State of Bitcoin
The rapid decline in bitcoin’s price since it got to its all-time high ($69,000) has left many panicking. There were a lot of predictions that it was going to attain a price of about $100,000 before the end of 2021. While many still hope for an increase in its price, some sets of people are not relentless in Cryptocurrency Volatility.
According to a report, a total of 19 million bitcoins has been mined leaving a minimal amount of 2 million bitcoins. Now, experts have predicted that by the end of 2140, there won’t be any Bitcoin left to be mined. This is because there’s been a reduction in the amount of Bitcoin one can generate per block. And this is due to a process called halving which takes place every four years.
The last halving was on May 11, 2020, and the amount of Bitcoin that can be made per block is 6.25. It is very advantageous to mine when the price is down as more of the coin would be mined at a lesser price. An increase in price after mining would yield more profit.
Mining
The act of obtaining cryptocurrency through the use of computers is termed mining. It requires solving difficult mathematical problems and other technical work before a bitcoin is generated thereby making the Bitcoin network reliable and secure. But as easy as it sounds, it is not an easy task. Before now, miners could mine bitcoin using a computer which was the original intent of bitcoin’s creator. But over time, miners discovered they could generate more harsh power from graphic cards. However, with the increasing popularity of bitcoin, a lot of miners have dived into the usage of powerful hardware such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC).
Presently, the scarcity of bitcoin has made mining more difficult. Now a powerful computer solely designed with ideal software and hardware is needed to mine a reasonable amount of bitcoin per month depending on the hash power. The harsh power determines the speed at which the computer can perform cryptographic functions needed to validate a block and mine cryptocurrencies like bitcoin from the blockchain.
Challenges faced by Miners
Unfortunately, the mining machines are very expensive as only a few people can afford them. And as mining becomes more difficult, the computers used consume more energy. The computing energy that can be used to mine one block of bitcoin today has increased greatly when compared to 12 years ago judging by the same amount of time. As a result, a solo miner is challenged with the cost of electricity consumption and low harsh power making mining pretty slow.
Average cryptocurrency miners are directly affected by harsh rates irrespective of how they mine. One certain thing is this, the higher the hash rate, the higher the chances of validating a block. To overcome these odds and challenges, a lot of miners come together, agree to share their rewards from block mined successfully.
Crypto miners now combine their hash power to push it to its peak and have a higher chance of validating a block. Apparently, It is very unlikely for a solo miner to validate blocks without forming a team that can effectively run a full blockchain node. Over the last decade, it has become impossible to mine bitcoin without the help of a large pool.
pool
Contrary to this, there has been a report of another solo miner from the Solo CK mining pool whose computational power was relatively small. The miner had a lower hash power compared to a single S9 mining machine and earned 6.25 BTC (approximately $220,000 current price) as a block reward. However, a solo miner from the same pool also validated a block by completing a similar task. It seems solo miners from the team are quite exceptional.
the pool is not regarded as a normal pool as their name implies. They offer services that permit solo mining without facing the cost and troubles of the Bitcoin network. Hass McCook, a bitcoin council member found this unbelievable and reported that it would be an understatement to call this event a very uncommon one.
The shocking event took place on the 24th of January at a block top of 720,175. It was reported by Con Kolivas, CKPool admin, in his recent tweet that the solo miner had a harsh power of about 86 tetraharshes per second. He also said, ” There are many more miners now in the solo pool and if more people are mining solo, somebody will finally be the fortunate one right here”.
