Tampa bitcoin company gets $5.6M loan to buy Texas mining facility

LM Funding, a bitcoin-mining company based in Tampa, announced a letter of intent to purchase a mining facility in Texas after securing a $5.6 million loan last week. 

A bitcoin-mining facility is a huge data center that makes quintillions of guesses every second to add to the next block of data to the bitcoin blockchain. One bitcoin reward of 6.25 coins is awarded every 10 minutes to some miners.

LM Funding officials say their computers, according to a story on the company in March, have computational power of 614 "petahash," or 614 quadrillion guesses a second. That's a lot, but LM Funding needs more, so it pools its guesses, or "hashes," with other miners, and the company can split the reward.