One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s internet advisers wants to raise up to $100 million for a company he co-owns in order to help put Russia at the top of the bitcoin mining industry, according to recent reports.
Bitcoin mining is a process of being able to verify transactions and add them to a public ledger – the blockchain – and it’s also how new bitcoins are released. Anyone who has appropriate hardware and the internet can partake in bitcoin mining.
Russian Miner Coin (RMC) is slated to hold an initial coin offering (ICO) to raise funds. Investors would be able to buy RMC tokens using units of ethereum or bitcoin, and the tokens would give that holder rights to 18 percent of the revenue earned through the company’s bitcoin mining equipment, according to a Bloomberg report.
Dmitry Marinichev recently said during a presentation that the company would use satellite chips to “minimize power consumption in computers for crypto-mining,” according to Bloomberg.
“Russia has the potential to reach up to 30 percent share in global cryptocurrency mining in the future,” Marinichev said, pointing out that $10 million from the ICO would be spent developing the processors, Bloomberg reported.
Bloomberg also reported:
Russia has 20 gigawatts of excess power capacity, with consumer electricity prices as low as 80 kopeks (1.3 cents) per kilowatt hour, which is less than in China, RMC said in the presentation. The company initially plans to locate mining computers based on Bitfury chips in individual Russian households to challenge Bitmain [in China; one of the leading producers of Bitcoin mining equipment] by using Russia’s lower power prices.
Crypto Mining ”More Profitable Than Drugs and Arms Trafficking” in Russia https://t.co/uxucdW1HRj #bitcoinmining pic.twitter.com/szNOHZINLY
— Bitcoin News (@BTCTN) September 25, 2017
