Braxton Ball is the owner of T-Ball Miners, a cryptocurrency mining company in Idaho Falls. He explains what it is and how it works in the video player above. | Rett Nelson, EastIdahoNews.com
IDAHO FALLS – Cryptocurrency has become an increasingly popular investment option in the last several years.
A local company capitalizes on this trend by mining for it.
Braxton Ball is the operations manager and co-owner of T-Ball Miners, a company that has been hosting miners for the last six years in an Idaho Falls warehouse. The warehouse houses a large network of computers that process cryptocurrency transactions around the world.
“Just like Visa has a data center that processes U.S. dollar transactions, Bitcoin transactions are processed with Bitcoin miners. As a reward, people that mine Bitcoin get paid in Bitcoin,” Ball tells EastIdahoNews.com.
Bitcoin is just one type of cryptocurrency T-Ball deals with. Others include Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin and Zcash.
Each computer is equipped with a mining unit that processes these digital transactions, which are added to a worldwide pool and distributed among each miner.
“The miners are trying to solve a math equation, and it’s called a block. When they solve a block, it makes the next block in the blockchain,” says Ball. “We connect our miners with miners around the world, and we all work together to solve the same equation at the same time.”
Each miner is rewarded, depending on how much work they put into solving the equation, he says, and there’s a monthly fee to do it. Without miners, Ball says cryptocurrency transactions would not be possible. See what it’s like in the video player above.
Braxton Ball poses for a photo in front of the computer network that mines cryptocurrency. | Rett Nelson, EastIdahoNews.com
Ball was introduced to cryptocurrency as a day trader in the stock market about six years ago. It first came up on his radar when people started trading Bitcoin.
“It started popping up a lot and I saw people were trading Bitcoin because the markets never close,” he says.
As he did some more research, he started asking himself why you would buy Bitcoin if you could make it.
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“If you buy one Bitcoin, in a year you’ll have one Bitcoin. If you buy one Bitcoin with the miners, in a year you might have four Bitcoins,” says Ball. “We see mining as the cheapest way to obtain cryptocurrency, and it’s a great passive revenue stream.”
A massive amount of power is required to run a cryptocurrency mining company. Ball says T-Ball Miners consumes one kilowatt-hours worth of electricity every second. Idaho Falls was selected as a location because it has one of the cheapest power rates in the nation.
Ball is also married to his co-owner’s daughter, who is from Idaho Falls.
Since 2015, Ball says the cryptocurrency market has continued to evolve. Today, there are 10,000 different types of cryptocurrency, and more companies are starting to use it.
“I lived in California for a while, and almost all the restaurants there accept it,” he says.
Visa and Mastercard offer a bitcoin debit card that will convert it into dollars when you swipe it. Tom Tueller, the other co-owner in the business, says there’s an apartment complex in Rexburg that accepts rent payments in Bitcoin.
“And companies like Walmart and Apple are posting job openings every day for cryptocurrency specialists,” Ball says.
Both Ball and Tueller say cryptocurrency is the trend of the future and will eventually become the norm.
“It’s already been proposed in the U.S. Senate that every U.S. citizen will be given a digital address. That’s how they originally wanted to send out all the stimulus checks last year,” Ball says. “It was declined, but the fact that it’s already been proposed tells you where the future is headed.”
Regardless of your experience or level of understanding with cryptocurrency, Ball says T-Ball Miner’s job is to remove all the barriers and simplify the process for everyone.
“You don’t have to understand the entire industry to get into mining. We take all the technical out of it,” says Ball.
Email sales@tballminers.com to learn more. You can also visit the Facebook page.
If you want your business featured in the Small Business Spotlight, email rett@eastidahonews.com. Please use “SBS” in the subject line.
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