The soaring value of bitcoin is encouraging more and more companies and individuals to engage in “mining”. Mining is actually a process which secures the distributed bitcoin network, and processes all of its transactions. Historically anyone could do this using a standard PC, but these days hardware that is purpose-built for more energy-efficient mining is a necessity to mine profitably. Every ten minutes miners across the globe compete to the be the first to solve a mathematical puzzle. The winner gets the “block reward”, which is currently 12.5 bitcoins (at the time of writing worth more than US$200,000).