The Future of Mining
Frankly, few credible experts are optimistic about the future. Energy costs increase as cryptocurrency fluctuates and its value diminishes with time. You’re up against fiendish competition and the need to buy evermore sophisticated equipment if you hope to be a viable competitor.
Daily FinTech predicts that the future of mining belongs to countries where energy costs are cheap, like China, Bosnia, or Iceland. Bitcoin mining can also be subject to regulation and taxes. Chinese firms (not necessarily in China) will dominate the industry, and PoW will largely succumb to PoS. In 2017, Bitcoin proposed adopting a Lightning Network which works on a “second layer” payment protocol on top of a blockchain. As a result, this will cut miners’ work in half — though mining will still remain.
Meanwhile, the large-scale commercial crypto miners are the only ones raking in a good business since they can afford to live in remote regions that have low energy costs. These hashing centers focus on their lowest margins, while generating a power capacity that produces gigawatts rather than megawatts.
According to Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Circle, a venture-backed digital currency startup, “We’re at the institutional scale today. We’ll see investments grow to billions of dollars in coming years. We’ll see the mining pools move from being run by hobbyists to being run by large companies.”
These large companies tend to service franchisees or retail miners. Their costs push them out of the reach of the average miner.