BTC Miners: No More Basement Rigs, Greater Profits to Come

CPU mining quickly became antiquated in favor of more powerful GPU-based systems, and facing the threat of obsoletion, numerous old-school miners joined forces - forging the pioneering mining pools which have become the norm today.

Several weeks after the announcement, a mining firm based in the United Kingdom known as Argo Blockchain placed a $9.51-million order for 10,000 T17s. This massive addition to the company's already burgeoning fleet of miners has seen it grow by a monumental 240%. Speaking to Cointelegraph, Mike Edwards, CEO of Argo Blockchain, elaborated on the achievement of the T17s."Overall, we are very pleased with the performance and stability of the 17 series miners, and we believe that the T17 represent the best combination between efficiency and price per petahash."

It's perhaps no wonder Argo feels a need to increase their miner armada, an escalation of mining power has been increasingly evidenced over the past few years.

Retail miners are still sufferingWhile things may be golden for larger mining firms, smaller mining outfits are likely not faring quite as well.

"Small miners usually don't get industrial power rates and generally don't benefit from economies of scale like large players do. Depending on the local conditions, it's still possible to make money as a small scale miner, but we can expect to see larger operations to take over more and more market share."

Bitcoin is 85% completeOn Oct. 18, 2019, the 18 millionth Bitcoin was hashed into existence, leaving only 3 million BTC left to mine of its 21 million cap.

Contrary to common sense, the fact that Bitcoin is 85% mined doesn't actually impact miners whatsoever - not directly at least.

Its first event, back in 2012, saw the mining reward cut from 50 BTC per block to 25 BTC, the second witnessed a further reward reduction to 12.5 BTC per block.

As the reward halves, so too will miner profits - that is, unless Bitcoin's price meets some lofty expectations.

"Over time, the market will exclude the least efficient miners and the diminishing mining block rewards will slowly be replaced by fees collected from user transactions."