Expanding capacity and accumulating bitcoins is a popular tactic for public companies that mine BTC. In this case, their advantage lies precisely in their publicity, i.e. stock traded on exchanges. This not only allows them to raise capital, but also to preserve the mined coins.

As a reminder, miners most often have to sell cryptocurrency to pay operating costs. In this case, large companies may take a different route and save coins. Given the rising rates of cryptocurrencies the day before, such a strategy seems justified.

What Bitcoin miners are doing

The partnership between CleanSpark and Lancium is part of an initiative to expand a mining company in Texas. It includes placing 20,000 Bitmain S19 ASIC miners on top of the 22,000 pieces of equipment already installed. Eventually, the company will bring the total hash rate of its own equipment to 20 hashes per second.

That said, at the moment, the total hash rate of the entire Bitcoin network is just above 203.9 hashes per second. Accordingly, the giant is aiming for about a tenth of the total cryptocurrency mining niche.

Bitcoin network hash rate

CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford commented on the event. Here’s his quote, published by news outlet Decrypt.

This move is in line with our strategy of focusing on infrastructure first. We continue to ramp up capacity at our own mining centres, while also partnering with colocation providers. This hybrid approach helps us ensure that we always have space ready to deploy new machines when they are supplied to us by vendors.

CleanSpark

The company also owns two mining centres in Georgia and is located at the Coinmint facility, the former Alcoa aluminium smelter in Massena, New York.

CleanSpark’s move to Texas is also partly due to the local government’s favourable attitude towards digital assets. Earlier, Texas Governor Greg Abbott made attracting new cryptocurrency companies a major part of his election strategy.


It's important to note that the topic of Bitcoin mining has been raised recently within the cryptocommunity. It was prompted by Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen's bizarre proposal to convert the cryptocurrency's blockchain to the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. The latter, among other things, has set aside a sizeable sum for related research. The blockchain community has criticised the idea.

Meanwhile, Bengal Energy, a Canadian oil and gas company, plans to start mining bitcoins from unused resources from its gas wells. Bengal Energy is going to conduct a pilot programme that will see around 70 crypto farms installed in a portable building known as a donga in the local mining industry. It will be installed next to previously idle gas wells in the Cooper Basin.

According to Bengal Energy chief operating officer Kai Eberspacher, the company has acquired the gas wells from its local oil and gas partners called Santos Energy and Bridgeport Energy. Eberspacher added that the recently acquired gas wells pose an interesting challenge for the energy company because they are mothballed. This means that although the company can technically generate electricity from the gas on site, the existing distribution pipelines are too far away.

Donga – a mobile home for crypto farms

A pipeline that can serve Bengal’s remote gas wells is currently under construction. However, construction delays have been seriously exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, so now the company has come up with this creative solution to the downtime problem.

In essence, we were counting on a six-month period when the wells would be ready but no gas would be coming out yet. We were dealing with idle assets.

The resource will now feed crypto-farms in dongs. The first of these will be equipped with 66 mining rigs that can generate about 0.005 BTC per day, or about $235 at the current cryptocurrency exchange rate. If the trials are successful, Bengal Energy intends to increase its bitcoin mining by a factor of ten to twenty. Accordingly, the total revenue could be between $2,000 and $5,000 per day.


We believe that such plans by major mining companies are good for the reputation of digital assets. They make it clear that the coin niche is not a short-term hobby, but a huge field with incredible potential and volume of investment. Newcomers would do well to hear and understand something like this.