A new week closes for the mining business and in this summary (number 72), we present you the best of this in news. The most important of them is that Bitcoin mining reached its historical high or ATH last Friday. In this way, the low price of the currency plus the complexity of the network, generate one of the most difficult stages for the business in terms of profitability.
Other important news was highlighted alongside this one. One of them is the announcement of an Italian city in the province of Trento, which will start digital mining. By decision of the local authorities, this small city will follow in the footsteps of El Salvador and generate cryptocurrencies to obtain resources. This is the city of Borgo D’Anaunia, a town with less than 2,500 inhabitants.
An information that cannot be missing in this edition comes from an ETH miner, who got the jackpot. In the summary above, an identical achievement was recounted by an individual Bitcoin miner. These and other impact news from the last 7 days are reviewed in this informative synthesis. If you want to know them, we invite you to continue reading.
Top 5 Bitcoin Mining News of the Week
As usual, in this weekly summary, we present the 5 most relevant points of the week in the mining business. As already pointed out, this week the main news is the difficulty of the network. Thus, Bitcoin mining reached an ATH in its level of complexity to process blocks of transactions. These are the headlines of the 5 most outstanding facts:
- Italian city institutionalizes cryptocurrency mining.
- Bitcoin Difficulty Hits All-Time High Amid Bear Market.
- Kosovo miners with uncertain future amid state repression.
- Individual ETH miner hits jackpot.
- Intel will release its own ASIC for the month of February.
Italian city institutionalizes cryptocurrency mining
Recently, it was learned that the mayor of the Italian community Borgo D’Anaunia authorized by decree the start of digital mining operations. Located in the province of Trento, in the northwest of the Italian peninsula, the city has a population of 2,500 inhabitants. Operations would be carried out through an old power plant in the process of being remodeled.
It should be noted that the adaptation work is done with the local clean energy company Alps Blockchain. Likewise, the city decree stipulates that mining would start with a total of 40 ASIC equipment. Of these, 20 were purchased by the authorities and the other 20 rented in a total investment of about 150,000 euros, according to means.
With this initiative, the small city follows in the footsteps of El Salvador and becomes the first Italian city and one of the pioneers in Europe in this initiative. On the other hand, it was known that the equipment had a mining power of 100 TH/s each.
Bitcoin Difficulty Hits All-Time High Amid Bear Market
The difficulty level for Bitcoin mining, it reached an ATH or historical high this Friday after a rise of 9.32%. In this way, the complexity to find and validate blocks of transactions in the Blockchain of this currency reached 26.64T. With this, the previous all-time high of 25.05T reached in May 2021 just before the ban in China is broken.
Also, it becomes the 13th difficulty increase out of the last 14 when the coin hashrate recovery process started. In other words, it can be said that it has never been so difficult to mine fractions of the most popular virtual currency.
Added to this increase is the fact that the crypto market is on the canvas after a resounding drop in the prices of these assets. In that sense, for the mining business, this is one of the worst moments in terms of profitability. It should be noted that if the difficulty continues to rise and the price of Bitcoin falls, disconnections could occur.
Kosovo miners face uncertain future amid state crackdown
The continued crackdown in Kosovo against the Bitcoin mining business increases uncertainty among miners. Recently, the authorities of this partially recognized country announced that power generation was not enough for everyone. Immediately, a Commission asked the authorities to ban on mining activity, which went into effect almost immediately.
In a few days, the repressive bodies of the State began a strong hunt against the miners. In it, all kinds of equipment were confiscated, from ASIC machines to graphics cards or GPUs suspected of being used for mining. In this way, the mining business, with significant casualties, went underground.
Now, a significant part of the miners find themselves in the dilemma of selling their equipment, leaving the country with it, or continuing to mine secretly. The vast majority are likely to opt for the latter option. It must be taken into account that in repressive countries there are many ways to mine clandestinely without being discovered.
Individual ETH miner lands jackpot
Another news of great importance in the field of mining, but this time not Bitcoin, but Ethereum, has to do with an individual miner. This would have won the jackpot of a block of transactions valued at $540,000 dollars. The miner, against all odds, started the mining process alone and individually reached the block with 168 ETH coins.
This is fresh news of individual miners achieving the unlikely feat. Recently, a Bitcoin miner with about 126 TH/s managed to solo mine a block, taking home the 6.25 BTC reward. The ETH miner feat was achieved on January 17 in the 2miners pool SOLO. The amount of reward Ethers is unusually high compared to the average block payment.
The reason for this, highlights CoinTelegraph, is that the mentioned mining pool has little computing power, with 1.5 TH/s. The pool is made up of about 850 miners online. It is noted that the miner who achieved the feat contributes 2.5 GH/s. This equates to less than 20 mid-power graphics cards.
Intel will announce its own ASIC for the month of February
If the manufacture of Bitcoin mining equipment seemed to have no place for competition, it was because Intel had not said the last word. The tech firm announced a date to reveal its low-power ASIC kit. The machine could be a revolution in the mining world in terms of efficiency (maximum power plus low consumption).
The expectation that has been created around this model, called Bonanza Mine, could put Intel squarely in the competition for this market. This is one of the reasons why the existence of the Bitcoin cycle could last for many decades regardless of temporary price drops like now.
Consequently, the Intel miner is expected to be officially unveiled next February at the IEEE International Conference on Solid State Circuits. For now, it is not clear whether the team will have commercial or research purposes.
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