money in my basement.
Here's a good resource to learn about BTC mining:
I'm clearly no expert but at a high level I believe that the number crunching the complicated algorithms have to do take a tremendous amount of computing power and electricity.
They are mining money. You don't "need" a warehouse full of them. Each miner consumes electricity, produces a lot of heat that must be mitigated and produces a small daily revenue. Here are some rough numbers but remember they vary depending upon many factors including the cost of electricity and the current value of the "coin" you are mining. These numbers are from Compass Mining. They sell miners and miner hosting where you buy the machine and they set it up and run it for you. The newest ASICS Ant Miners are going for around $10,000 to15,000 if you can find one. The price of miners moves with the value of Bitcoin. The newest Antminer will typically earn just under $30 a day. Subtract your $8 (depends on how much you pay for electricity) of direct power consumption and your left with $22 a day. That means if your miner is up and running 24/7 it could take you up to 681 days to recoup your investment. Miners do need maintenance, cleaning and repairs and down time can be significant. The reason you hear about warehouses full of miners is that it is a scalable business. Several of these mega miners are in Texas because of its cheap cost of electricity. The less you pay per KW the more profit you make. There are over a dozen publicly traded bitcoin mining companies. One has a market cap of 791M. These companies raise money, buy miners, run the mining operation but aren't selling their BTC. They instead hold them and borrow against them to run their businesses. Riot, for instance, spent $651 million to acquire mining assets in Rockdale and plans to spend $160 million on the infrastructure build out. Marathon recently raised $650 million. The big players are dominating the market and make it hard for an individual to make money. Last year Marathon ordered 70,000 new miners. That kind of makes it hard for an individual to buy one.
But to what end? What purpose does it serve? That’s what I struggle with understanding.
Miners serve the purpose of facilitating transactions. By way of (imperfect) analogy, miners play the cryptocurrency-equivalent role of dollar-denominated transfer services and payment processors like ACH, wire transfer, credit card, PayPal, etc.
