There’s a huge new trend out there that almost everyone is trying to get in on, even though it isn’t exactly new anymore: we’re talking about bitcoin today. Specifically, we’re talking about bitcoin mining, grabbing these juicy, valuable coins directly from the source.

Bitcoin mining has been a huge thing for years now, with miners getting a lot of money out this activity, without having that much competition.. until now. Now, there are huge bitcoin farms trying to get as much as possible before others grab their share, and that affects the way mining is done nowadays.

Since there is a limited number of bitcoins, 21.000.000 to be exact, mining gets tougher and tougher as time goes by, and most miners have decided that they shouldn’t be doing it on their own anymore and grouped up to compete.

But among all of the dynamics in mining, there’s a question most miners have that is hardly answered on the web: how much bandwidth does bitcoin mining take? Essentially, is it possible to do so without paying hundreds of dollars at the end of the month in internet fees?

As time goes by and as the amount of bitcoins available to be mined keeps on decreasing, mining starts to be less and less profitable, as it takes a lot of energy to do so, and energy costs a lot of money for miners who do not have the proper equipment. These miners are probably just doing it for the experience, as they are certainly not making money anymore.

There are, however, miners who either mine in teams, or miners who do have the proper equipment and manage to get a lot of bitcoins and stay ahead of costs, doing it as a profitable activity.

When it comes to bandwidth consumption, bitcoin mining isn’t the worst thing in the world and, as a matter of fact, it barely even consumes a lot of bandwidth, whether you are mining on your own with dedicated equipment, or mining in a bitcoin rig with a thousand other miners.

According to most miners on the internet, the bandwith taken by bitcoin mining activities for a solo miner is very very very low, staying at around 2 MB/hour, which isn’t a problem at all ss long as you have an somewhat decent internet provider.

As for mining rigs with a lot of miners, things get a little bit different. as doing things in a team requires a lot more connectivity than doing things on your own, but he consumption isn’t as high as one would expect.

According to the stats that we managed to take a look at, the average bandwidth consumption of miners inside a rig did not even hit 10 MB/hour, which is still not a lot if you have a decent internet provider. The costs are, obviously, very low on this end.

The reason for low amount of bandwidth taken is due to the actually low necessity of internet on behalf of mining activities. Bitcoin mining, without dedicated equipment, is done through CPU power, and not through internet power.

Mining bitcoin is essentially solving complex math problems that, as a form of compensation, rewards miners with precious bitcoin, much like students in school get rewarded with good grades whenever they get their math problems correct – except that grades aren’t really worth anything, and bitcoins are worth a lot.

Since bitcoin mining is essentially the solving of complex problems, there isn’t a lot of internet involved and that is why dedicated equipment might be a necessity. The equipment help solves the problems so miners can get bitcoin in return. Huge bitcoin farms are, essentially, huge storage houses with computers solving problems in exchange for money, with people maintaining the farm working properly (computers might stop working, power might go down, the property may suffer damage, etc.).

As such, we can conclude that bitcoin mining is NOT a download, and that while you are mining bitcoin you aren’t exactly downloading a huge movie, you are solving problem and simply require internet connection to stay connected to the “mine”, if you will.

As a matter of fact, some of the biggest bitcoin farms are located in China and, according to some of the owners of these bitcoin farms, their own internet bandwidth is a piece of crap, and they still manage to run their operations without being completely torn down by this simple problem.

Quite recently, some of the most prominent bitcoin entrepreneurs suggested an increase in the size of blocks so that more transactions can be processed at the same time, but this increase would mean higher computing power is required for mining and, taking into account miners get some fees per transaction as a reward for mining, this would mean that the bandwidth taken would also increase.

Certainly, the amount shouldn’t increase to very high numbers, as some of the players in the mining game also have bandwidth problems (the Chinese miners), so you still don’t need to be worried about bandwidth consumption for quite some time.