Inside one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines

https://qz.com/1055126/photos-china-has-one-of-worlds-largest-bitcoin-mines/

by mdelias • 9 years ago

66 27 9 years ago

qz.com

lafar6502• 9 years ago

i wonder how their computing power compares to biggest supercomputers and at what fraction of their cost

azag0• 9 years ago

Bitcoin mining is trivially parallelizable. Most supercomputers are built for problems that are not.

piker• 9 years ago

Why can't the proof of work be a series of adversarial StarCraft games or something? At least then all of these GPU cycles (is that the term with GPUs?) and power consumption creates something we can watch and be entertained by.

exit2• 9 years ago

probably because it's slow to verify and the difficulty is not readily adjustable

SmallDeadGuy• 9 years ago

Slow to verify, sure, but difficulty is definitely easily adjustable. Just scale up the game map and number of units, suddenly you have a larger search space for navigation and more AI objects to manoeuvre, too.

abledon• 9 years ago

Make a pull request =)

EA• 9 years ago

Why don't we add processors to water heaters and HVAC systems to do something useful with the heat generated by the processors?

base698• 9 years ago

Water is basically a sink, and it requires more btus than the minor amount a miner would generate.

sathackr2• 9 years ago

http://en.hotmine.io/

"Bitcoin Boiler"

tlb• 9 years ago

It would require the silicon to run at higher temperatures than when air-cooled. Semiconductor failure rate roughly doubles every 10C temperature rise. For most environments, it's better to spend energy to actively cool the silicon than extract heat energy from it, because the cost of failures is higher than the cost of power.

philbarr• 9 years ago

I would rather it be put to work finding genome sequences or something.

amatus• 9 years ago

I love how they published a picture of the keys[1].

[1] https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/bitmain_127.jpg

mod• 9 years ago

Those office chairs need a re-think. It would crush my back to sit like that for a shift.

vog• 9 years ago

Very interesting view into the insides of mining.

However, I always find it sad to see how mining is depicted in most media: as a way to "generate" bitcoins. This view is inaccurate for two reasons:

1. The purpose of this whole computation power is to secure the Bitcoin transactions. The mined Bitcoins are "just" an incentive (i.e. a desired side effect).

2. In addition to the mined Bitcoins, the miners receive the transaction costs. In the future, the mined Bitcoins will become a lesser and lesser part of the incentive, gradually replaced by the transaction costs.

Luckily, this one seems to be an exception. Although the title is misleading, the process is stated mostly correct (except for not mentioning transaction fees). From the related article:

"The lives of bitcoin miners digging for digital gold in Inner Mongolia"

https://qz.com/1054805/what-its-like-working-at-a-sprawling-...

Today, Ordos (population 2 million) has emerged as a center of bitcoin mining, the process of approving transactions and creating new coins in the digital currency’s system

landave• 9 years ago

I don't know. If you are not already familiar with the inner workings of bitcoin, it seems to me that a simple computation power secures the transactions is not really helpful. What does that even mean, to secure the transactions?

Essentially, for an article that is aimed to such a wide audience you need to find an appropriate simplification. Such a simplification will never be completely accurate. Therefore, I consider anything appropriate that is technically not wrong and does not create more confusion. For example, describing mining as a process of generating bitcoins would probably satisfy those requirements (ignoring transactions fees).

I agree that it would be nice to be able to explain what the real purpose of mining is, but I don't see a really good way to do this.

MrBunny• 9 years ago

Funny bloomberg just made a video about this mine. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-08-18/bitcoin-s-r...

1024core• 9 years ago

Its daily electricity bill amounts to $39,000.

All from coal-fired plants.

Surely there's a better form of "currency" that's not so wasteful?

dutchbrit• 9 years ago

IOTA

elmar• 9 years ago

Why Blockchain Needs ‘Proof of Authority’ Instead of ‘Proof of Stake’ or ‘Proof of Work’

https://cointelegraph.com/news/why-blockchain-needs-proof-of...

theEXTORTCIST• 9 years ago

Interesting... there doesn't appear to be any fire suppression systems pictured in the mining buildings

zwieback• 9 years ago

Looks like unintended consequences of the worst kind to me.

SippinLean• 9 years ago

Ah so that's who was using my "new" ASIC before Bitmain shipped it to me

Inside one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines

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