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Armenia Opens $50 Million Bitcoin, Ethereum Mining Farm (chepicap.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the day-late-and-a-dollar-short dept.

Armenia has opened a cryptocurrency mining farm to the tune of $50 million. It reportedly mines Bitcoin and Ethereum and consists of 3,000 machines. Chepicap reports: The country's first mining project, launched in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, is headed by Armenian real estate investment company Multi Group Concern and Malta-registered Omnia Tech International Company. Armenian entrepreneur and head of Multi Group, Gagik Tsarukyan said at the ceremony that $50 million had been invested into the farm. The first floor of the farm is designed for an IT business center with around the clock operating services. Bitcoin.com reports that Armenia is working at establishing its own Silicon Valley through the development of a free economic zone that will boast an advanced technology center.

38 comments

  1. The joke writes itself, I guess by nospam007 · · Score: 0

    Or not

    1. Re: The joke writes itself, I guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The true joke was made when your dad neglected to pull out.

    2. Re: The joke writes itself, I guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You lost money on Bitcoin, didntcha? You reek of ass and bitterness.

      Go eat a hot pocket, sweetie.

  2. ./get-rich-quick.sh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lol blockchain

  3. Timing is by reiterate · · Score: 1

    ... Everything.

    1. Re:Timing is by alvinrod · · Score: 1

      Now doesn't seem like a particularly bad time. The price has been relatively stable for a while. It's probably still going to slide down, but it's probably better to get in now when there's at least some future chance of it going up sometime in the future instead of getting in right at was starting to crater. If it remains relatively stable over time, it might have some potential as a real currency since one of the biggest knocks against it was that the value was too unstable.

    2. Re:Timing is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Desperately trying to find greater fools to save your investment? :-)

    3. Re: Timing is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bitcoin was never an investment. It was gambling you could sell to a greater fool before it crashed.

    4. Re:Timing is by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      I never invested in or mined bitcoin, but I was genuinely intrigued by the whole thing. The concept itself is interesting and it's funny to think back to a time where people were spending them when they were pretty much like coins. No one expected any of it to really pan out or be worth anything, so people would spend a dozen or so on a pizza if they could find some place that would take them just for the novelty of spending some funny digital money that no one really understood. I just wonder how many of those people think back on that pizza and think that they could have had a quarter million dollars instead if they would have held onto them.

      Everything to come with it has been fascinating. The rapid technological arms race to mine more bitcoins, where people started being able recoup an investment from their high-end GPU in a few months by having it mine bitcoin instead of gaming on it, and people setting up little bitcoin mining operations until the ASICs pretty much killed that off. People posting on message boards about plowing their tuition into mining rigs or just outright investing bitcoin and the stories about people moving to towns that had cheap power contractually guaranteed to set up massive mining operations there because electricity was the real limiting factor.

      All of it's almost just too surreal and I'm not even completely sure that the rodeo is over either. It's like getting to watch a gold rush happen and all of the human exuberance and tragedy that comes along with it.

    5. Re: Timing is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's like celebrating war because explosions are cool. Blockchain is cool, but it's just the latest excuse for money movers to ply their timeless trade, and the latest thing for lazy people to gamble on.

  4. At $50M... by Wolfrider · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...this thing will never pay for itself. One of the Big Five should put a monitor on their network traffic and see what they're *really* doing.

    --
    .
    == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
    1. Re:At $50M... by Gilgaron · · Score: 1

      If the guy is smart, he used the buzzwords of cryptocurrency to fleece some VCs to build an IT Business Center that will otherwise keep itself afloat via normal means.

  5. How do cryptocurrencies work? An answer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    * PoW (or PoS) based consensus is a strike, sabotage and pollution of unprecedented proportions.
    * The nodes' history, their "subjective", called ledger, is dictated by the more powerful nodes. This ledger plays the role of truth or law, therefore the stronger nodes are judges or legislators.

    This madness did sneak into our lives only because of our unwinnable stupidity. /* End-of-post (EOP) */

    The blockchain's professed purpose is to serve as a means for participants to agree upon who gave money to whom. It does this by keeping parallel histories of transactions in a tree structure, and this on each node (a distributed database, so your computer stores many gigabytes, some bits of which are pedophilic material: cf. OP). The "official" history is *a* longest branch of this tree. A tree's node is called a "block" the payload of which consists of so-called "transactions" which say that x gave y a coin. One is expected to have a hard time counterfeiting such a translation because in order not to be rejected by a participating node, said transaction has to be signed with x's private key, must include y's public key, and a reference to a signed transaction saying that x is the receiving party (containing x's public key).

    Still one can multiply transactions (aka "double spending"), they need not be rejected by the nodes only kept in different blocks.

    A block also holds, as overhead, a block's hash which is used as a pointer to its father in the tree. Now, in order for a block to be grafted it has to be referenceable i.e., to have an address or, in blockchain parlance, a hash. An acceptable hash has a growing with time collision prefix (sequence of 0s) each further bit of which rarefies them by half, so that a longer 0-prefixed hash is more precious and takes longer to find by exhaustive search.

    A quantum computer can spit longest branches instantaneously, even by yesterday. These branches become the official history or ledger which the crass proletariat nodes believe to have been arrived at through the masses' consensus.

