Best Bitcoin Card for Mongolia
Why Inner Mongolia wins the Miner location race
Compared to commercially available central processors from Bitcoin’s founding year 2009, current ASICs are even a hundred million times faster. If the old machines were still used for the current Bitcoin operations, “much more electricity would already be required than is generated on the entire planet,” says Dutch computer scientist Harald Vranken.
Inevitably, there is no ever-increasing electricity consumption. But Moore’s Law, the advance in processor efficiency, is far from keeping pace with the increasing complexity of blockchain computing.
The lucrative race of the Bitcoin miners is won by those with the strongest and fastest computers – and with the lowest electricity costs. That’s why most of the mining takes place in China. According to a spring study by Cambridge University, 59 percent of Bitcoins are produced there. Currently, China-based mining pools contribute at least three quarters to the extension of the blockchain – although some of these pools can also involve computers anywhere in the world.
The largest mines operate pools in which Bitmain participates, conveniently also the leading manufacturer of ASICs equipment called Antminer, in Inner Mongolia. On the surface, the desert province is not the best place: In the summer it gets much too hot, so that the devices have to be cooled down too much, in the winter much too cold, and all the time it is extremely dusty.
However, the region in northern China has one unbeatable advantage: plenty of coal-fired power plants with currently excess capacity. According to various reports from journalists who were allowed to visit Bitmain’s facilities in August, the provincial government subsidizes coal-fired power, so that the miners only have to pay 4 cents per kilowatt hour. This, along with access to superior hardware, beats all other factors.
Alex de Vries estimates on the basis of known data that every Bitcoin mined in Inner Mongolia is produced with an output of 8 to 13 tons of CO2. Since the difficulty level of the Bitcoin blockchain has increased considerably since August, but no new, more efficient processor generation has been used at the same time, the climate balance has probably deteriorated dramatically since then.
About Mongolia
Mongolia (Mongolian Монгол Улс / Mongol Uls / mongɣol ulus, literally: “Mongolian State”), situated between Central, North and East Asia, is the second largest landlocked country in the world after Kazakhstan in terms of area. It has only two neighbours, Russia in the north and the People’s Republic of China in the south. The country, four and a half times the size of Germany, is inhabited by only 2.75 million people, making it the most sparsely populated independent state in the world. Due to its soil and climate, the country is hardly suitable for agriculture, mainly nomadic livestock farming is practiced. Its largest city is the capital Ulaanbaatar, where one third of the country’s population lives.
In older atlases the name Outer Mongolia can still be found (in contrast to Inner Mongolia, which belongs to the People’s Republic of China as an autonomous region). Until the constitutional amendment in July 1992, Mongolia was known as the Mongolian People’s Republic.
Extremely continental climate with cold and dry winters and warm, rainy summers. The average January temperature in Ulan Bator is -25.6° C, and in July 16° C. The precipitation amounts to 205mm per year. Mineral resources
The name of the Mongolian state goes back to the word mengu (“brave”). The name of the ruling tribe was often transferred to all united tribes.