- Saturday, April 27, 2024
By: Pramod Kumar
TWO Indian American students in Frisco, Texas are earning over $30,000 a month by mining cryptocurrency, according to a report in CNBC.
Siblings Ishaan, 14 and Aanya Thakur, 9, have learned crypto mining from YouTube videos and updating their equipment from their earnings and a loan taken by their father, Manish Raj, the report added.
“Crypto mining is just like mining for gold or diamonds,” Ishaan told CNBC. “Instead of using shovels, you mine with computers. Instead of finding a piece of gold or a diamond in the mine, you find a cryptocurrency.”
“We could have spent the entire summer playing video games, but instead we used our spare time to learn about technology,” he added.
They said that they started mining as they wanted to learn something new about technology and make some money along the way.
Now, they have formed a company – Flifer Technologies.
They made good money by mining three digital coins-Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value; ether, the second-largest; and ravencoin, an altcoin.
According to the report, Ishaan and his sister watched instruction videos on YouTube and other platforms. Ishaan converted his Alienware, a popular kind of gaming computer, into an ether mining rig.
To mine digital currencies, one needs processors and graphics cards. Each card costs around $3,000. The electricity bill goes up to almost $3,000 a month as well. This prompted the children’s father to take a loan.
The report added that Ishaan and Aanya use renewable energy when possible and also rent a data centre.
Ishaan said: “We now use the garage (at home) only for building and testing mining rigs. When they are ready, we move them to a professional, air-conditioned data center in downtown Dallas.
“With the infrastructure upgrade and options, we can process a little over 10 billion Ethereum algorithms per second.”
Ishaan and Aanya want to fund their future medical studies with the earnings, the report added.
