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Inside BitFury's 20 Megawatt Bitcoin Mine
1sockchuck (826398) writes Bitcoin hardware vendor BitFury has opened a 20-megawatt data center to expand its cloud mining operations. The hashing center in the Republic of Georgia is filled with long rows of racks packed with specialized Bitcoin mining rigs powered by ASICs. It's the latest example of the Bitcoin industry's development of high-density, low-budget mining facilities optimized for rapid changes in hardware and economics. It also illustrates how ASIC makers are now expanding their focus from retail sales to their in-house operations as Bitcoin mining becomes industrialized.
pissed away on trendy pointless crypto nonsense
i can't believe this has gotten so stupid and out of hand
Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.
As far as I can judge, and please correct me if I am wrong, running a bitcoin mining farm isn't really something that ties up a lot of your time. I might be a bit naive, but... isn't it just "flip the switch and, well, wait"?
If it's not so, the next question is probably moot, but if it is: Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves? To me the whole deal smells a bit like those crystal ball experts who tell you next weeks lottery numbers... why, if it works, don't they play themselves and get rich themselves?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And causing global warming in the process.
The currency is volatile and it's a risky business mining Bitcoins. Companies that build the rigs and sell them shield themselves from this risk somewhat.
First of all, here in Georgia, we are a State in the US of Fucking A!
Secondly, what the fucking Hell does Athletic shoes have to do with Bitcoin?
The good is that if enough different mutually-hostile groups mine en mass like this, it will prevent any one group or consortium from gaining enough BC (by percentage of BC in existence) to be able to easily manipulate the blockchain.
The bad news is that there is always the risk that enough of these groups will merge, cooperate, or be manipulated by an outside force (think government or mob influence) to disrupt the BC economy. Once trust in BC or any similar currency is disrupted in a way that can't be fixed by technical means, it may never be restored.
This is one reason (among many) that people should not hold BC as a long-term investment, as they might do with gold.*
Holding BC for same-day use, near-term (weeks, not months) use as a hedge against volatility, and perhaps even as as a short-term or if you are looking for a high-risk investment, medium-term (months or a few years) investment may be appropriate for some investors. But as a traditional investment I would strongly warn against buying BC with the intent of holding it for decades Buffett-style.
*While it's possible that some massively disruptive technology might devalue gold in the same way that aluminum was massively devalued in the 1800s by technological advances, it's not something I foresee in the next 20 years.
What a colossal waste of power. Personally, I'd like to see a cryptocurrency where the production of the coins is directly related to the amount of energy produced by a particular source.
For example, a 3MW solar farm could produce N number of coins every day. But a 3GW nuclear plant could produce 3000N coins every day. This way the power can be still use productively but the currency is directly tied to the energy produced. So essentially it'd be a non-fiat currency based on the real world.
Fuck the USA. Stop being the world police
This begs the question whether mining for BitCoins is more damaging to the environment than mining for precious metals, for a given value of return. The EPA emissions factor for electricity is about 0.69 tons of CO2 per megawatt hour, so producing the electricity used by this datacenter is, on average, dumping into the atmosphere 331 tons of CO2 per day or about 120,000 tons of CO2 per year. While there are many other forms of environmental damage from gold mining, a quick search suggest that the greenhouse emissions from gold extraction run to about 11.5 tons of CO2 equivalent per kg of Gold. At this rate 120,000 tons of CO2 yields of 10.5 tons of gold, worth nearly $500 million at today's price. Will this datacentre yield more than half a billion dollars worth of bit coins each year?
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
A gen- U -ine redneck wouldn't know that Asics is a brand of athletic shoe.
They should have used these resources to research the Nine Million Names of God to immanentize the eschaton .
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Stupid.
I love bitcoin but even I find these huge mining outfits disturbing.. even if using free energy all that hardware seems such a waste.
Bitcoins. They're horrible for their Earth, and their kind hates the Earth so they love them. Wasting 20 MWatts 24/7 for a fake conservative currency should be a crime. If our rulers weren't so biased against sensible laws, these people would be put in prison.
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
There is less uncertainty and other risks in making and selling mining rigs than in mining.
Also, to "do it right," mining on a large scale requires some some BC-mining expertise that making equipment doesn't have. Granted, this "expertise" isn't very much (yet) - it amounts to things like legal compliance (where applicable - not very many places if any as of today but probably many places soon), whether you want to provide "washing/anonymizing" services and if so at what cost, what is the lowest transaction fee you are willing to accept under a given circumstance (e.g. if electricity costs less at night, you may be willing to take a lower fee), etc.
