14-year-old Ishaan Thakur and his 9-year-old sister Aanya used their summer vacation to build a lucrative commercial mining cryptocurrency.
"We started because we wanted to learn something new about technology-and make some money in the process," Ethan told CNBC Make It.
Every month, these two kids earn more than $30,000 by mining three digital coins: Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization; Ethereum, the second largest; Ishaan said, and ravencoin, one of the top 100 Altcoins.
For this reason, Ishaan and Aanya, who live in Frisco, Texas, must learn how to mine, which is no easy task. When mining cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, sophisticated computers are programmed to compete to solve puzzles to verify transactions.
Crypto mining is like mining gold or diamonds
After watching videos on YouTube and searching on the Internet, Ishaan converted his Alienware (a popular gaming computer) into an ether miner in April. (He does this by using a graphics card, which can perform a lot of mining calculations.)
His parents supported him: "We could have spent the entire summer playing video games, but we used our spare time to learn technology," Ishaan said.
The kids start with ether, because mining Bitcoin can be particularly difficult. Due to the limited supply and the surge in demand, the competition for mining Bitcoin may become more intense.
On their first day, "I made $3," Ishaan said. In order to officially start their business, Ishaan and Aanya founded their own mining company Flifer Technologies on April 30 with the help of their father Manish Raj.
"We liked it so much that we started adding more processors [or chips] and made $1,000 in the first month of May," Ishaan said.
Mining requires expensive equipment
The income of the siblings continued to increase, and by late July, they were able to purchase equipment such as Antminers and Nvidia RTX 3080-Ti graphics cards, and also began to mine Bitcoin and ravencoin. Raj said that when deciding which to mine, they chose ravencoin because the equipment they had was "the best" for mining it.
Raj said that based on the equipment currently ordered, they expect total revenue in September to be approximately US$36,000.
"We can process more than 10 billion Ethereum algorithms per second," Ishaan said. Despite the success of Ishaan and Aanya, the process was not easy.
In addition to being very complicated, mining is certainly not cheap, because it requires expensive equipment, a lot of energy and computer power. For example, Ishaan and Aanya have more than 97 processors, and their father Raj, who was an investment banker, used loans to fund these processors.
Raj declined to disclose the exact loan amount. However, the worldwide shortage of computer chips makes finding equipment more difficult and overpriced. Ishaan and Aanya mainly use Nvidia RTX 3090 graphics cards. Ishaan said that the purchase cost of each card is approximately US$2,500 to US$3,000.
Although at home, the siblings said they "use 100% renewable energy for mining" because "we want to be environmentally friendly", they also rented a data center in Dallas, Texas. In general, Ishaan said, for their homes and data centers, the monthly electricity cost is slightly less than $3,000.
"We moved from the desk to the garage because the heat and noise in the house were too much. [W]e has surpassed the garage because the heat and noise in the garage are also too much," Ishaan said. "We now only use the garage for construction and testing of mining equipment. When they are ready, we will transfer them to a professional air-conditioned data center in the center of Dallas."
Ishaan and Aanya were able to "expand" their operations during the school's summer vacation, but looking to the future, they hope to continue to develop their business and maintain a balance with the school. When her friend asked, "I just told them we were only mining in the garage," Aanya said.
They plan to use their profits to reinvest in their business. But, “hope that the profits of our mining business [also] pay for our college expenses,” Ishan said.
He said that Ishaan hopes to attend the University of Pennsylvania. There, he wanted to study medicine and become a doctor. Aanya also wants to study medicine, but she wants to study at New York University.
However, they still have a few years to save—after all, Ishaan is just a high school freshman, and Aanya is a fourth grader.