Mining Research: A dire necessity for cryptocurrency market
Cryptocurrency has been a significant source for generating a fortune not only for its investors but also for its miners — the big deciders in cryptocurrency. Since the advent of digital currency, mining seems to be quite on a spree in this profit generating network. With numerous people barging into this domain, mining of certain cryptocurrencies now requires a higher hash rate which raises the need for specialized hardware devices.
What’s a Hash Rate?
Hash Rate measures the number of times a hash function can be computed per second. It determines whether a Bitcoin miner’s machine is powerful enough to mine or not. The miner’s expected profit is directly proportional to the hash rate.
Market Monopoly
But when it comes to purchasing mining equipment, the market isn’t as decentralized as this concept of blockchain is. This has infuriated miners because of their inability to buy from any other company other than bitmain and insufficiency of routes to procure ASIC chips for bitcoin mining.
Let’s state a few facts addressing the monopolistic nature of some companies in bitcoin mining:
· Bitfury has minimum order quantity of 1 million$ of ASICs for bitcoin mining. Normally for massive MNCs, computer chips worth 250k $, are sufficient.
· For order approval, a miner is enquired about his current activities in bitcoin market.
· Bitmain’s miner works well with Antpool (Bitmain’s self-mining pool), whereas its performance is remarkably lower with other available mining pools. Further bitmain incentivizes miners an extra 3 to 8 percent per mined block for their hashing power, at antpool.
These acts of power consolidation are hemorrhaging the very profound sentiments of this peer-to-peer network.
Why is there a need for mining research?
Over the years bitcoin mining has evolved from CPU mining to pool and cloud mining and is now being mined at mining farms in Scandinavian countries. As a result, individual Miners’ interest is now brewing in the mining of various other Altcoins. Today there are hundreds of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin waiting to be mined. These new altcoins pop up daily, some of which require a basic GPU rig while few others are mined on high-powered ASICs. Not just hardware there are other factors which do impact the feasibility of mining. Some of which are:
· Active miners in the network
· Incentives offered against Altcoin mining
· Hash rate
· Market performance analysis
Hence there’s a need for an extensive and structured research before reaching a sensible conclusion — whether mining is profitable or not.
Conclusion:
MCAP labs has been performing some exceptional work for past few months, driven by an initiative to rectify fallacies prevalent in the mining of various cryptocurrencies. MCAP labs employs a one of its kind “two way research methodology” which strategically assesses mining equipment hardware and algorithm, the two main entities of mining. This rigorous evaluation is carried out on a set of parameters to produce the best-suited results, to turn mining into a profitable business.
