The Lone Star State has some five-star talent.
Two Indian-American siblings in Frisco, Texas, are showing a precocious gift for cryptocurrency and business. Ishaan and Aanya Thakur, 14 and 9, respectively, have been earning over $30,000 a month by mining cryptocurrency.
How did they accomplish this? By learning from YouTube videos, and updating their equipment from their earnings and a loan taken by their father, Manish Raj.
“Crypto mining is just like mining for gold or diamonds,” Ishaan told CNBC Make It . “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.”
The siblings said they chose mining as they wanted to learn something new about technology and make some money along the way. After their promising start, they have formed a company – Flifer Technologies.
“We could have spent the entire summer playing video games, but instead we used our spare time to learn about technology,” Ishaan said.
Each month, the Thakur kids make over $30,000 mining three digital coins: Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value; ether, the second-largest; and ravencoin, an altcoin, CNBC Make It quotes Ishaan as saying.
When mining to earn cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, computers are programmed to compete to solve difficult puzzles in order to validate transactions.
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.
But mining is not cheap. It needs advanced technology – such as processors and graphics cards. Each card costs around $3,000. The shortage of computer chips worldwide has led to price hikes too.
The electricity bill goes up to almost $3,000 a month as well. This prompted the children’s father to take a loan. Ishaan and Aanya use renewable energy when possible and also rent a data centre.
“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,” Ishaan told CNBC Make It.
With the infrastructure upgrade and options, “We can process a little over 10 billion Ethereum algorithms per second,” said Ishaan.
The Thakurs plan to reinvest their earnings in Flifer. The children also want to pay for their college tuition.
Ishaan and Aanya want to study medicine. But for now, it’s processors over pulse rates.
Source: https://www.moneycontrol.com