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Did you see Dirty Coin teaser above? if it isn’t still not clear why bitcoin should be considered separate from other digital assets, then keep reading my articles, Bitcoin Internet of Value and Bitcoin Value proposition and use cases, or follow what highlighted Fidelity Asset services, which manages $4.5 Trillion from a total of 43 million investors, in their very recent analysis:
Bitcoin dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is a strategy that involves buying a fixed amount of bitcoins (1 bitcoin = 100M Satoshi, Sats) at regular intervals, regardless of its price.
The goal is to smooth out Bitcoin’s price volatility by buying it in small increments over time. This method is popular among long-term investors who want to build a position in Bitcoin without exposing themselves to the risk of buying it all at once at a high price.
To implement a Bitcoin DCA strategy, an investor can set up a recurring buy order with a cryptocurrency exchange, or use a DCA app that automates the process. The frequency of the purchases can be daily, weekly, or monthly, and the amount can be adjusted based on the investor’s budget and risk tolerance.
One advantage of bitcoin DCA is that it removes the emotional element from investing. Instead of trying to time the market and make decisions based on short-term price movements, investors can focus on their long-term goals and stick to their investment plans.
Mining is capital-intensive, if not profitable data centers need to be turned down. It requires specialized labor, the scouting of a proper site, low-cost energy (60/70% of the costs come from energy consumption), the ability to optimize data center operations (OPEX), and the ability to select the right miners/hardware (CAPEX). Throughout the years, the hash rate (the computational power needed to solve the puzzle and find the next block) reached an all-time high, combined with the entrance into the market of several new miners, leading to higher difficulty in mining a block.
Although mining can be profitable, it is a high entry-barrier type of industry, still blurry because nascent, controversial, due to the lack of transparency, and extremely misunderstood.
One of the misconceptions about investing in mining is that if you don’t plug in and manage your rig (miners or hardware) yourself, then it is a scam. In reality, there are several ways to mine bitcoin without going through the complexity, and capital required to mine. Below I walked through the process of :
a) selecting a reputable miner
b) selecting the right investment product.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
One man's win against the players shows there's still digital gold to be found in the mining fields of crypto. However, while the story of the solo miner's victory is inspirational, it's essential to approach mining with a balanced perspective.
On August 18, a jaw-dropping moment took the bitcoin (BTC) community by storm when a solo miner, without the backing of massive computational might, scooped up a 6.25 bitcoin reward for cracking block 803,821.
In layman’s terms, this individual pocketed a cool $160,000, after deducting a 2% fee by their mining service.
But why has this created such a buzz, and what does it reveal about the state of bitcoin mining in 2023?
Identifying as bc1q2za4ejga366sn288273pty8trasn5zs4y9hqg6, this miner was registered with the Solo CKpool mining service.
Distinct from the gargantuan mining pools we’re familiar with, Solo CKpool caters to individual miners.
Con Kolivas, the mind behind this service, expressed his jubilation on Twitter and gave us a glimpse into the technicalities of this win.
The winning miner is believed to have had a hash power close to 1 PH/s (petahash per second), by comparison, immense mining conglomerates like Foundry operate at a mind-boggling 123.64 EH/s.
Thus, for a solo miner with a mere petahash or so, succeeding in this domain is akin to a minnow triumphing in a sea filled with sharks.
Crunching the numbers, Kolivas highlights that a miner with such capabilities would, on average, be successful once every 7 years – that’s what amplifies the astonishment of this achievement.
How was it done? Likely through deploying ten Antminer S17 bitcoin mining machines, which are engineered to break down these sophisticated mining challenges, resulting in such coveted Bitcoin rewards.
A solo Bitcoin miner beat the odds on Monday, solving a block and taking home a whopping $218,544 reward. The miner of block 841286 became the 282nd solo miner in Bitcoin history across more than 841,000 blocks to achieve this feat.
According to Con Kolivas, lead developer of mining software provider CKpool, the miner contributed an average of 12 petahashes—1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) hashes per second, or about 0.02% of the network’s total hash rate. In other words, his odds of beating all the Bitcoin mining pools and every single Bitcoin miner to mine a Bitcoin block were just 0.02% or around 1 in 5,000.
Kolivas offered some insight into the miner's potential strategy.
"From the block solve summary, one can postulate that this large miner either recently switched from pooled mining post-halving (presumably for no longer recouping their elec. costs) for a chance at a solo block, or has been intermittently hashing/renting large amounts solo.," he said in a response to his tweet.
This is the first block mined by a solo miner since the last Bitcoin halving. Solo mining is extremely challenging due to several key factors. Firstly, mining involves competing against the entire network's hash rate and difficulty level. As more miners join the network, the overall difficulty increases, making it harder for solo miners to find blocks.
The usual way to mine Bitcoin today is by joining forces with other miners and then splitting the earnings. This modern version of a guild is known in the crypto space as a mining pool. Right now, the Chinese pool Antpool and the American pool Foundry USA control 49% of the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network.
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Calculate the cost to mine a Bitcoin with Expa Miner visit expacoin.com, powered by Galaxy Digital's model.