Bitcoin mining is becoming more accessible to more people.
The Giga Watt Project broke new ground in bitcoin mining with their token sale startedon June 2nd, 2017. Dubbed the WTT, the token represents the right to use 1 watt worth of mining equipment space, rent-free, for 50 years at Giga Watt’s mining hosting service facilities.
The token sale has a cap of 30 million WTT tokens and aims to raise around $35 million.
The Giga Watt Project
With Giga Watt, there’s no need to operate your own bitcoin mining hardware. The Giga Watt Project offers customers the power of remote-location mining hardware at various locations through its facilities located in Wenatchee, Washington. There are currently several mining options available for individuals and businesses as an alternative to home mining, own mining farms and cloud mining.
Giga Watt is unique in that it can serve a range of mining needs from those of large businesses to individual operations by offering competitively low prices for electricity and maintenance. Whether one or ten thousand machines, remote miners holding WTT tokens will be able to house their machines at Giga Watt’s facilities.
Already, Giga Watt has established several facilities with an electrical output of over 2,250,000 watts of power (2.25 MW). The team plans to expand their facilities with the funds raised from the token sale to reach 34.5 MW output by November 2017.
How the Tokens Work
Purchasers of the WTT token are entitled to use a 1-watt space capacity at Giga Watt’s facilities for 50 years, all without rent. The main costs incurred by mining, after initial hardware and set-up costs, are electricity and maintenance.
Owners of the WTT token do not have to pay rent to use the Giga Watt facilities if they own enough tokens to cover the electrical output of their mining machines. For example, the average cryptocurrency miner requires around 1200W of power to run. To host a miner machine at the Giga Watt facility, an owner would have to purchase 1200 WTT tokens. By doing so, the miner would gain access to 50 years of physical space to house the machines, as well as extremely cheap access to the two most important resources in cryptocurrency mining: electricity and maintenance.
A Giga Watt miner thus overcomes the current geographical inequities inherent in the electrical cost of mining: If operational costs are low in a given region, miners operating in that region will be more profitable than those operating in geographies with higher prices.
Due to the massive hydropower presence in Washington state, Giga Watt has claimed access to electrical costs running as low as￠2.8 kWh. This electrical cost is among the most competitive in the world. Currently, home mining electricity costs can be between￠9-18 kWh. Still, some mining farms struggle to reach that low a level of electrical output cost.
But owning WTT tokens is not just appealing to those interested in establishing a mining operation. The ability to rent out unused tokens provides a clear economic incentive for token holders who do not want to establish a mining operation.
Giga Watt’s website will provide a platform where token holders can offer to rent out the capacity that their token represents to potential renters wanting to establish a mining operation. Prices will be set by Giga Watt’s facility rental fees which currently run between 4.20 to 6.45￠/Kw/H. This implies annual returns of ￠37-￠57 per token if the token is being consistently rented out.
The WTT token is different from many of the other ICO tokens that have been released in the last year. Many of those tokens rely on speculative value derived from the success of the protocol network. In this sense the WTT is different. Rather than deriving value from the protocol’s success, which takes time and significant buyer momentum, the WTT is backed by an underlying asset--in this case access to the Giga Watt facilities.
Giga Watt is headed by Founder and CEO Dave Carlson, a former Microsoft software engineer who has been actively engaged in the Bitcoin community and bitcoin mining since 2010. For more information on how to purchase the Giga Watt token see this post.