Texas Oil and Gas – An Interview with Sergii Gerasymovych
Bitcoin Built on Excess
To understand how the pandemic’s effect on the oil and gas industry might spell out danger for crypto mining, we first have to understand how bitcoin and other forms of cryptocurrency work.
Bitcoin, specifically, was created as a sort of digital cash meant to serve in decentralized peer-to-peer transactions. Over time, it developed into a sort of digital gold, wherein it serves as an asset more than simply cash for transactions.
And, similarly to gold, it also has to be mined.
Bitcoin mining might sound like a bit of nonsense at first, but it’s actually an important and detail-focused process. It isn’t some sort of virtual digging for gold, rather is the process of carefully verifying that bitcoin transactions are done correctly and free of fraud, which in turn returns some value to the person validating those transactions. The process requires a bit of infrastructure, however, not to mention a steady source of energy.
That’s where oil and gas come in.
Dealing with energy providers can be a bit tricky as a cryptocurrency miner, especially if you’re trying to find ways to avoid unnecessary costs. A way around these costs—and one that EZ Blockchain has been keen on targeting—is to take advantage of the fact that energy plants run 24/7 while energy consumption does not. This means that plants are producing more energy than they need, resulting in wasted energy that might otherwise be used for something useful.
By purchasing this wasted energy, EZ Blockchain works around unnecessarily high energy costs while also helping energy producers waste less of their energy.
Surviving a Pandemic
Of course, as with most business models, this process wasn’t designed with pandemic survival in mind. The oil and gas industry got hit unfavorably between all the lockdowns—and one would think that this would extend to affect crypto mining by association.
What’s interesting, however, is that this hasn’t been the case. In this episode of Texas Oil and gas, Sergii Gerasymovych explains how oil and gas production has taken a hit but still needs to do something with would-be wasted energy. Multiple big and small producers are producing the equivalent to hundreds of megawatts of excess energy at a time, which is more than enough to keep up mining practices.
Learn more about how the cryptocurrency and bitcoin mining industries are handling the pandemic alongside oil and gas companies by checking out the full episode on the Texas Oil and Gas podcast – here.
