The 2024 Bitcoin halving event reduced the block reward to 3.125 Bitcoin (BTC). As a result, the supply of new BTC slowed down, and the profitability of mining companies plummeted.
In a new report, Cointelegraph Research explores the current state of the mining ecosystem, including its economic conditions and technical developments. The report also covers new approaches to make Bitcoin mining open to retail investors, including GoMining’s gamified Bitcoin mining using non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Download a full version of the report for free here
The effect of the Bitcoin halving on mining profitability
Historically, the Bitcoin network’s hashrate has been volatile but follows an exponential growth trend. Significant deviations from this trend occur when miners are forced to upgrade to newer and more efficient hardware before each halving event and turn off older mining rigs after a halving event.
Although the total Bitcoin hashrate is increasing exponentially, the performance of individual mining rigs is advancing more slowly.
For instance, the Antminer S19j Pro, released in July 2021, currently accounts for 34.3% of the total network hashrate and has a maximum hashrate of 100 terahashes per second (TH/s). The latest Amtminer S21 Pro, unveiled in March 2024, has a hashrate of 234 TH/s.
Energy efficiency, another fundamental characteristic of mining hardware, has improved from 29.5 joules per terahash (J/TH) on the S19j Pro to 15.0 J/TH on the S21 Pro. However, an Antminer S21 Pro is priced at over $6,000, pushing it out of reach for most retail investors.
GoMining’s gamified approach to Bitcoin mining
Retail investors must seek alternatives since traditional mining has prohibitively high entry barriers due to capital costs and expertise. One option is cloud mining, which allows individuals to rent processing power from remote servers and use it to mine Bitcoin.
GoMining pursues a different approach by letting its users not rent but perpetually own a certain amount of Bitcoin hashrate. GoMining tokenizes hashrate produced by miners in the company’s data centers and mints it as NFTs with varying energy efficiency and power characteristics.
Since these NFTs are tradeable and transferrable, the concept is called Liquid Bitcoin Hashrate.
The GoMining project has a native Gomining Token (GOMINING) sustained by a deflationary mechanism and a wide range of use cases, including NFT upgrades, all of which are covered in Cointelegraph’s report.
Download a full version of the report for free here
GoMining offers two modes to earn rewards from NFTs: Solo and pool mining. The solo mode provides guaranteed results and is based on the characteristics of the NFT used for mining. The pool mode mimics real-world mining practices and lets users launch their own pool or join an existing one to compete for block rewards. The pools are internal to GoMining and rely on a collaborative effort, allowing users to potentially earn more than in the solo mining mode.
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