Mining Leaders, Rich Kids, and Autonomous Car NFTs
The US hit a big milestone. We’ve become the global leader in crypto mining.
This is pretty big news. In 2019, 75% of the mining industry was located in China.
The crackdown obviously allowed for new leaders, and we saw a redistribution of who was mining where.
The US is currently responsible for 35% of the hash rate.
Second place is Kazakhstan – Very Nice! Sorry about that. At 18% and Russia comes in third at 11%
Mining is very interesting because literally, anyone is able to do it. In fact, in Texas, a 14-year-old and 9-year-old converted a gaming computer into a mining rig 8 months ago from watching some youtube videos.
When Ishaan and Aanya Thakur started 8 months ago, they were making about $3 a day.
Now they’ve grown their operation to mining $35,000 a month – mostly in Ethereum.
Of course, they upgraded from a gaming computer and ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on graphics cards – but still. I don’t think these kids will have to worry about college debt.
Another big financial institution is pushing the adoption of crypto. In August, Visa purchased a crypto punk NFT for 150k dollars worth of Ethereum.
Well, now they have announced they are starting an NFT-centric program to in partnership with artist Micah Johnson to teach both creators and small businesses about how they can use blockchain and cryptocurrency to create and sell digital work.
Visa’s vice president and head of crypto tweeted out: “We believe that we are at the beginning of a digital renaissance in the world of art and content creation—a flourishing ecosystem of artists, musicians, writers, photographers, and curators building communities at the intersection of culture and commerce,
“New technologies emerging in the crypto ecosystem, like NFTs, have the potential to lower the barrier to entry for digital creators across the world to build their own small businesses,”
Visa will be accepting open enrollment for artists soon, so be on the lookout for that.
It’s really great to see all of these brands getting into and supporting Crypto. In fact, we’ve seen Budweiser, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Arizona Iced Tea, and Charmin enter the NFT space.
In fact, we’ve hit a point where some analysts believe Crypto has become too institutionalized to go away.
EO of venture capital firm Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya made some interesting points on a recent podcast when discussing bitcoin bans.
He believes there’s no way you can just wipe out 3 Trillion dollars from our economy – and that there’s just too many people and companies banking on it at this point.
Being the capitalist society we are, politicians would have to be worried about losing support and financial backing from some of these big crypto investors.
We’re at a point where there’s basically no chance of a ban – especially as more and more payment processing companies accept crypto. We’d simply cripple a large part of our economy.
Anyway, it’s time to talk about the NFT world.
Yesterday we discussed Coibase’s new NFT marketplace. Well, apparently it’s going to be something big – as there have already been over 1 million people to join the waiting list in its first day.
In fact, the demand to join ended up causing Coinbases’ website to temporarily break.
With Coinbases’ current user list – it’s very possible they could be the biggest rival to Opensea.
In another interesting way to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world, single malt whiskey distiller Glenfiddich is partnering with the marketplace Blockbar to release NFTs.
The NFTs will be attached to a real-world luxury bottle of liquor. The bottle will remain safe at a warehouse in Singapore until the token is redeemed.
This allows people to buy and trade the luxury brands without having to ship the bottle or pay duty taxes until someone decides to basically cash out. In this instance, the NFT acts as a sort of receipt for collectors.
Another cool NFT design comes from Wakkata, who developed the NFT blockchain Sensorium. They partnered with Roborace to create a mixed reality racing-based metaverse.
The NFTs will be upgradable and connected to a real-world full-sized autonomous racing car.
That’s right, the cars will be driven solely by onboarding computers – and owned by you.
Roborace was created as a way to advance the technology for autonomous cars. Autonomous cars are expected to help with traffic congestion, which will also cut down on gas emissions. It can also lead to much fewer road fatalities and hopefully put an end to DUIs.
So I’m excited about this project. To find out more about Wakatta and Roborace, be sure to check out the link in our show notes.
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I’m Dustin Knouse, thank you for joining me today.
Resources:
https://www.techspot.com/news/91745-us-overtakes-china-first-time-become-global-crypto.html
North Texas Siblings Make $35K a Month Mining Cryptocurrency; Here’s How They Do It
Visa to Help Creators, Small Businesses Learn About NFTs and Crypto
Here’s why this analyst believes Bitcoin is ‘too institutionalized’ to ‘go away’
Coinbase’s NFT waitlist tops 1 million signups on first day
The whisky-maker putting the ‘fun’ in Non-Fungible
Wakatta Partners with Roborace to Integrate Upgradable NFTs into Racing Metaverse Platform
