Crypto mining remains one of the most lucrative sectors of the crypto industry. Yet, its profitability today is nothing compared to what it was during the early days of Bitcoin.
As a case in point, an early Bitcoin miner, who mined BTC tokens during the Satoshi days, recently made a fortune selling 100 BTCs. Benjamin Brannan, the head of business development at CryptoQuant, reveals that these tokens were 13 years old and had a combined value of just $1.
This early Bitcoin adopter moved 100 of his BTC tokens on Nov. 7, a day on which the price of a single Bitcoin was around $35,000. Brennan reveals that 50 of the moved tokens were sold, while the remaining 50 were also sent to an exchange or an over-the-counter (OTC) trading platform.
Assuming that all the tokens were eventually sold, this miner made profits upwards of $3.5 million. He could also have a substantial amount of mined Bitcoin left in his holdings, which he could sell later at significantly higher prices.
The Evolution of Crypto Mining
With the crypto market displaying extreme bullish tendencies over the past month, the profitability of the Bitcoin mining industry is once again in the headlines. On Tuesday, the daily Bitcoin mining revenue hit $44 million, creating a new all-time high. This led Changpeng “CZ” Zhou, the founder of the Binance crypto exchange, to call Bitcoin the greatest business model ever invented.
Predictably, Google Trends data reveals that “Crypto Mining”, “What is a crypto mine” and “What is crypto mining” searches are surging in number.
In the early days, Bitcoin mining was a relatively simple process, easily accomplishable on a general purpose CPU. Many of the early Bitcoin adopters – which mostly consisted of computer scientists and university students – mined their own BTCs.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, is said to have mined over 1.12 million tokens – a substantial amount which would be worth over $40 billion at today’s price.
The CPUs were soon replaced by graphics process units or GPUs. In fact, Laszlo Hanyecz, the man who became a part of Bitcoin folklore for exchanging 10,000 BTC tokens for two large pizzas, was one of the first people to realize that a GPU was more well-suited for the task of crypto mining than a CPU.
However, as awareness about the profitability of Bitcoin mining grew, so did the competition in the industry. The GPUs were soon replaced by Application Specific Integrated Circuits or ASICs, the first hardware designed specifically for the purpose of crypto mining.
Today, the Bitcoin mining industry is exclusively monopolized by wealthy corporations that deploy thousands of miners to give themselves the best chance for earning the rewards. For instance, Riot Platforms, one of the top BTC mining platforms, recently purchased 33,000 additional miners ahead of the Bitcoin halving.
The top mining companies also combine their computational power to form mining pools. Currently, only two mining pools, Foundry and Antpool, make up about 50% of the global Bitcoin hash rate.
New Bitcoin Minetrix Platform Makes BTC Mining Easier For Ordinary Investors
Due to the monopoly of wealthy corporations, retail investors have been phased out of the crypto mining industry over the past decade. The technical expertise and capital investment required to run a competitive mining operation is simply too high.
However, the Bitcoin Minetrix platform is challenging this lopsided nature of the industry, making it easier for everyday investors to also earn mining rewards.
Minetrix is an innovative cloud mining platform, which allows users to mine BTC by staking its native token – BTCMTX. Investors can purchase this token, preferably in the ongoing presale, and stake them to earn mining credits. These credits can be burned for cloud mining time or a percentage of the yields, both options leading to passive BTC rewards.
All a user needs is an Ethereum-compatible wallet such as MetaMask, Minetrix’s stake-to-mine dashboard makes the rest of the process simple and intuitive.
This tokenized approach also quells any fear of scams or centralization risks that other cloud mining platforms carry. For instance, instead of the long-term cash-based contracts utilized by other platforms, Bitcoin Minetrix allows its users to unstake and sell their tokens at any point in time.
Due to its unique value proposition, the Bitcoin Minetrix presale has already raised over $4 million in just over a month.
Visit Bitcoin Minetrix Presale
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