With the overall market capitalization of cryptocurrencies gradually trending towards $1 trillion, increasing from just under $20 billion at the start of 2017 to over $700 billion at the beginning of the current year, it’s simply a good time to invest in the revolutionary technology called blockchain. Last year alone, bitcoin, the pioneer cryptocurrency, which introduced the blockchain technology too, rose from the $1000 region at the beginning of the year to over $19,000 at a point during the year.
Over the past month, or so, cryptocurrencies including ethereum, litecoin and ripple have enjoyed impressive rallies too. With governments and financial institutions around the world exploring the possibilities of issuing some form of cryptocurrency to benefit from the improved efficiency that blockchain powered money brings to the digital world, it’s safe to say that cryptocurrencies are here for the long haul and they’re likely to change the way we use money. The case for investing in blockchain and cryptocurrencies has never been stronger. The problem, however, is that the cryptocurrency market is plagued with instability and many useless coins, making it difficult for long-term investors to find a good entry points. Moreover, at present, partly because it’s still early days, it’s currently difficult to determine what a fair value is for cryptocurrencies. So this leaves the question of how to, genuinely, benefit from the blockchain and cryptocurrency revolution over the long term.
One effective way is to invest in cryptocurrency mining, the process that generates new cryptocurrencies. Many of the major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, ethereum and litecoin depend on mining to function.
What miners do and why they’re important
Mining cryptocurrencies simply has to do with the process of verifying cryptocurrency transactions and adding them to the public ledger. Recall that crypto transactions are peer-to-peer, which means there are no intermediaries. In order to maintain the integrity of the system and avoid double spending, which had been one of the things that the traditional banks do, miners serve as witnesses to transactions. To verify transactions, miners use a computer or group of computers to solve a mathematical puzzle, called cryptographic function and they are rewarded with freshly generated cryptocurrency – the part that’s actually the mining. Miners can either sell the cryptocurrency rewards for fiat money on exchanges or keep them as an investment to bet on an increase in the value of the cryptocurrency. Just to point it out, it’s the process of mining described here that leads to an increase in the number of cryptocurrencies in circulation.
Is cryptocurrency mining profitable?
In a similar fashion to the saying that “not all cryptocurrencies are created equal,” all cryptocurrencies aren’t equally profitable. Cryptocurrency mining is designed to increase in difficulty as the number of miners of a particular cryptocurrency increases and the number that cryptocurrency in circulation increases. Consequentially, the cost of mining a cryptocurrency tends to increase as the usage of that cryptocurrency increases. So there’s simply no one formula to determine if cryptocurrency mining is profitable on an overall basis. Like all businesses, it would depend on the set up — like how much computational power is allocated to the mining of the cryptocurrencies of interest and the energy tariffs at the mining site. On a general basis, setting up a mining operation that is profitable depends on the ability of the owners to identify areas where energy costs are relatively lower and the cryptocurrencies that offer lower costs on a relative basis so they can assign them more computing power just to optimize operations.
Specific cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum have been said to be profitable for miners. For instance, bitcoin miners in China reportedly break even at $6,925 per bitcoin when energy cost in China is at its highest, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. With bitcoin hovering around the $14,000 mark, this means that bitcoin miners in China potentially making about 100 percent profit.
In addition, a calculation on the website Ethereumin suggests that, with a Geass ASIC setup, which cost about $2,289 with the capability to provide 200 MH/s (mega hashes per second) in hash rate, your profit could be 18.215 ETH in a year. With this sort of profit margin, it’s safe to say that a properly set up mining business should be profitable over the long haul.
How to Invest In Cryptocurrency Mining
There are mainly two ways to invest in the cryptocurrency mining business. You can setup either your own mining operation or investing in a mining business. If you have the technical expertise and time to start your own mining rig, as it’s commonly called, it could be profitable. However, for most people, the best option would be to invest in a mining business and one of the easiest options is to buy tokens during the ICO of a cryptocurrency mining company.
MoonLite is one of such companies. The MoonLite project is an industrial scale cryptocurrency mining operation focusing on the mining of all forms of bitcoin, litecoin and dash.
Cryptocurrency mining operations have been under pressure in recent times for the amount of energy they consume. In fact, Power Compare, a U.K. energy tariffs comparison platform cited Digiconomist, a cryptocurrency power usage tracking website, to suggest that bitcoin mining operations now account for approximately 0.13 percent of the total global electricity consumption. Going by that number, if bitcoin miners were a country, they would be the 61st largest consumer of electricity in the world. While some researchers have argued that Digiconomist’s data has a few layers of error in it, there’s no denying that bitcoin mining consumes a considerable amount of energy — just like any set up of computers doing high-level computation.
These consumption issues have started making governments around the world look into crypto mining operations. In the end, only cryptocurrency mining projects built to be efficient in terms of energy would win. That’s one thing to like about the Moonlite project.
Moonlite is building its first datacenter in Iceland, which is the unofficial capital of the world datacenter due to its inherent need for more heat energy that datacenters could offer. Moonlite datacenter will be running at roughly 14.6MW with 100 percent of the power coming from green sources. The mining company has been able to lock down a 12-year fixed and guaranteed energy cost with the Icelandic Power Producer at a huge discount to the local energy cost. It’s worthy to note that Iceland already has one of the cheapest energy tariffs in the world.
MoonLite plans to start its ICO on February 28 although it’s currently offering a presale, which will end before the start of the main ICO. Another unique thing about the MoonLite ICO, unlike many ICOs, is that the MoonLite tokens confer voting rights on all of the company’s financial, HR and branding affairs through Secure.Vote. That offers an extra layer of security and transparency that’s often missing in the ICO market.
To bring it all together, in world that’s filled with over a thousand cryptocurrencies from which one is to decide which ones are worth an investment, it might help to look in the direction of companies like MoonLite who help bring cryptocurrencies to the market.