Mine Craft

With the cryptocurrency craze going strong, more and more people are mining their own

- Rahul Devulapalli

It was Christmas vacation, and while most of his friends were sleeping in or headed out to play basketball, Varun Munagala, 13, had a different plan. He woke up early, went to the first floor of his villa in Gachibowli, near Hyderabad, and got ready to do some mining.

No, he didn’t have a helmet or a shovel; his equipment consisted of three large monitors and an advanced graphics processing unit (GPU). After all, this miner was not after coal, but cryptocurrency.

Ever since Bitcoin became a buzzword, cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash and Monero have been in huge demand. While many people want to buy these currencies, there are others, like Varun, who want to mine their own. Across Hyderabad and its outskirts, many youngsters and entrepreneurs have been converting their houses and offices into mining units, hoping to make a fortune.

Varun, who studies in an international school, has been mining for the past six months. “I wanted to buy games and started watching videos on how to make quick money. That is when I got to know about mining,” he says.

With the help of his Ubuntu operating system and a Bash script (a sequence of commands), Varun has been running programmes to generate Ethereum coins, which go into his virtual wallet. “I exchange these coins for games online,” he says. Hesitantly, he adds, “I once lost a good amount after I tried my hand at online gambling.”