It must be a Bitcoin type of day. Our Canadian special report featured the last datacenter/cryptocurrency miner aiming to come public via a reverse takeover and a look at U.S. market leaders shows Marathon Patent Group (NASDAQ:MARA) perched right near the top of percentage gainers so far in Monday morning trading.
Marathon was once a company focused on licensing intellectual property, but has shifted gears since its recent acquisition of Bitcoin miner Global Bit Ventures and acquisition of patents covering the transmission and exchange of cryptocurrencies between buyers and sellers, to now be a blockchain/cryptocurrency-centric company.
Monday morning, Marathon said that it has begun Bitcoin mining at its new facility in Quebec, Canada. The 26,700-square-foot leased facility is outfitted with 1,400 Bitmain Antminer S9 miners, computers considered amongst the best available today for hash rate, heat, etc. amongst cryptocurrency miners.
Marathon says its setup will utilize about two megawatts of power and deliver about 19 Peta hash per second at capacity. The initial focus is on Bitcoin, but other cyrptocurrencies can be mined at the company's discretion.
Mining facilities are little more than racks and racks of energy-gobbling computers running 24/7/365 that only have one purpose: be the first to solve complex equations in order to earn payments for being first to verify transactions and add a new block of information to the global digital ledger known as a blockchain.
Because the mining machines consume so much electricity, location and power costs are integral to facility locations. Quebec is a favorite choice because it has some of the lowest electricity prices in North America.
Considering the current payout is 12.5 Bitcoins per block, it's not hard to see why miners want stacks of super-computers solving problems as fast as possible. The Bitcoin network is designed to produce a constant amount of Bitcoins every 10 minutes.
At $9,000 per Bitcoin, that's $675,000 per hour in payouts, but remember that people and companies all over the world are fighting for it.
The competitive edge comes from scale. Marathon says it wants to add another 3.9 megawatts of power, which will allow for up to 2,800 more Antminer S9 computers at the new facility.
Shares of MARA are up 48 cents each, or 31.2%, at $2.01 with today's news.
While impressive so far on the day, this is a stock that was as high as $10.03 in November during a market craze surrounding Bitcoin as the digital coin was on its way to over $19,000. Through about noon Eastern today, the price of Bitcoin is up three-quarters of a percent at $9,170, according to Coinbase.
