Bitcoin Stares Down Impending Apocalypse

In the global arms race known as bitcoin mining, there’s success, and then there’s an excess of success. That’s what a company called CEX.io discovered yesterday when it abruptly stopped accepting new machines into its consortium of bitcoin miners. The consortium — known in bitcoin circles as a pool — was running such a large portion of the worldwide computer network that oversees bitcoin, people were beginning to worry that CEX could corner the market and gain control of the digital currency. The whole idea behind bitcoin is that isn’t controlled by any one central authority. Now that the CEX has pulled back on the throttle, the bitcoin world can rest a little easier.

Anyone can help drive the bitcoin network by contributing the processing power of their own machine, known as a miner. And to encourage the practice, the system regularly doles out new bitcoins to these miners. It’s a bit of a crap shoot — 25 bitcoins get paid out to one lucky miner about six times an hour. But you can make money in a more predictable fashion if you sign up with a pool of miners like the one operated by CEX and split the profits.