Canadian Bitcoin mining firm ramps up capabilities as hashrate rises

By Robert Stevens

Canadian company Bitfarms has bought 2,500 A10 Avalon miners, to increase its mining capacity. This comes as the Bitcoin hashrate continues to break records, making it harder to mine new bitcoins.

The Bitcoin hashrate is a measure of the total computing power of Bitcoin miners around the world, who use computational energy to “mine” new bitcoins.

The new A10’s were launched in March this year, offering high computational power while consuming little power–relative to older models. With 2,500 more mining machines, Bitfarms’ total mining power will rise to 51 Megawatts, a lot of energy but still a drop in the ocean compared to the power the whole Bitcoin network churns through. Digiconomist.com estimates that the Bitcoin network uses 73 Terawatt hours a year.

Bitfarms CEO Wes Fulford, said, in a press release, that the new deliveries will “more than double the hash power reported in the second quarter of 2019.”

Bitcoin miners are having to step up their game in light of increasing competition for new bitcoin rewards. Bitcoin’s hashrate recently surpassed 100 quintillion hashes per second. That means that miners need to have bigger and more powerful machines in order to profit from mining Bitcoin.

With this in mind, Canada’s Bitcoin mining industry has been doubling down on mining equipment and energy supplies. Blockstream, a Canadian blockchain company known for its work on the Bitcoin Lightning Network, created a mining pool with utility provider Hydro Quebec back in August. And Hydro Quebec promised earlier this year to keep energy cheap for crypto miners, setting aside hundreds of megawatts for a handful of companies.

In fact, lots of big mining companies, like Bitmain and Innosilicon, are failing to meet demand for miners caused by the rising price of Bitcoin. Major mining retailers are sold out as they struggle to deliver on backlogs of orders, according to a recent report.

Currently, Bitcoin miners are already spending half a million dollars an hour to keep the network running. Which seems a lot but is still lower than the $750,000 that they can take home in block rewards (with transaction fees on top of that).

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