Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said that mining bitcoins with ASICs is 30 times cheaper than with GPUs. So his company starts a new mining project. Interestingly, it was carried out in… space.
Bitcoin in space
GPUs are about 30 times more expensive per kilowatt or watt than ASICs. A 1-kilowatt B200 chip can cost $30,000. A 1-kilowatt ASIC costs about $1,000
– he said.
He predicts that BTC mining in space will become a “huge industry” due to it being much more economical than mining cryptocurrency on Earth:
Bitcoin mining uses approximately 20 GW of electricity continuously. There is no point in doing this on Earth, and ultimately it will all take place in space.
Starcloud was founded in early 2024 and is engaged in the construction of data centers in space. These are solutions that meet the growing energy demand in the field of artificial intelligence. In November, the company launched a satellite with an NVIDIA H100 processor into orbit – the first time such a powerful graphics processor appeared in space.
The startup’s data centers, consisting of approximately 88,000 satellites, are powered primarily by solar energy.
Sending cryptocurrencies between planets
It is worth adding that the idea is just the beginning of moving cryptocurrencies into space: last year, technology entrepreneurs Jose E. Puente and Carlos Puente developed a solution enabling the transfer of digital assets between planets.
In September, Puente told Cointelegraph that it was theoretically possible to send bitcoins to Mars in just three minutes using NASA’s optical link or Starlink and a new interplanetary time-stamping system.
Of course, someone on the red planet would have to pick up the transaction. Here we are waiting for Elon Musk’s move. The transaction itself would have to pass through space systems – such as antennas and satellites – and even a relay around the moon before reaching Mars.
Bitcoin mining itself will not be possible on Mars due to the delay between the two planets.
