15 Nov 2013 / Business Insider – Say what you want about the long-term viability of Bitcoin, the digital currency that’s been going crazy lately.
Bitcoin has been incredibly lucrative for Sam Cole, Marcus Erlandsson and Andreas Kennemar.
Because of Bitcoin, they generated $3 million in revenue in just four days.
Their company, KnCMiner, doesn’t own Bitcoins or trade them. They make the special computers that allow people to “mine” Bitcoins from cyberspace.
From November 7 to 10, 2013, while Bitcoin prices were climbing wildly, Stockholm-based KnCMiner sold out of its newest Bitcoin computer, selling 5,000 units. These computers cost $7,000 a piece (and yes, they take Bitcoin as payment).
At one point, the computers were selling so fast that KnCMiner generated $600,000 in less than five minutes, it said.
That’s because there’s basically three ways to get a hold of a Bitcoin. You can buy them. You can take them as payment for products or services. You can go out into cyberspace and create them, otherwise called “mining.” Mining a Bitcoin is hard for a typical computer to do. A computer has to solve a series of difficult cryptography problems and most computers don’t have the computational power to do that.
So companies like KnCMiner developed special Bitcoin computers using custom computer chips. (Such chips are called ASICs which stands for “Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.”) These computers do only one job: mine Bitcoins.
We asked cofounder Andreas Kennemer about the business of Bitcoin computers.
