Pickaxe Strategy for Bitcoin Mining

 Pickaxe Strategy for Bitcoin Mining

As mentioned above, the easiest way to acquire Bitcoin is to simply buy it on one of the many Bitcoin exchanges. Alternately, you can always leverage the "pickaxe strategy." This is based on the old saw that during the 1849 California Gold Rush, the smart investment was not to pan for gold, but rather to make the pickaxes used for mining.

To put it in modern terms, invest in the companies that manufacture those pickaxes. In a cryptocurrency context, the pickaxe equivalent would be a company that manufactures equipment used for Bitcoin mining. You may consider looking into companies that make ASIC equipment or GPUs instead, for example. 

Downsides of Mining 

The risks of mining are often financial and regulatory. As aforementioned, Bitcoin mining, and mining in general, is a financial risk because one could go through all the effort of purchasing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of mining equipment only to have no return on their investment. That said, this risk can be mitigated by joining mining pools. If you are considering mining and live in an area where it is prohibited, you should reconsider. It may also be a good idea to research your country's regulation and overall sentiment toward cryptocurrency before investing in mining equipment.

One additional potential risk from the growth of Bitcoin mining (and other PoW systems as well) is the increasing energy usage required by the computer systems running the mining algorithms. Though microchip efficiency has increased dramatically for ASIC chips, the growth of the network itself is outpacing technological progress. As a result, there are concerns about Bitcoin mining's environmental impact and carbon footprint.

There are, however, efforts to mitigate this negative externality by seeking cleaner and green energy sources for mining operations (such as geothermal or solar sources), as well as utilizing carbon offset credits. Switching to less energy-intensive consensus mechanisms like proof-of-stake (PoS), which Ethereum has transitioned to, is another strategy; however, PoS comes with its own set of drawbacks and inefficiencies, such as incentivizing hoarding instead of using coins and a risk of centralization of consensus control.

•Mining is a metaphor for introducing new bitcoins into the system because it requires (computational) work just as mining for gold or silver requires (physical) effort. Of course, the tokens that miners find are virtual and exist only within the digital ledger of the Bitcoin blockchain.