IDAHO FALLS – Cryptocurrency has become an increasingly popular investment option in the last several years.
A local company capitalizes on this trend by mining for it.
Braxton Ball is the operations manager and co-owner of T-Ball Miners, a company that has been hosting miners for the last six years in an Idaho Falls warehouse. The warehouse houses a large network of computers that process cryptocurrency transactions around the world.
“Just like Visa has a data center that processes U.S. dollar transactions, Bitcoin transactions are processed with Bitcoin miners. As a reward, people that mine Bitcoin get paid in Bitcoin,” Ball tells EastIdahoNews.com.
Bitcoin is just one type of cryptocurrency T-Ball deals with. Others include Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Zcash.
Each computer is equipped with a mining unit that processes these digital transactions, which are added to a worldwide pool and distributed among each miner.
“The miners are trying to solve a math equation, and it’s called a block. When they solve a block, it makes the next block in the blockchain,” says Ball. “We connect our miners with miners around the world, and we all work together to solve the same equation at the same time.”
Each miner is rewarded, depending on how much work they put into solving the equation, he says, and there’s a monthly fee to do it. Without miners, Ball says cryptocurrency transactions would not be possible. See what it’s like in the video player above.
