The New Secrets of Successful Bitcoin Miners

In the popular imagination, Bitcoin mining is like digging in the Copernicus Crater–as daunting as a lunar mission. The costliness and technical demands of the enterprise dissuade many from plunging into this lucrative endeavor.

Yet, this was not always the case. How did we get here, and where are we going?

In the beginning, the puzzles were easy. All you needed was a PC with a standard CPU. Back then, you received 50 Bitcoins (BTC) for successfully adding a block to the network.

The potential value of Bitcoin was not widely recognized. 50 BTC, hardly worth a penny then, is now worth over 2 million USD. Of course, few could foresee the valuation Bitcoin would eventually garner.

Case in point: Laszlo Hanyecz, who bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. He claims he has no regrets, but most (understandably) balk at this claim.

As demand climbed and competition between miners intensified, basic CPUs would no longer suffice. They were first replaced by GPUs, which could keep the BTC rolling in by bringing more power to the table.

GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) were now quickly cracking the increasingly difficult puzzles posed by the blockchain. This epoch also saw a shift towards communal mining, as mining pools formed to leverage their combined resources to improve their odds of all parties benefiting.

Alongside Bitcoin’s swiftly ascending price, mining would continue to evolve, albeit in a punctuated fashion. Only 2 years after the Genesis Block was added to Bitcoin’s ledger, a third generation of hardware would come, FPGAs.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) brought more precision, as they allowed hardware and software to be customized to optimize the process. Miners could add custom code to juice up their virtual drill rigs to extract what was now digital gold.

The downside was that the venture became more specialized, expensive, and intensive, a trend that continues up to the present. But with the price of a single Bitcoin at $5 in 2011, it was worth it, even to those who did not anticipate further growth.

The First Halving

The following year would witness BTC’s first halving. Now miners would only earn 25 BTC for adding a block.

2013 would see a watershed innovation with the introduction of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). Unlike their predecessors, they were devised specifically to mine Bitcoin. Unsurprisingly, the network's hashing power spiked tremendously when ASICs entered the fray.

The advent of ASICs ushered in an ongoing arms race for the latest and greatest. Chip size has steadily decreased, allowing efficiency to escalate.

But what about now?

Let’s Go Mining

As BTC became still more sought after, mining farms—operations that house a plethora of ASICs–sprung up wherever electricity was cheap and plentiful. All of this has made it exceedingly difficult for the lone miner to prosper.

However, a solution is at hand.

GoMining is a platform where users can purchase NFTs to own a portion of a sophisticated mining farm. This is a way to re-democratize Bitcoin mining. GoMining’s team of experts handles the tech-intensive tasks needed to excel in the contemporary landscape, taking care of all the required programming and upkeep.

This gives casual users a way to be gainfully involved in the mining process.

But the platform is not just for newcomers.

It is also a welcome relief for those who have the desire (but not the time or capital) to invest in a Bitcoin farm, as it obviates the headaches that come with implementation and maintenance.

By drastically lowering barriers to entry, GoMining is making mining accessible again; this could alter the ownership landscape. The democratization of Bitcoin mining could lead to a more diverse group of miners and potentially a more stable network.

This diversity is crucial, as the concentration of mining power in the hands of a few large players has long been at odds with the decentralized ethos behind blockchain. Thanks to GoMining, Bitcoin has come full circle.