According to Quantum AI Trading, miners are now switching to immersion cooling. Mining Bitcoins has not been profitable for the general public for years. As the difficulty of solving the problems increases, only powerful, efficiency-optimized Asics are profitable. However, some solo miners have been very successful recently with relatively weak rigs with USB-based mining rigs.
A participant in solo.ckpool.org, a pool that “offers anonymous bitcoin mining to everyone, with a 2% fee”, solved a block and earned over 190,000 euros or 215,000 US dollars in BTC. His setup had a hash rate of 86 tera hash per second, running at 83TH/s at the time.
Compared to Britain’s next Antminer, the S19 Pro+ Hyd with a hash rate of 199TH/s, this is not a robust system, especially when considering that these professional rigs are intended for farms with hundreds of units. Additionally, the price of this model is expected to be above $10,000.
It is not the only success of a solo miner; in January, small operations are said to have made more than $260,000. The miner mentioned above uses USB sticks from GekkoScience that contain chips from Bitmain. According to the manufacturer, one rod of about 200 euros can achieve a hash rate of 350GH/s.
This Compac F contains an overclockable BM1397 chip from Bitmain produced at 7 nanometers. The manufacturer also sells a USB hub with a power supply; a similar model is needed to power the USB sticks, such as a Raspberry Pi, to control it. The rods come with a heatsink with a small fan, but people can also use a USB fan for cooling.
It is of utmost importance for Bitcoin miners and crypto miners, in general, to be as efficient as possible and to get the most out of their hardware. Mining consultant BlocksBridge explains that many miners are now paying more attention to this.
That writes Bloomberg, who has spoken with the consultancy. Bitcoin is subject to varying degrees of difficulty when confirming transactions, with a higher price generally associated with more incredible difficulty. As a result, consumption increases for the same reward, so it pays to be as efficient as possible.
The individual ASIC modules are placed entirely in a (non-conductive) liquid, pumped around to carry the heat away from the energy-guzzling modules. According to the company, every central mining farm is now working on such solutions. Electricity costs can make up about 80% of the total costs. Keeping the hardware cooler makes the costs less high or performs better.
A month ago, crypto-miner Riot Blockchain announced working on immersion cooling for ASIC hardware and the necessary infrastructure. It will immerse 46,000 Asics in a pilot program. Even Shell (yes, the oil company) sees potential in developing such a cooling infrastructure.
Intel May Unveil ASIC for Bitcoin Mining at ISSCC End of February
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) will occur at the end of next month. Intel is scheduled to make a remarkable presentation during this digital fair. For example, on February 23 (4:00 PM European time), team blue will reveal more information about ‘Bonanza Mine’, an efficient product for mining Bitcoin.
This does not mean an Arc GPU, as the document states an ASIC. Compared to video cards, these devices are aimed explicitly at mining crypto coins, so they must be a lot more efficient. The description of the presentation also points to an ‘ultra-low-voltage energy-efficient device, although further details are lacking. In any case, in a statement to Tom’s Hardware, Intel said that the company has been working on SHA 256 optimized Asics for several years.
Compared to Nvidia, both AMD and Intel will not hinder the mining performance of their video cards, although the latter prefers that they are not used for this. With the development of its custom solution, Intel may later want to prevent its upcoming Arc Alchemist video cards from being eaten by crypto miners.
Intel’s blockchain accelerator is said to offer a performance that is 1000 times higher than the commercially available graphics cards currently used for SHA-256-based mining. Koduri emphasized that the new chips will only minimally affect the availability of Intel’s current products. To better support, new technologies such as blockchain accelerators, Intel also announced the formation of the new Custom Compute Group business unit within the Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. The aim is to develop chip platforms optimized for specific customer tasks.
Specially adapted PCs are used for cryptocurrency mining, performing cryptographic calculations, and writing this data to a blockchain. Mining makes it possible to generate cryptocurrencies without paying for them – however, potent and efficient hardware is required for the mining systems to be operated profitably. In 2020, the cryptocurrency market was worth around $1.44 billion. In 2021 it was already 1.63 billion dollars. Experts assume that around 90 percent of the world’s population will use cryptocurrencies in the next five years.
