Meet Phillip Hughes – a crypto-mining farmer who makes excellent use of the huge amounts of manure his cows and sheep expel daily. Hughes’s family has farmed their land for generations in a traditional manner, but Phillip Hughes has gone one level higher by using animal feces to power supercomputers that mine digital coins like Ethereum. 

Here’s how it works: When cow dung hits the ground, microbes immediately descend on it, ready to feast on their favorite treat. The microbes break down the manure and end up producing methane. And even more methane is emitted as the manure decomposes. Normally this methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) enters the atmosphere and contributes to climate change.

But the Phillips Hughes farm has a biofuel plant with a six-cylinder engine that transforms the methane into electricity. Two-thirds of this electricity powers the farm but the rest powers specialized computers called mining rigs that mine hundreds of cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. Now Ethereum doesn’t get as much attention as Bitcoin, but it’s been going up at a steady rate this year. In fact, Ethereum has shot up by 1000% in the last year. 

Phillip Hughes purchased his mining rigs from Easy Crypto Hunter, which cost about £18,000 (Rs. 1,819,164) and can mine about 800 digital currencies. But Bitcoin is not one of them because the founder of Easy Crypto Hunter, Josh Riddett, claims that other coins are ‘more profitable and more energy efficient.’ Their website claims that ‘over a 12 month period, our business clients yielded up to a 72% ROI.’ 

It’s insanely expensive to buy a mining rig but anyone with access to electricity and the Internet can potentially own one – oh and it’ll also add a few zeroes to your electricity bill. But if you produce your own electricity like Phillip Hughes, your power bill won’t be as high. Hughes generates so much electricity from his livestock that he leases out some of it to other mining rig owners. 

This begs the question, how does crypto mining work? Here’s the answer in a nutshell: Mining rigs compete with one another to solve advanced mathematical equations. Whichever rig solves these cryptographic puzzles first is rewarded with units of cryptocurrency. But it’s not easy to come in first place, it’s a game with a lot of players so winning first place is far from routine. Your odds of winning these math competitions certainly go up if you own multiple mining rigs.

Environmentalists criticize the massive amount of electricity that goes into crypto mining, and the giant carbon footprint that it creates, and this criticism is valid because most crypto mining is not powered by a renewable energy source like cow dung. But cryptocurrencies are not the problem. The problem is relying on fossil fuels to generate electricity. And the solution would be to find cleaner methods to generate electricity.

Crypto mining is a powerful incentive to discover renewable sources of energy, especially when those renewable sources are cheaper than burning fossil fuels. Crypto miners could very well pioneer green energy production systems because the ROI of cryptocurrencies is a major motivator. Maybe in the future, scientists will find a way to convert human waste into clean renewable energy, now wouldn’t that be creative?

Tags : Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoins, Renewable Energy, Crypto Mining, Ethereum