Old Power Plant in Australia Repurposed Into a Bitcoin Mining Plant – Irish Tech News
Two Australian companies, IOT Group and Hunter Energy, are aiming to bring a decommissioned coal-fired power plant back online. What’s particularly interesting about their plan is they want to use the property as a power source for a new cryptocurrency mining base — which they’ll use to mine Bitcoin.
IOT Group has plans to develop a “Blockchain Application Centre” and sync it up with the Redbank power plant, long decommissioned at this point. The plant will then to supply energy directly to the crypto-mining operation.
Redbank closed in October 2014, and has been empty and quiet ever since. Hunter Energy wants to change that by bringing it back online through its partnership with IOT Group. Currently, the goal is to get the plant up and running by the first quarter of 2019.
Bitcoin is one of the most popular and lucrative coins currently. However, cryptocurrency mining requires powerful, energy-consuming hardware. Due to the nature of the process, the more machines and devices you have mining, the more chances you have of acquiring the digital currency.
Mining is akin to a complex puzzle. Collectively, the mining community works to solve equations — called hashing — to find hidden coins within the blockchain. Those who solve the puzzle receive the rewards — yet the reward gets split among all involved parties, with more of it going to those who used more processing power. Therefore, it behooves miners to have multiple systems simultaneously mining for coins.