Is there any kind of geographical map that shows in which states/cities these hashrates are? I guess there probably isn't good correlation between hashrate + external IP?
I wonder how profitable mining Bitcoin is these days at any scale.
They have calculators for this [0]. The summary is that assuming mining difficulty, electricity rate, and bitcoin value hold constant it's a 10+ year return on the most energy efficient miners, so you're probably better off buying bonds. If you don't have access to very cheap electricity ($0.06/kwh or cheaper) and don't have an efficient way of handling waste heat then it's a non-starter. Even then the price of bitcoin and the mining difficulty are likely to move considerably in 10 years so it's a very risky business plan.
[0] https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/calculator?hs=80
what does one large mining operation (one large enough that when it goes offline during a blizzard, it's a mention-worthy part of that 40% hash rate drop figure) look like in terms of the calculator variables?
How many of what piece of equipment do they have, are they getting electricity for $0.06/kwh or less like you said, how are they handling the waste heat?
I wasn't aware we had huge mining farms in America to be honest. I thought it was mainly other countries. I'm also not super knowledgeable/in the know about this kind of stuff so, might just be accidental ignorance on my part.
2. The blizzard probably took multiple mining operations offline. Large parts of the US are experiencing very cold conditions.
3. Maybe Rockland, TX has the most PR about currently operating large miners in the US. I think they have a contract for ~$0.03/kwh and purchase hundreds of megawatts [0]. It's tens of thousands of miners.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/hard-luck-texas-town-bet-bitcoin...
Riot Blockchain (RIOT) [1], Marathon Digital (MARA), HIVE Blockchain Technologies (HUBTF) and Hut 8 Mining Corp (HUTMF) have public financials [2].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1167419/000107997321...
[2] https://marketrealist.com/p/publicly-traded-bitcoin-mining-c...
It boils down to a function of Capex and Opex.
Today though it is a bit more complicated. Given that the bitcoin price goes in cycles, it is less about the current profitability and more about the ability to weather bear cycles. Miners now will hold as much as possible and then take profits when the prices go up again. Sometimes, they borrow against their existing holdings to buy more hardware.
During bear cycles it is far more risky to setup a new mining operation, especially when presented with the ability to just market buy BTC in large enough quantities to not affect price.
To answer your question though, it makes almost no sense to start a mining operation these days. You're competing with much larger players who have much deeper pockets. If you're doing just a small operation, the difficulty adjustments will hurt you more than a larger player who's lighting up thousands of machines at a time.
One example: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/natural...
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4546309-ivanhoe-mines-upsid...
https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map
I didn't know this existed but randomly saw it in the website's menu while researching another comment. It even drills down to state level in the USA and province level in China if you click the button at the top of the map. Georgia is popular in the USA, anyone know why?
Probably not, since you don’t even need to be online at all to mine bitcoin.
> Every 10 minutes or so, some miner on the network guesses correctly, and their block becomes the new one that everyone uses for their guessing.
> If your miner isn't on the network, it'll never be told that some other miner guessed correctly and that everyone else on the network is now working on a newer block. Your miner will keep on guessing, but if it does eventually guess correctly, it won't matter as the network has moved on.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/sjfds/why_am_i_abl...
Seems kind of inefficient?
You don't need fiber internet but just a DSL modem with most-of-the-time connectivity to do mining for contributing to the network's safety, but doing it offline altogether indeed does not really make sense. (If you're doing it for the moneys then you probably do want to get information early (stable, low latency internet) so that you don't waste hash cycles.)