There’s a huge new trend out there that almost everyone is trying to get in on, even though it isn’t exactly new anymore: we’re talking about bitcoin today.Specifically, we’re talking about bitcoin mining, grabbing these juicy, valuable coins directly from the source.Bitcoin mining has been a huge thing for years now, with miners getting a lot of money out this activity, without having that much competition.. until now.Now, there are huge bitcoin farms trying to get as much as possible before others grab their share, and that affects the way mining is done nowadays.Since there is a limited number of bitcoins, 21.000.000 to be exact, mining gets tougher and tougher as time goes by, and most miners have decided that they shouldn’t be doing it on their own anymore and grouped up to compete.But among all of the dynamics in mining, there’s a question most miners have that is hardly answered on the web: how much bandwidth does bitcoin mining take?Essentially, is it possible to do so without paying hundreds of dollars at the end of the month in internet fees?

As time goes by and as the amount of bitcoins available to be mined keeps on decreasing, mining starts to be less and less profitable, as it takes a lot of energy to do so, and energy costs a lot of money for miners who do not have the proper equipment.These miners are probably just doing it for the experience, as they are certainly not making money anymore.There are, however, miners who either mine in teams, or miners who do have the proper equipment and manage to get a lot of bitcoins and stay ahead of costs, doing it as a profitable activity.When it comes to bandwidth consumption, bitcoin mining isn’t the worst thing in the world and, as a matter of fact, it barely even consumes a lot of bandwidth, whether you are mining on your own with dedicated equipment, or mining in a bitcoin rig with a thousand other miners.According to most miners on the internet, the bandwith taken by bitcoin mining activities for a solo miner is very very very low, staying at around 2 MB/hour, which isn’t a problem at all ss long as you have an somewhat decent internet provider.

As for mining rigs with a lot of miners, things get a little bit different.as doing things in a team requires a lot more connectivity than doing things on your own, but he consumption isn’t as high as one would expect.bitcoin-cli installAccording to the stats that we managed to take a look at, the average bandwidth consumption of miners inside a rig did not even hit 10 MB/hour, which is still not a lot if you have a decent internet provider.4th bitcoin minerThe costs are, obviously, very low on this end.ethereum silicon valley hboThe reason for low amount of bandwidth taken is due to the actually low necessity of internet on behalf of mining activities.why bitcoin value dropping

Bitcoin mining, without dedicated equipment, is done through CPU power, and not through internet power.Mining bitcoin is essentially solving complex math problems that, as a form of compensation, rewards miners with precious bitcoin, much like students in school get rewarded with good grades whenever they get their math problems correct – except that grades aren’t really worth anything, and bitcoins are worth a lot.bitcoin ticker nyseSince bitcoin mining is essentially the solving of complex problems, there isn’t a lot of internet involved and that is why dedicated equipment might be a necessity.litecoin asic newsThe equipment help solves the problems so miners can get bitcoin in return.Huge bitcoin farms are, essentially, huge storage houses with computers solving problems in exchange for money, with people maintaining the farm working properly (computers might stop working, power might go down, the property may suffer damage, etc.).

As such, we can conclude that bitcoin mining is NOT a download, and that while you are mining bitcoin you aren’t exactly downloading a huge movie, you are solving problem and simply require internet connection to stay connected to the “mine”, if you will.As a matter of fact, some of the biggest bitcoin farms are located in China and, according to some of the owners of these bitcoin farms, their own internet bandwidth is a piece of crap, and they still manage to run their operations without being completely torn down by this simple problem.Quite recently, some of the most prominent bitcoin entrepreneurs suggested an increase in the size of blocks so that more transactions can be processed at the same time, but this increase would mean higher computing power is required for mining and, taking into account miners get some fees per transaction as a reward for mining, this would mean that the bandwidth taken would also increase.Certainly, the amount shouldn’t increase to very high numbers, as some of the players in the mining game also have bandwidth problems (the Chinese miners), so you still don’t need to be worried about bandwidth consumption for quite some time.

AMD Radeon RX 500 series graphics cards, particularly the RX 580 and 570, have been out of stock for weeks now owing to the cryptocurrency mining craze.The market had shifted away from GPU mining a couple of years back after several China based companies launched specialized ASICs that were much faster and more power efficient at resolving the block chain equations necessary to mine Bitcoin and Litecoin, the Gold and Silver of cryptocurrencies.However GPU mining has seen a massive resurgence over the past little while due to the rising popularity of ASIC resistant coins.Chief among which is Etherium which has seen its price more than triple in a matter of months.AMD’s add-in-board partners have caught on to this and have already started directly advertising to miners.Why AMD GPUs Are Flying Off The Shelves – Sold Out In Over A Dozen Countries Our resident lab-master and chief Keith May published a story a couple of weeks ago detailing the performance of different graphics cards in Etherium mining.

No matter what price bracket we looked at AMD GPUs were the biggest profit makers in terms of a return on investment basis.While some NVIDIA graphics cards do close the gap with their AMD counterparts in perf/watt at Etherium mining, their significantly higher initial cost make them far less profitable.For example, not too long ago miners would’ve been able to grab two RX 470 graphics cards for the price of a single GTX 1070 and generate nearly double the profit.The mining craze hasn’t just affected US based retailers, the phenomenon has gone global.RX 500 series GPUs are sold out all over the globe.Nearly all retailers in North America and Europe are out of stock.Even retailers that have RX 500 series cards in stock only have a handful of units left.Used AMD Radeon Graphics Cards Are Catching 2-3 Times Their Original Value In The 2nd Hand Market We’ve seen the same scenario back in late 2013 early 2014 during the Bitcoin and Litecoin mining crazes.AMD GPUs of the day handily outperformed their NVIDIA counterparts and as a result AMD simply couldn’t keep up with the demand and supplies of R9 290 and 290X cards dried up really quickly, driving prices up to insane levels.

Today if you browse eBay for used Fiji based cards like the R9 Fury X and R9 Nano you will find them routinely being bought for several hundred dollars more than what they cost new just a couple of months ago.AMD retired Fiji GPUs a while back in preparation for the Vega launch.All Fiji based cards that retailers were selling over the past several months were just left-over inventory.It’s the same story with RX 480 and RX 470 units.The irony in all of this is that PC hardware has always been one of those things that consistently lost value over time as it got older and replaced by new products, but what we’re witnessing here is the exact opposite.It’s almost like Radeon graphics cards have become collectors items’ overnight.How long these shortages will last is unknown.Back in 2013-2014 the Hawaii shortages lasted for at least two quarters.If AMD decides to increase supply now it risks building up inventory that it can’t sell later on if the mining craze fades out as quickly as it had come in.