Bitcoin has been around for nearly a decade now and its value just keeps going up. The original investors were less of the financial expert sort and more of the computer programming genius variety. In short, bitcoins can be bought, sold, traded, or mined, with the latter being a process involving more brain than brawn. You need a computer, software, and lots of time to mine for the ever-elusive bitcoin. Successful MSSD online graduates have created scripts that help them to mine for bitcoins, even though they are getting much, much harder to find. So, are you better off buying bitcoins or can you still mine them?

Bitcoin and Blockchains

Uncovering a recently created bitcoin is like solving a puzzle. Consider each attempt at finding a newly minted Bitcoin like rolling dice - except imagine that these dice have more than a million sides. In short, your computer can literally run all day and you’d still have a one in a billion chance of mining a bitcoin . Some users have several super-fast computers running all day and night in the hopes of finding digital gold in the form of solving blockchains, or the codes that Bitcoin uses to ‘bury’ coins. Although they might have to spend a little cash on upgrading their computers paying for electricity, the payoff is grand. At present, just one bitcoin is valued at nearly $8,000. Bitcoin miners are gifted with exactly 12 and a half bitcoins every time they solve the blockchain puzzle, so that’s almost $100,000 in returns.

Other Bitcoin Miners

If you think that you’re the first one in your area to try your hand at mining for Bitcoin, you would probably be very, very wrong. Once you have a mining rig setup you can just let your computer run until you hopefully mine some bitcoins. That means that people who have already gotten their computers setup are heavily invested in this activity. Approximately every 10 minutes a fresh batch of bitcoins is created. In order to snag them, you’ve got to beat other miners who are more experienced than you.

Bitcoin Exchange Rates

Right now, it may make sense to invest in Bitcoin mining only because the exchange rate is so high and by the fact that bitcoin can and has fallen in the past. Say you decide to buy a really fast computer and even get involved in a Bitcoin mining pool to help increase your chances of finding mining success. You may be able to use your software development master’s degree to put together a program that can help you to mine more coins, but you can’t do anything to change their value.

Profits can be made mining for Bitcoins, but this is not an activity that is advisable for novices. You can’t just turn on a personal computer and think that you’re going to find a Bitcoin, even if you keep the right software running for a year straight. Rather than ending up with high power bills and crushed dreams you may want to look into mining other forms of cryptocurrency.