Two Brothers From Texas Successfully Become Crypto Miners

Etrhereum, one of the cryptocurrencies mined by Ishaan and Aanya Thakur from Texas. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - Two Indian-American brothers in Frisco, Texas, show great talent. Ishaan (14 years) and Aanya Thakur (9 years), respectively, have earned more than USD 30.000 per month mining cryptocurrencies at home.

How did they achieve this? They only learn from videos on YouTube, and then update their equipment from their earnings and a loan taken by their father, Manish Raj.

“Crypto mining is like mining for gold or diamonds”, Ishaan told CNBC Make It. “Instead of using a shovel, you mine with a computer. Instead of finding a piece of gold or a diamond in a mine, you find cryptocurrency”.

The brothers said they chose mining because they wanted to learn something new about technology and make money along the way. After a promising start, they have formed a company – Flifer Technologies.

“We could spend an entire summer playing video games, but we use our free time to learn about technology”, says Ishaan.

Every month, the Thakur children earn more than USD 30.000 by mining three digital coins: Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market value; ether, the second-largest; and ravencoin, an altcoin.

When mining for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether, computers are programmed to compete to solve difficult puzzles to validate transactions.

Ishaan and his sister watch instructional videos on YouTube and other platforms. Ishaan turns his Alienware, a popular type of gaming computer, into an ether mining rig.

But mining is not cheap. This requires advanced technology – such as processors and graphics cards. Each card costs about USD 3.000. The worldwide shortage of computer chips has also led to price increases as well.

Electricity bills have also risen to nearly $3.000 per month. This prompted the father of the children to take out a loan at the Bank. Ishaan and Aanya use renewable energy whenever possible and also rent a data center.

“We are now using the garage (at home) only to build and test mining rigs. When they are ready, we move them to an air-conditioned professional data center in downtown Dallas”, Ishaan told CNBC Make It.

“With these infrastructure upgrades and options, we can process more than 10 billion Ethereum algorithms per second”, Ishaan said, as quoted by CNBC.