TL;DR
-
As of yesterday, Binance users can mine Bitcoin.
-
Basically, Binance is saying: Instead of an expensive upfront investment in hardware, and plenty of YouTube tutorials to figure out how to set up a BTC mine yourself, we’ll make it easy for you, and share in the revenue generated.
Full Story
While Binance.US continues to battle with the SEC, Binance.com continues to innovate.
As of yesterday, Binance users can mine Bitcoin.
“But doesn’t it take crazy complex computers with massive computing power to mine BTC?”
Yes, it does – well, it did.
Here’s how this works:
Binance.com (not to be confused with the separate US-based entity, Binance.US) has contracts set up with existing BTC mining farms.
For this 6-month beta launch, they’re charging Binance users $10.728 USD for every Terahash per second (TH/s).
If you’ve never heard of a ‘Terahash’ before, all you need to know is the more you spend on TH/s, the higher your chance of mining blocks of BTC – therefore, the more potential income earned through mining.
Basically, Binance is saying: Instead of an expensive upfront investment in hardware, and plenty of YouTube tutorials to figure out how to set up a BTC mine yourself, we’ll make it easy for you, and share in the revenue generated.
While this is just a trial, it will be interesting to see how many new people are onboarded into the world of BTC mining.
We assume Binance is doing some large scale arbitrage – making a little less money than they could if they weren’t profit-sharing but getting a whole bunch of data and maybe even some new users in the process.
If this works out well, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this rolled out by other companies in the future.