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As concerns over their energy usage continue to rage, Bitcoin miners have been forced to change their tactic and find renewable energy sources that can be used to mine the coin.
Mining Bitcoin (BTC) just got more difficult as the latest change in the process has revealed an increase of over 7 percent taking the difficulty level to 21.66 Trillion. This would be the 8th consecutive time that the Bitcoin mining difficulty level has been positive.
Bitcoin (BTC) Mining Difficulty Level Increasing
Bitcoin mining is the process of creating or producing new units of Bitcoin using powerful software and computers. This process usually consumes a lot of energy which has led to the increased focus on the effect of mining the asset on the environment.
Thus, the new mining difficulty level is notable considering the fact that the Bitcoin mining difficulty had dropped drastically when China started easing miners out of its space.
However, with many of the miners who were offline now finding new data centers in friendly jurisdictions, the difficulty level is beginning to pick up again and its most current increase coincides with when the value of the digital asset was able to touch above the $60k mark again.
Texas Is Home to Two of the Largest Mining Firms in the World
As concerns over their energy usage continue to rage, Bitcoin miners have been forced to change their tactic and find renewable energy sources that can be used to mine the coin and it appears that two of the biggest miners in the world have found a home in Rockdale, Texas.
The area once hosted the world’s largest aluminum plant, Alcoa, which shut down more than a decade ago. Its absence left a huge gap in the energy capacity, which was steadily going to waste but with the emergence of crypto mining firms within the region, the, hitherto, unused energy is now being maximized.
Apart from the presence of an energy source that can be repurposed, Texas has become a welcoming ground for miners largely due to the numbers of crypto-friendly legislators in the area plus the large portion of untapped land coupled with the fact that miners would be able to tap into the power grid of the state which is highly deregulated and one of the cheapest in the world due to competition among the service providers.
These visible potentials, no doubt, played a role in convincing Bitdeer and Riot Blockchain to establish their firms within the area.
Riot, the largest mining firm in America, on average produces 500 BTC monthly which at the current rate translates to roughly $30 million monthly and above $350 million yearly. However, despite all of these gains and growth, the company has set eyes on having a total power capacity of 750 megawatts which would place it three times bigger than downtown Dallas which uses just 200 megawatts.