Give a euro for bitcoin
– Two Italian entrepreneurs are raising €20 million (R300 million) as they try to carve out a new niche in cryptocurrency mining – a dream that began in a dishwasher drawer.
Gabriele Angeli, 34, and Gabriele Stampa, 43, are founders of Florence-based Bitminer Factory, Italy’s largest currency-mining host, which has developed a computer “rig” they hope will underpin a plan to forge an unusual business model.
Mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin requires the use of powerful computers to solve complex problems to complete, verify and record transactions in these virtual currencies. In return, miners are issued with new units of cryptocurrency as a reward.
In eight months of operation, the “Bitminer 8” has helped to attract 140 miners to their mining operation on the outskirts of the elegant Renaissance city, which for several centuries from the Middle Ages served as a mint for European coinage.
Their next step, using the proceeds of their initial coin offering, is to take the Bitminer 8 on the road, installing the machines in shipping containers and enabling miners to move them by truck to cheap power sources across Europe.
“With the mobile farm we want to conquer Europe,” Angeli said. “It will allow us to export our business model which we’ve been experimenting with here in Florence.”
The enterprise is built on the Bitminer 8 machine, which began as a prototype assembled in a dishwasher drawer from off-the-shelf computer parts. It is aimed at those targeting currencies other than Bitcoin, the most challenging to mine.
Bitcoin mining needs more computational power and energy than other cryptocurrencies and the supply of Bitcoin rigs is dominated by large manufacturers, such as China’s Bitmain Technologies and Canaan Creative, and US-based Bitfury.
By contrast, miners of other cryptocurrencies require less sophisticated rigs and the market is more open to smaller firms like Bitminer, whose modern-day Florentine mint is powered by renewable energy and housed in a drab industrial building.
Angeli said they planned to use the proceeds of their fundraising to open a new mining centre in southern Italy and push into what they call “mobile farms”, rigs that are housed inside shipping containers. – Reuters