Mining cryptocurrencies is a costly exercise, both in terms of computational power and energy consumption. Thus, a significant investment in capable hardware, and the power to run it, is required to make the enterprise profitable.
A piece recently published in the Digiconomist site revealed some pretty startling statistics. A whole year of Ethereum mining consumes 5.01 Terawatts of electricity, which almost equals the entire 12-month power usage by a country like Moldova.
Broken down further, a single Ethereum transaction consumes 39.00 kWh. To put this into perspective, a dishwasher appliance consumes an average of 288 kWh per year.
Figures become even more staggering when considering Bitcoin and Ethereum mining together. In combination, mining for these cryptocurrencies for an entire year uses up more power than countries like Jordan, Iceland, and Syria, in the same period of time, according to Digiconomist. If we extrapolate this data to five or ten years down the line, the projected growth of mining enterprise may reach the point of collapsing power grids worldwide.
So the stark reality of cryptocurrency mining is that it demands serious energy consumption, which means that a single user working on a medium-high spec computer rig is likely to be left with little patience and a hefty electricity bill. In other words, a bedroom miner will never make a profit.
The solution? Cloud mining. And case at hand, HydroMiner‘s Cloud mining offering.
First things first. What’s in a name?
HydroMiner may sound like a Bond super-villain’s weapon of doom, designed to suck the world’s aquifers dry.
Yet, despite its cinematic overtones, HydroMiner is a rather smart concept that combines cutting edge mining technology with a basic Earth resource: Water.
HydroMiner is a cryptocurrency mining company that uses clean energy drawn from environmentally-friendly hydropower stations in the Alpine region to power its mining operation.
Hydrological power is generally considered to be one of the most cost-effective energy management resources available, and HydroMiner exploits this trait by achieving one of the lowest prices per kWh in the entire European continent. According to figures released by the company, mining operations can be performed at a price rate that is 85% cheaper than the European average. This amount of savings in energy consumption makes a lot of sense when applied to the costly task of mining Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D2gzIwRhaw
Ethereum Cloud Mining Under Proof-of-Stake (PoS)
Ethereum mining has been around for a while, and following a period of relative technological stability, the cryptocurrency’s blockchain is about to undergo a huge change to the algorithm that sustains its integrity.
This is a big deal, as it will effectively mean that blockchain developers will have to work with a hybrid system of sorts combining Proof-of-Work mining with the still-in-development concept of Proof of Stake (PoS). The new PoS methodology will change the way new Ethereum is issued and distributed across the blockchain.
Proof-of-Work v Proof-of-Stake
The entire concept of mining is underpinned by the implicit trust that the network of miners will adhere to the blockchain rules, to maintain the integrity of the ledger. In other words, it is a consensus-based concept.
Proof-of-Work can be explained as the blockchain equivalent of traditional book balancing. What Proof-of-Work does is validating that a series of transactions are accurate, using puzzle-solving hashing algorithms. Simply put, a computer -or more likely, a number of computers- are working together through Proof-of-Work to ensure that transactions are valid, and thus reap the rewards offered by these transactions and create new blocks, or groups of transactions, in the blockchain.
This has been the way Bitcoin and Ethereum mining has operated from the beginning, at a huge cost in terms of computational and electrical power, as we have seen.
Ethereum mining may soon evolve into PoS.
The PoS process also seeks to validate and create new blocks, but the way in which these goals are achieved differs substantially from Proof-of-Work.
In a PoS environment, your computer or wallet invests (‘stakes’) one or more of the Ethereum tokens (‘coins’) it already has. So for instance, if your wallet stakes one token and the entire stake throughout the blockhain is 100 tokens, you are staking just one percent of the entire offering.
Hence, the PoS process does not require the huge amount of computer and electrical power needed to solve the complicated mathematical puzzles involved in Bitcoin mining, as the only factors that affect the outcome of the miner’s chances are the total number of the coins they stake, and the current complexity of the blockchain, i.e. the total number of coins staked in any given transaction.
The trade-off here is that to get rewards in a PoS ecosystem, you have to own coins so you can stake them and turn them into more coins, whereas in Proof-of-Work, a miner essentially turns electricity into coins.
This is why Ethereum is now ready to implement a hard fork into PoS, as it will mean a cheaper, greener, more environmentally-friendly form of mining that just may avoid power grid meltdown in the future.
Pre-Sale closed in 36 minutes, 1,500 ETH raised! Thanks to all our supporters! https://t.co/z15tP5sJAg #ico #ethereum pic.twitter.com/HqKwM8SZzU
— HydroMiner (@hydro_miner) September 25, 2017
HydroMiner: A Pioneer in Ethereum Mining Under PoS
So we come full circle into HydroMiner’s value proposition.
The company’s setup will make full use of the hydrological energy source to power its entire Ethereum Cloud mining operation, leading to a substantial reduction in production costs and a significant upsurge in currency yield.
HydroMiner’s water-cooling solutions enables the company to maintain low temperatures at a very high density, which is crucial to achieve the highest possible mining power, given the limited space available in hydro power stations.
In the company’s own words, ‘most Cloud mining contracts provided by other companies like hashflare, genesis mining etc. just get diminished. With HydroMiner, investors are getting WATT and not Hashes, and thus the contracts won’t get terminated. This will lead to a larger ROI for investors.’
