- Cryptocurrency miners originate the coins that go on to circulate among investors.
- These coins can be kept idle in a wallet, traded on an exchange, or ‘extinguished’ and ‘burned’ in some cases.
- Mining has been blamed for rising PC component prices, even as individual profitability trends down.
While investors and
companies like Microstrategy that buy up Bitcoins have been in the spotlight, those who ‘mine’ for these coins have not quite gotten their fair share of exposure.
Mining for crypto tokens is no longer something that’s unheard of after the surge in
cryptocurrency seen over the past decade, however there’s a lot more to it than just setting up ‘rigs’ and the common complaint of
high energy consumption. The process for mining cryptocurrencies isn’t a one and done deal. It actually goes through an entire lifecycle — from discovery to destruction. These lifecycle phases are primarily applicable to
Bitcoin and Ethereum, which together dominate almost 60% of cryptocurrency market’s overall value, but are also applicable to most
‘altcoins’ that have followed in their footsteps.
Here’s a quick peek at how tokens go from being mined, and eventually into the larger crypto ecosystem: