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Inside BitFury's 20 Megawatt Bitcoin Mine

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fools-and-their-megawatts dept.

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.

6 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. 20 megawatts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    pissed away on trendy pointless crypto nonsense

    i can't believe this has gotten so stupid and out of hand

    1. Re:20 megawatts by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1, Interesting

      i can't believe this has gotten so stupid and out of hand

      However, no bitcoin miner has been bailed out with my tax dollars. So they are still doing better than the "real" banks.

      Twenty megawatts at 5 cents per kwhr is about $1000/hour. Wall Street likely uses a thousand times as much just to light their offices.

  2. Environmental ROI? by nickovs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?
  3. Re:Good Thing by ultranova · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Good thing you're not solving real problems. What. A. Fucking. Waste.

    How much energy is spent fighting against counterfeit cash? And do you perhaps think point-of-sale systems and credit/debit card systems or wire transfers require none? And armored trucks for moving money, those surely require no fuel?

    --

    Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  4. Re:Please answer me one question by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Selling bitcoin mining rigs is a guaranteed profit.

    Mining bitcoins is a potential profit, potential loss. It all depends on what happens to the value of bitcoins. Your reasoning only works if the equipment seller is absolutely certain that bitcoins will hold their value. From what I gather, the vast majority of people don't think they will, but will happily sell equipment to those who do.

  5. Which ASIC is worth trying ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 !