Due to the enormous fluctuation in the value of the bitcoin, amounts have been omitted.

Bitcoin went through the roof last week. The cryptomint rose by hundreds of dollars in a few days and tapped the $.... on Thursday.
Afterwards the price fell back just as fast, to around ...... dollars.
That is still quite a lot more than a year ago, when a bitcoin was worth about 500 dollars. This is good news for the miners, the people who create new bitcoins. Their computer networks are the backbone of the digital currency.
The miners' computers are in battle with each other to solve a complex puzzle. Anyone who succeeds in doing so may process a lot of transactions and receives 12.5 bitcoin as a reward.
You can have bitcoins mins at home, but solving the puzzles nowadays requires so much computing power that the energy bill is higher than the yield. That is why complete companies have emerged that focus on the extraction of bitcoins. Some are worth tens of millions of dollars.
These companies build large data centres, which use a lot of energy to do as many calculations as possible per second. All this in the hunt for digital gold.
Iceland has such a bitcoin mine.

These are photos of Genesis Mining, an Icelandic company where you can lease computers to mine bitcoins for you, also called cloud mining. This means that you don't have to invest in expensive hardware yourself.

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It is technically possible to minimize bitcoins on almost every computer, but without the right hardware it is often not profitable. Many people choose to join forces to try to solve the puzzles in groups, so-called mining pools. The Genesis model works differently.

The company initially had data centres in Bosnia and China, but now works almost entirely from Iceland.

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The country has three major advantages for the "mining" of bitcoins: energy is cheap, the internet connection is fast and the average temperature is low.

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The climate is extremely important. The hardware produces a lot of heat, which is why the rooms have to be cooled. If you can save on cooling due to the cold climate, this can mean the difference between running at a loss or being profitable.

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But even then, Genesis still uses a huge amount of energy. According to CEO Marco Streng, his company is such a large customer of energy companies that they offer him a helicopter flight every time he visits. Genesis is probably one of the largest electricity consumers in the country.

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If the electricity is not too expensive and excluding other costs, then mining a bitcoin costs about 260 dollars, according to Streng. A bitcoin is currently worth over ......... dollars.

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But there are a lot of additional costs, such as hardware and employees. At the moment, the profit margin is well above 20 percent ", says Streng. But 20% is normally what we are aiming for in the long term. When we buy hardware, we do not know exactly what the bitcoin price is going to do. Peaks like the one we are currently unable to predict.

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According to Streng, cloudmining has a "huge confidence problem". Customers never see or own the hardware themselves, so fraud lurks.

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Cloudmining is sensitive to ponzi fraud. In addition, a company pays new customers with the investment of previous customers. Streng:"They don't even possess the necessary hardware. They capture photos from other companies, edit them and pretend to be their own.

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Genesis not only delves bitcoin, but also Ethereum - another cryptomunt that makes it possible to conclude smart contracts that make intermediaries like a notary superfluous. It is also possible to build applications on top of the Ethereum platform.

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Ethereum is now worth over ..... USD 

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Another picture of the bitcoin mine of Genesis. In this space, more than 10,000 graphic processors are calculating to solve the puzzles.

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What is it like to work in a bitcoin mine? According to technical director Stefan Schindler, it is "absolutely terrible", he says in a promotional video for Genisis.

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You're constantly surrounded by machines that make a lot of noise. It is as if you're constantly listening to jet fighter jets taking off and landing. The heat is another factor: in parts of the building it becomes 40 to 50 degrees Celsius.

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Below is a video of how Genesis creates a new space with computers. The company has dozens of full-time employees, including electricity and internet experts.

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And here is a video by CTO Stefan Schindler who tells us about his work at Genesis:

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Finally, the bitcoin price according to the Coindesk Bitcoin Price Index, an unweighted average of the prices on various Bitcoin exchanges. The current peak is unprecedented:

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