| *Snicker* |
[JPost] The bitcoin farms consume about 300 megawatts of electricity per hour, about the same as a town of at least 100,000 residents.Power outages that have plagued Iran in the past month may have been caused by bitcoin farms run by foreign companies, according to France 24 and The Washington Post.
Bitcoin "farming" or "mining" is a way for people to earn the virtual currency Bitcoin without paying for it. "Farmers" are essentially getting paid to work as auditors, verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions in order to ensure that people aren't trying to "double-spend" Bitcoin currency, according to Investopedia. Double-spending is when someone makes a copy of a bitcoin and essentially attempts to spend the same bitcoin twice. Farming also creates new bitcoins for circulation.
In order to earn bitcoins, Bitcoin farmers also need to be the first find a 64-digit hexadecimal number, known as a "hash," that is less than or equal to a target hash, according to Investopedia. Finding these hashes takes a tremendous amount of computer power as it's essentially guesswork, but with the possible guesses numbering in the trillions for each problem.
The rewards for bitcoin mining are reduced by half every four years, with the current reward for one 1Mb block of transactions earning about 6.25 BTC. As of February 4, 2021, one bitcoin in shekels is about NIS 125,600 ($38,050) meaning that one block is worth about NIS 785,000 ($238,000). Bitcoin jumped as much as 14% on Friday to a two-week high after Tesla Inc chief Elon Musk tagged the cryptocurrency in his Twitter biography.