The sharp fluctuation of Bitcoin's "exchange rate" brings room for speculation, and the sales of professional "mining" equipment soars

When I last opened Mt.Gox yesterday, the "exchange rate" of 1 Bitcoin was $92.25, which was more than half of the historical high, and it happened in just one week. However, such a large fluctuation of Bitcoin has generated huge speculative value and attracted the attention of a large number of speculators and "miners".

Looking back at the past month, the trend of Bitcoin is:

On March 18, 1 Bitcoin could be exchanged for 47 US dollars. Three weeks later (April 10), the Bitcoin exchange rate soared to 266 US dollars. But in the following three days, Bitcoin continued to rise and fall sharply, with the maximum amplitude reaching 500%, from as low as 50 US dollars to as high as 188 US dollars, but it never stepped into the 200 US dollar mark again.

Historically, no currency has been able to fluctuate as drastically in a short period of time as Bitcoin.

However, there are only two normal ways to obtain Bitcoin: buying it from a trading website or mining it yourself.

The principle of "mining" is very simple. It is to keep your computer running and run a mining program. This program can calculate some "raw materials" (professionally called "blocks"). When you have mined enough raw materials, you can "extract" a Bitcoin.

Simply put, Bitcoin is a complex string of keys that exist on the network system, which can be calculated by relying on the simple but powerful computing power of the graphics card. If your computer graphics card is powerful enough, you can mine a Bitcoin in a few days. Especially AMD graphics cards, which are even more hailed as "mining artifacts."

I have tested that a HD7850 graphics card (a mid-to-high-end product) priced at around 1,200 yuan can mine 0.0025 bitcoins in about 5 hours. In other words, it takes 2,000 hours, or nearly 2 months and 23 days, to mine one bitcoin.

If 1 Bitcoin is exchanged for 100 US dollars, the hardware cost can be recovered in about half a year of continuous mining. After deducting the electricity cost, it can basically earn 100 US dollars a year. Mining seems to be a competition of hardware strength among geeks. Whoever has a higher-end graphics card and more can get more Bitcoin in this appreciation game.

However, the stock of Bitcoin was designed to be a fixed value at the beginning, not exceeding 21 million. The more miners participate, the greater the output, the more difficult it is to mine a Bitcoin, and the hardware mining capacity will also decrease. For example, if there are 100 people participating in the entire Bitcoin system, each person can get 1 Bitcoin per day on average. When 10,000 people participate, each person can only get 0.01 Bitcoin per day.

Professional equipment (referred to as "mining machines") designed for "mining" has now been developed, and its performance far exceeds that of ordinary graphics cards. The price of such products is generally more than 10,000 yuan, and the mining capacity is theoretically more than 10 times that of HD7850.

Despite their high value, the sales volume of mining machines has increased dramatically since the end of March, when Bitcoin entered the rapid appreciation channel.

On Taobao, a seller with only 73 transactions since its opening sold 33 8-core mining machines priced at 12,000 yuan in April alone. Another seller of relatively low-end 2-core products, priced at around 3,000 yuan, also sold 26 units this month.

The sales of some graphics cards commonly used for mining, such as AMD HD5870, HD5890, etc., are soaring, because "even if Bitcoin is no longer popular, these powerful graphics cards can still be used for playing games." A "miner" told me.

But as mining becomes more and more frenzied, the risks of speculating on Bitcoin become increasingly apparent.

Bitcoin was originally a toy for geeks, but after it became a speculative currency, normal trading volume has shrunk significantly. People no longer focus on the monetary attributes of Bitcoin - being able to be used for consumption and shopping, but rather on whether it can be sold at a good price in the trading market.

On April 12, Mt.Gox, which accounts for 70% of the trading volume of the entire network, had to announce a 12-hour suspension of trading due to a large number of trading orders attracted by price fluctuations.

On April 18, Bitcoin exchange platform BitFloor announced that it would shut down its platform. Its founder stated that "due to uncontrollable factors, the company's operations encountered problems and BitFloor had to stop operations."