The mining company Bitfarm has updated its capacity of Bitcoin mining to 18 MW, reaching up to 16.8 BTC per day on its production. The enhancement is part of Phase 2 of the project that started in March 2022 and now has 9,450 miners installed and working.
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The addition of 18MW resulted in an increase of 200 PH/s (peta hash) to the operation. It adds to the already managed total of 3.8 EH/s (exa hash) which roughly corresponds to 2% of the current global hashrate.
Geoff Morphy, the president and COO of Bitfarms stated that completing Phase 2 of The Bunker expansion is a strategic milestone that contributed to growing their hashrate to 3.8 exahash per second (EH/s), up 5.5% from the beginning of July.
Morphy also reinforced the upgrade that led to the final number of 16.8 BTC per day:
“Together with an additional 3 MW of low-cost hydropower that went online this month at our mining facility in Washington state, our total operating capacity is now 158 MW. Significantly, with our higher hashrate came an increase in our current production to 16.8 BTC/day, a 15% increase from 14.6 BTC/day at the end of June”.
Hash rates
Such numbers do not tell much to a crypto users if they don’t understand the functionalities of the basic engine that runs into mining.
Recapping: cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin require mining to be validated and created. The mining process happens when super powerful computers “solve” complex equations in order to complete the validation of the block.
This validation process involves a lot of energy from computers – or miners – to solve it quickly and accurately. The process is confirmed when the hash (a sort of code) is hit during the miner’s calculations.
Since the variations of hashes to be considered and dismissed are many, it may take a while to get to the right number – until now, a regular process takes up to 10 minutes for Bitcoin transactions.
That being said, calculations of different hashes to find the correct hash is what makes the hashrate. Or, in other words, hashrate is how much power the Bitcoin network is consuming to generate or find blocks at the regular time of 10 minutes.
As for hash rate denominations, as 1 kH/s is the equivalent of 1,000 hashes per second, 1 MH/s is 1 million hashes per second, 1 GH/s is 1 billion hashes per second, 1 TH/s is 1 trillion hashes per second, 1 PH/s is one quadrillion hashes per second and 1 EH/s is 1 quintillion hashes per second.
Power consumption
Those numbers seem astonishing, especially when we understand the amount of power it takes just for one miner to complete a validation process.
However, even the miners are looking for better places and better ways to mine crypto in a more sustainable and economic way.
As we previously informed in our article about blockchain and crypto projects becoming possible collaborators to the environment, a recent report from the Bitcoin Mining Council (BMC) shows that there’s been a growth of approximately 58.6% of the global mining industry’s sustainable electricity mix.
This means that members of the BMC and participants in the survey are currently utilizing electricity with a 66.1% power mix, making it one of the most sustainable industries globally.
According to the study, what ultimately matters for the environment is not the level of electricity consumption per se, but the carbon intensity of the energy sources used to generate that electricity which more and more mining companies are willing to compensate for.
