A bitcoin mining company in Singapore is seeing a rising number of customers purchasing mining rigs as the cryptocurrency gains in value.
SG Mining, based in Singapore, has seen sales shoot up in recent months. In July, the company was selling 15 mining rigs, but now it’s seeing sales of around 100 per month. Dexter Ng, one of the team members who builds the mining hardware and sell them, said to Channel News Asia:
Customers come in and order 50 rigs on their own. Compared to last time, probably one person only buys one or two. Now we get customers who buy 10, 20 or even 50.
Each of the mining rigs sells for between S$5,000 to over S$6,500, depending on its processing power.
This rise in the number of customers comes at a time when bitcoin saw its value soar to $7,800 earlier this month. This was in light of the fact that the organisers behind the SegWit2x hard fork had announced that they were suspending the operation due to a lack of consensus.
However, shortly following that news saw bitcoin’s price dropping to $5,500 over the weekend before making a recovery on Monday to $6,500. Of course, this is likely to fuel the opinion of critics that the digital currency is in a bubble due to its volatile prices.
Stanley Yong, a cryptocurrency researcher, said:
The price going up is probably a bubble, given that it has reached more than US$7,000 per bitcoin. And the question for us is not whether it is a bubble. But how long this bubble will be there.
It remains to be seen what future the digital currency has in Singapore. At the end of October, Ravi Menon, the managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the country’s central bank, said that the country doesn’t intend to regulate the cryptocurrency or the market in the short-term.
At the time, Menon stated that bitcoin doesn’t pose a ‘risk that warrants regulation,’ however, the central bank will keep ‘an open mind‘ about it.
The jury is still be out regarding whether bitcoin becomes accepted into the mainstream in Singapore.
For now, though, many investors are keen to get involved with mining their own coins despite the fact that the market may have suffered a drastic drop over the weekend. That, however, doesn’t appear to be preventing investors from getting involved. This can be seen by the fact that bitcoin’s price has rallied back and is back up by over $1,000 from weekend lows.