That potentially precarious environmental situation isn’t likely to improve. Texas governor Greg Abbott, an advocate for cryptocurrencies, recently urged the Texas Public Utility Commission to incentivize the development of coal, natural gas, and nuclear power and to penalize producers of renewable energy sources that fail to deliver enough power. Even so, a few mining companies are looking at novel ways to source energy, including by capturing natural gas that would otherwise be burned off—or “flared”—by drillers when they come across gas while extracting oil.
Poolin is a multi-currency mining pool that includes popular and profitable coins, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Zcoin.

But, as always, the miners’ biggest challenge came from bitcoin itself. The mere presence of so much new mining in the Mid-Columbia Basin substantially expanded the network’s total mining power; for a time, Carlson’s mine alone accounted for a quarter of the global bitcoin mining capacity. But this rising calculating power also caused mining difficulty to skyrocket—from January 2013 to January 2014, it increased one thousandfold—which forced miners to expand even faster. And bitcoin’s rising price was now drawing in new miners, especially in China, where power is cheap. By the middle of 2014, Carlson says, he’d quadrupled the number of servers in his mine, yet had seen his once-massive share of the market fall below 1 percent. Lauren Miehe: The Prospector With a knack for turning old buildings into bitcoin mines, Miehe has helped numerous other outsiders set up mining operations in the basin and now manages sites for other miners. He’s been stunned by the interest in the region since bitcoin prices took off last year. “Right now, everyone is in full-greed mode,” he says. Here, Miehe works at his original mine, a half-megawatt operation a few miles from the Columbia River. | Patrick Cavan Brown for Politico Magazine
The price of GPUs range from as low as $600 up to $2000 and more. The reason for the price differential is all about performance. For GPUs this relates to their maximum hashrate. In simple terms, hashrate is the amount of power/speed/calculation that the GPU unit can apply to mining a cryptocurrency. The hashrate is expressed in 'million hashes per second'. So 1MH/s is one million hashes per second. Lower cost GPUs typically have lower hashrates. CPUs on desktops and laptops have lower hashrates still, and are measured in thousand hashes per second as opposed to millions - so TH/S.