Bitcoin miners from the earliest days were the OG Bitcoiners. Each one ran a full Bitcoin node and made their own bitcoins.
They traded these with other Bitcoiners by writing Bitcoin Script OP codes. Both to transact and to verify if they were talking to real cypherpunks.
These guys were tough hombres.
Since then, a beautiful and long journey of mountain-climbing hashrate has taken us here into the future. Now we have tokenized Bitcoin mining, and life is easier.
This is the present and the future.
Tokenized Bitcoin Mining is a real business
With all the scams that have wrought the crypto market, it isn’t surprising if you find a Bitcoin maximalist averse to anything ‘token’. But tokenized assets are not a new invention like Bitcoin. They are securities, they have been around, and they are important.
Commodities are assets you physically have on your person. They include land, metals, salt, bitcoin mining hardware like electric wires and poles and GPUs, buildings, your bed, smartphone, shoes and clothes.
Financial securities allow you to own an asset, or even a piece of it, without having to physically have it on you. They include things like stocks, bond certificates, gold certificates, a legal receipt showing that your friend owes you bitcoins that you stored with them, and many a receipt of ownership.
Securities law has been around for decades and is well entrenched. It emerged because it is infeasible to carry on crucial financial activity such as the funding of companies and governments using only commodities or cash.
Risk appetite
A key problem with securities, especially in a financial climate as dynamic as the one we live in, is the problem of trust.
Being too trusting is how people lose their life savings to cranky securities investments spamming the cryptocurrency and traditional currency markets.
Being too untrusting is how you remain broke.
Bitcoiners ask that you do not trust, verify. Sage wisdom to apply as we explore this Bitcoin mining landscape. But bear in mind that all financial investments need a little faith. Even Bitcoiners transacting on the mainchain can (low-key) be swindled of their money if they only trust two confirmations. The probability is small, but it still exists.
We must have faith, for there is always risk. Because you can keep your eye on your commodities they are less risky to own and hold than securities, which are abstract ownership. But since commodities are like physical cash and securities are like digital cash, commodities are more expensive and hence riskier to transit during a trade e.g. Gold, or Bitcoin due to the fluctuating prices and the ballooning :-( fees. Meanwhile, securities are easy-peasy e.g. USDT, stocks, ETF holdings that you can safely transit while in your bed.
Physical Bitcoin miners (commodities) have risks as well as tokenized Bitcoin miners (securities). But tokenized miners provide efficiency gains that cannot be matched by most physical miner systems today.
Learn your risk appetite, and feed it well.
Turning Ethereum into Bitcoin
Did you know?
You can turn Ethereum into Bitcoin!
Lead into Gold.
This cryptographic alchemy is being made possible by tokenized mining platforms like GoMining. After signing up for an account, a user can purchase an Ethereum-gas-powered NFT of their choosing, which acts as their virtual Bitcoin mining hardware.
I say virtual Bitcoin mining hardware and not Bitcoin mining software to avoid confusion.
The user shall be buying a security backed by and pegged to real mining hardware in the background. Meanwhile, Bitcoin mining software is software that enables you to mine bitcoins on a physical Bitcoin mining system.
Below is one of the GMT (the name of their NFT) mining assets on the GoMining platform. Available to you at the click of a button no matter where you live in the world.
I know the artwork is not fancy. But this is to keep the user focussed on what matters, which is mining bitcoins and making money.
For example the above token is worth $17 per TH of mining power with a total of 5000TH up for grabs in that single token. This price might seem high, but it is less than that of this Antminer on Amazon.com whose cost per terahash is well over $22 (image below).
I haven’t included the import duty payable at the Kenyan port if you are in Uganda like I am, nor the other setup costs that await you such as connecting wires, a better laptop, an air conditioner to cool your house.
So we can see that this idea of a Liquid Bitcoin Hashrate by GoMining allows their users to effortlessly own GMTs that return them real-world value every day, as opposed to cranky jpegs that only gain value when hype is in plenty.
This makes these GMT assets RWA (Real World Assets) as much as a physical Antminer. It blurs the line between commodity and security to make these closer to digital commodities.
Of course, the Antminers must exist somewhere, held by a big mining pool like Foundry USA. Since Foundry has a majority of the hashrate then they win a majority of the Bitcoin rewards. These rewards are then enjoyed by GoMining users, to the chagrin of Solo miners and Pool miners running physical hardware with high maintenance costs (that Antminer above is going to need cleaning every other while. Which will be hell if you live in a dusty area of the world).
The Future is Tokenized Bitcoin Mining
As can be appreciated, the future is tokenized Bitcoin mining. Especially when mining becomes so unprofitable for physical holders of 1,2,3 ASICs with the ballooning of maintenance costs following a shrinking of mining rewards with each Bitcoin halving.
Even more impressive is the fact that tokenized Bitcoin mining is an easy on-ramp for holders of alternative cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin. If some of Ethereum’s huge ($200 billion) market cap is channeled towards mining bitcoins, I, a Bitcoiner, have no problem with that.
I like that.
And what do you know, platforms like GoMining hit these two birds with one stone.