There is a parallel question in the real world with a parallel answer:
Why do people/companies that make oil-drilling rigs sell them instead of just using them to drill for oil themselves? Answer: Different risks and different areas of expertise. Oil exploration companies have or hire expertise in how to scout for possible deposits, how to negotiate mineral leases, how to operate oil rigs, how to handle legal compliance, etc. etc. - things that the rig-manufacturing companies would prefer not to do.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Help out a brother here who nodded off during most of his ECON101 class. What is the benefit or impact of the way bitcoins are created? If they are industrialized like this, how is this a good thing? Where does the distribution of wealth occur, or does it not (and is that a good or bad thing)? It seems you have a limited number of players who can print and hoard their own money because now it seems you need large resources to do it in any real sense. I look at it like mining some kind of mineral; sure everyone can go out in their back yard and maybe find some specs, but over yonder you have these large industrial companies strip-mining the tops off of the mountains; you end up with a few flakes and they end up with most, and I don't see how that is a good thing in the larger economy.
Okay, I'll grant you that equipment that uses engines which require more power than today's electric engines of the same size can produce can't feasibly be done with wind or solar. Ditto for portable equipment where the size or weight of today's electric engines + batteries is more than the size or weight of the comparable non-electric engine.
But any mining equipment which could be run off of an electric engine and where the size or weight of an electric engine + batteries is acceptable could be run or recharged off of electric mains. The power on these mains can come from "green" sources, assuming of course that a "green" power plant exists or could be built close enough to attach to that region's power grid. That assumption may not hold in some non-developed countries.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.
This a thousand times over. Run this equipment with World Community Grid or Folding@Home, might lead to curing cancer or AIDS. Fuck, just donate it to some medical research effort and maybe in 20 years a cure will come out and save your ass.
Bitcoin? Megawattage flushed down the entropy hole. Wouldn't it suck for all the bitcoiners if a talented mathematician found a way to trivially circumvent the bitcoin exchange system or if someone came up with a new cryptocurrency that people just liked better (I think both are just a matter of time), leaving Bitcoiners with worthless data stored on hard drives. Maybe all that fine computing equipment won't end up in the landfill, but that's a lot of heat and fossil fuel gone for nothing.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I think one does not need to spend 20 megawatt-hours on calculations to realize that whoever created Bitcoin, holds a secret backdoor or a magic word that can calculate all virtual "coins" near instantly. The elliptic crypto which underlines Bitcoin has very peculiar initiating values that were allegedly chosen in a random way. One has to be blonde-silly to belive such claims.
Investing dozens of millions of dollars in a "mining farm" and waking up one morning to news of a list of all possible bitcoins dumped by an anon onto Pastebin would be a bad morning.
Donate 1000 satoshi or more to my microwallet (17Yvsma9tfiuqVP7QhsFE2VmsFpTEMy17P). All donations will be used to pay for the time needed to write funny comments on Slashdot.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Wasting even more electricity for something completely pointless.
Money (exchangeable value) has always driven innovation. The application-specific integrated circuits made just for Bitcoin math were rapidly developed and produced in mass quantities in multiple variations. All of this if about a 2 year span at most. These the ability to quickly design and produce ASIC chip is real innovation here and actually commodity. It won't be long now before we have ASIC for all kinds of number crunching and specific tasks. It's hardware that's innovating and changing nearly as fast as software. I bet on this as a new wave of tech. Multipurpose CPUs are likely going to become just small components in a much larger system replacing what we know as computers.
It all starts at 0
All this effort, resources and real money being flushed down the drain for imaginary currency.
Whoever ACTUALLY coined the phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum was off by a factor of measurement at least.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
20 million dollar data center is low budget?
Why would anyone SELL bitcoin mining rigs instead of simply building them and getting rich themselves?
Same reason that people sell get rich quick schemes to the gullible rather than getting rich off the scheme themselves. They know there is no profit to be had in the actual mining of bitcoins but there is money to be had selling virtual shovels to those dumb enough to not figure this fact out.
If you really could make millions mining bitcoins why would you tell anyone?
are the utility companies.
There are numerous offerings of bitcoin / altcoin asics in the market and often the information available are confusing
Which ASIC (or ASICs) are more efficient (in terms of result and/or in terms of result per unit of energy consumed ?
Any suggestion ?
Thanks !
If it really was worth wasting all this money and energy to generate imaginary money, every bank, power company and other large company in the world would be running thousands of these facilities all over the world. The fact that they're not is a good indication that they know more than you about the true value of this phenomenon.
What a total waste of energy!! Nothing produced, nothing gained but a faddish, imaginary item that adds no value to the world.
Almost all hardware manufacturers *do* mine with all the hardware they make. They make it and mine with it even after you have paid for it. They then ship it to you right before the break-even point. There are endless stories out there about missed shipping deadline after missed shipping deadline, mining hardware companies making empty promises, and would-be miners receiving hardware a few months too late, by which point their projected return is orders of magnitude smaller than it would have been due to the increase in network hash rate between when they paid for the hardware and when they received it.
They should be thinking bigger... imagine how much WoW gold you could farm with that! ( :
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
What will they do with all that computing power once they will have mined the last bitcoin? I wonder if such setup could be crack and steal existing bitcoins.
When will they start selling ASICs for Cookie Clicker I need moar cookies! 34.676 sextillion cookies is just not enough!