What will the future of Bitcoin mining look like? Here’s what the boss of the world’s largest cloud computing company thinks

Chengdu is becoming a must-go place for "mining" summits and is dubbed the "mining capital".

Recently, the crypto mining industry media MinerUpdate held the first "Global Mining Leaders Summit" in Chengdu. Many foreign mining companies attended the summit, such as mining machine manufacturers (Bitfury), cloud computing power (Genesis Mining), mining pools (Slush Pool, Luxor), and mining farms (MineBest, Blockware Solutions).

Although not well-known in China, Genesis Mining is well-known in Western markets and is the world's largest cloud computing company with more than 2.8 million users.

Toutiao recently interviewed Genesis Mining CEO Marco Streng. Through his interview, you will know why he provides cloud computing power, his views on Bitcoin mining energy consumption, mining centralization, and the impact of Bitcoin halving on the price of the currency, etc.

Cloud computing power gives everyone the opportunity to participate in mining

According to Marco Streng, Genesis mining was born in 2013. At that time, he was very interested in Bitcoin and the mining return rate was amazing. Many friends were also interested in Bitcoin mining and wanted to participate. He built a relatively large mining farm, so he sold the computing power to his friends so that they could also participate in Bitcoin mining.

And this is also in line with his philosophy. He believes that Bitcoin mining is very important because mining is becoming more and more centralized and individual competitiveness is becoming less and less.

Bitcoin mining is not a waste of energy

Although Bitcoin has been around for 10 years, many people still don’t understand why so much electricity is consumed to mine it, and believe that “Bitcoin mining is a waste of energy.” As a computing power supplier in the Bitcoin mining industry, Marco Streng disagrees with this view in an interview.

Marco Streng said frankly that POW is the only real consensus mechanism in decentralized blockchains. Mining is the backbone of the industry and is absolutely necessary. Now there is indeed a POS consensus mechanism, but...

At the same time, it is not a problem because there are enough renewable energy sources on our planet, such as hydropower, wind power, geothermal power, solar power, etc. Bitcoin mining even has a positive effect on the renewable energy industry, because more and more miners want to use renewable energy to mine.

Centralization is the main problem facing the mining industry

Marco Streng said in an interview that centralization is the main problem facing the mining industry.

How to solve this problem?

He believes that there are some good solutions in software and mining pools, such as decentralized mining pool protocols such as BetterHash or Stratum V2 that Slashpool is promoting. At the hardware level, the decentralized solution is that more and more miners are decentralizing their mines and deploying them globally rather than just in one country. For example, Genesis Mining operates mines in four continents in the world. He said that Genesis Mining also hopes to help Chinese miners, if they want to go out of China, they can host their mining machines.

Halving will have a strong effect on Bitcoin

Marco Streng says no one knows exactly what the price of Bitcoin will be, however.

He believes there are two reasons: first, psychological effect. Because the block reward is halved, many people think that the price of Bitcoin will rise before the halving. Second, many miners know that the arrival of the halving will cause the price to rise, so they will stop selling Bitcoin. Therefore, the halving will have a strong effect on the price of Bitcoin.

It is challenging for mining companies to enter AI and high-performance computing

Many mining companies have begun to enter other industries such as AI and high-performance computing in addition to their main business of mining. Marco Streng said that the reason for Bitmain and Genesis Cloud, including Genesis's Genesis Cloud business, is very logical, because many people think that they can build efficient data centers, and they can certainly do AI and high-performance computing. But he admitted that this is easier said than done. Genesis has been engaged in high-performance functional computing for three years and has spent a lot of money and resources. For example, Genesis Cloud provides AI and rendering services, but this is very challenging and not easy.