KnCMiner, who recently won a lawsuit against complainants who had sued over late or failed delivery of one of the company’s previous iterations of bitcoin mining hardware (the Titan) , has filed bankruptcy ahead of July’s mining reward halving.
The Swedish Bitcoin mining company’s CEO Sam Cole cited energy taxes and uncertainty about the future of the Bitcoin mining market over the weekend in an interview with Swedish website Breakit.se . 44 percent of our income goes to energy taxes. If we had had that the rest of this industry, so we had not gone bankrupt today. But we do not know if or when it will be changed. While filing bankruptcy is being touted as a loss-cutting measure, the company will still be involved in its other ventures, including XBT Provider , a company that KnC owns in part which offers Bitcoin notes on the Swedish NASDAQ, similar to the American Bitcoin Investment Trust. Nonetheless, a total of 34 employees will be looking for jobs, according to the Swedish news site.
Despite many problems over the course of its history, KnC will be remembered as an innovative mining company, having only just last June released the 16 nanometer 3D FinFET Bitcoin mining chip, which enabled the company to maintain an edge on competitors around the world. This, too, was an effort to both reduce the company’s energy costs and to increase mining output. A press release from the time read: The 3D design not only improves the speed of the processors, due to the shorter distances involved in shuffling around data down at this nanometer scale, but also dramatically increases energy efficiency. As the rate of Bitcoin inflation (production) is set in stone better efficiency means less energy consumed per minted (mined) bitcoin. The primary reason for the closing […]
