GENERATING GREEN BITCOIN
Investors can now get straight to the source of Bitcoin’s escalating value with BitValley’s unique green solutions to cryptocurrency mining.
Almost a decade ago, a Bitcoin (BTC) was essentially worth nothing. As a nascent cryptocurrency that circulated only within small circles of hackers, its value was still being negotiated via its first few transactions, including the infamous trade of 10,000 BTC to indirectly purchase two Papa John’s pizzas.
But from being an incognito pathway to the Dark Web to becoming the harbinger of other cryptocurrencies, BTC’s soaring journey of snowballing value has already become a legendary piece of financial history.
Having touched an all-time high of US$17,900 in December 2017 and holding a current market cap of US$192 billion, it has become arguably the most-sought after financial asset of the new century.
But while most investors scramble for a piece of the BTC pie, others are discovering a more pertinent path to profit – mining the coin at its source. Bringing this lucrative path to the doorstep of Southeast Asian investors is London-based BitValley Mining Group Limited, an alternative, human driven, blockchain-secure platform for investments in emerging payment technologies. By driving down mining costs, BitValley is offering investors a compelling return but with an added ace up its sleeve – generating its own green energy.
Understanding Bitcoin Mining
Computer mining is the answer to the rudimentary question – where do BTC come from? With fiat currencies, it is traditionally a government that decides when to print and distribute money. However, BTC does not have a central government – it has miners. BTC miners help approve transactions by using special software to solve complex math problems. This is the process of adding transaction records (also known as blocks) to BTC's public ledger of past transactions or blockchain. The blockchain serves to confirm transactions as having taken place to the rest of the network. Therefore, miners help keep their network secure by approving transactions and in return for their effort, they are issued a certain number of BTC. This process has been lauded as an ingenious way to issue a currency while ensuring its validity and incentivizing more people to keep mining.
That being said, mining is a time-consuming process requiring specific equipment, abundant energy resources and a large amount of technical knowledge. More importantly, the validation of new blocks in the blockchain is also becoming increasingly difficult with an ever increasing number of miners coming to the table and an increasing amount of BTCs coming into circulation. At the same time, mining rewards decrease by 50% every four years. This means a mined block that was rewarded with 50 BTC in 2008 will only receive 12.5 BTC today.
One of BitValley’s two energy partners is a privately owned solar farm near the east coast of Malaysia which is already generating 15 MW of power.
Precise Solutions
BitValley’s solutions to these concerns are simple and twofold – keeping costs to a minimum and most importantly, harnessing energy. A traditional mining set up requires a number of computers, equipment, manpower and energy costs that keep them all afloat. These energy costs are only bound to move upwards as mining difficulty increases – a problem that BitValley solves by outsourcing their computers to Malaysia, where the cost of power is as low as 57 Malaysian sen per kw/h. This means that an array of 30 computers costs a little over US$4,000 to run per month – with an average return of 2.09 BTC. With the valuation of BTC looking like it has nowhere to go but up, the potential minimum return on investment (ROI) is a promising number for investors.
Further protecting this profitability from rising energy costs and BTC price volatility is BitValley’s secret weapon – green energy that is generated in its own backyard.
Leveraging Green Energy
With over five million hectares of just Palm Oil Plantations, Malaysia has an abundance of two commodities: sunshine and biomass waste. Leveraging on these components, BitValley has forged allegiances with two companies: a privately owned solar farm and a biomass waste-powered renewable energy plant, the latter of which belongs to BitValley’s own Vice President of Operations, Dato’ Jeremy Smeeton. The total energy haul from these two facilities alone could free up at least 10 MW of power, which could fuel over 6,300 mining computers. This means that 16 MW of power could power 10,000 mining computers. BitValley’s logic then becomes simple – if it can reduce its total electricity costs, or even mitigate them altogether, then its long-term profitability is as good as ensured.
Apart from their returns, investors can expect to be insured against risks like fire, electric surges and theft under BitValley’s policy, as well as support for and maintenance of their account status with minimum downtime. With a system that is preconfigured for profit maximization, BitValley’s green energy approach may well be the future of cryptocurrency mining as we know it.
This article was first published in the MillionaireAsia Issue 47 - March 2018
