He would roam the side streets and back roads, scanning for defunct businesses that might have once used a lot of power. The efficiency of power supplies is a worthy topic of investigation for any aspiring Bitcoin miner; inefficient, unrated power supplies will waste electricity and create extra noise and heat. It does, however, plugin to your computer via USB. By summer, Giga-Watt expects to have 24 pods here churning out bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, most of which use the same computing-intensive, cryptographically secured protocol called the blockchain. Note: Before you buy an Antminer S5 make sure you already have Bitcoin mining software and a Bitcoin mining pool.