    Imagine the likely consequences. /* EOP */

    Alright here's a quick and easy summary of the technology behind Bitcoin which is trivially generalizable to other cryptocurrencies since their authors aren't discoverers but puny copying dwarves.

    The seminal idea of Bitcoin is that of standpoint or of reference frame. Satoshi Nakamoto (be it a juridical person or otherwise) looked at the world from a particular, discrete, individual coin's perspective.

    The only relevant life of which coin, the "subjective" of it, is whoever owns it, thus *a coin can be reduced to a memory, a history, a graph of its owners.* This graph, once you postulate that the same owner is different persons at different times (like the coin), has tree topology. Branches sprout when it is "double spent" i.e., when an owner gives it more than once without first losing it & being given it back. This is of course an undesirable possibility in a copy happy computer setting.

    Each node of the coin tree is a signature of a certain hash. The hash is computed on a sequence consisting of a signature & of a public key.

    What is a hash? A hash of a set of things can be imagined as a synthesis of sorts of that set: given an arbitrarily long (bit) string, a string of length invariant from input to input is output. Now, of course, the hash is a noninjective correspondence because, obviously, its image is of bounded size (the set of hash strings of a certain length) while its domain isn't (strings, whatever the length), but in practice one treats them as injective because the size of the image is a big enough integer relative to the number of hash function applications.

    What is a signature? A signature is what is obtained by encrypting something with a private key. Anybody can verify that the originator of that thing is the one who has signed it by decrypting the signature into that thing by using the public key of the signer.

    A coin is a

    1. Re: How do cryptocurrencies work? An answer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Goddam gibberish, felt like reading spam mail...

    2. Re: How do cryptocurrencies work? An answer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yet it explains what cryptos are all about. They flagged it as redundant, as if the inner workings or the economics of the blockchain were made clear in the white paper or in the popular publications, but nothing could be further from the truth. BTC & c. need incomprehension to be accepted and used.

      If you were less prejudiced against Anymous Cowards, who it is true, owing to the depraved state of mankind, are halitosous talking feet for the crushing majority of them, if you were to read the collection of posts calmly, it wouldn't be unintelligible or at any rate less so than what most of the Internet or of the books tell.

    3. Re: How do cryptocurrencies work? An answer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Having read that not at all TLDR post, I agree, we should simplify it with a simple table consisting of just ID and Balance. This way it will take much less resources to maintain and can support the billions of transactions per day needed to scale, while running on nothing more expensive than a decent gaming rig.

      That bit about the Jews and Israel in the middle seems out of place though.

  6. Hello from ARMENIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    When we makes hundred billion dollar we buy all country of TURKEY

    1. Re:Hello from ARMENIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, we heard that you two get along real good...

    2. Re: Hello from ARMENIA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you want the pastor, I believe he left

  7. In Latvia, no mining farm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    only dream of mining potato

  8. Alternative uses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And they can use the waste heat to heat the entire country in the winter. Or fry bacon on the GPUs. Everyone likes bacon.

  9. It's a private investment by swell · · Score: 5, Informative

    Armenia is a country. The headline clearly says that Armenia is doing this. The article clearly says that individual companies are doing it.

    Some governments do invest in similar ways, such as Saudi Arabia and China. Armenia doesn't seem to be doing it here. Please read before posting stories.

    --
    ...omphaloskepsis often...
    1. Re:It's a private investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This has been a chronic problem for all American media, not just /.

      Someone in country X did something bad or stupid? "Country X did xxxx"

      Someone in country X did something good or heroic? "Dude did xxxx in country X"

      It is as if there is a coordinated effort by American MSM to make Americans feel superior.

    2. Re:It's a private investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think it's working ...

    3. Re:It's a private investment by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Realtors... they're dumb enough.

  10. You're doing it wrong. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    The reason to run such a farm is not to mine for coins. All the minable bitcoins are gone, the remaining pool is for blockchain maintainers. Even that is not the reason though, it's to validate transactions and earn transaction fees. Not sure about Etherium but it's likely the same, to earn fees for handling transactions rather than actually mining. It should be lucrative no matter what the actual trade value of the tokens is.

  11. Armenia? Blood Disease? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    STD? RUSSIAN?!

  12. Is this good? by Idimmu+Xul · · Score: 1

    Seems Bitcoin is now about moving control away from Governments and towards private corporations.

    Is this the capitalism of money itself?!

    --
    The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
    1. Re:Is this good? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is good for bitcoin

    2. Re:Is this good? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Governments were never in control of BTC and never will be.

    3. Re:Is this good? by jythie · · Score: 1

      Well, a big part of the hope behind bitcoin was rooted in the idea that private companies are better for 'people' than governments, so yeah, BTC was in part about moving control from governments to the already wealthy, well, after making some new wealthy people at least.

  13. Too late by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Mining BTC and ETH at this point in time is going to be a lot less profitable than 2 or more years ago.

    1. Re:Too late by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People are saying this since 2013. This can be said of any given timespan.

  14. The real solution by Blackburd · · Score: 1

    The logical endgame for bitcoin is to add an Ethernet card to electric heating systems and call it a day. At least you are getting some sort of logical return from the work preformed.

    1. Re:The real solution by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      There has been some effort to reduce impact and cost by homing mining servers in people's homes, but that's a lot of expensive hardware to insure offsite.

      I say we bomb any bitcoin farm from here on out, for the protection of the environment. This shit has got out of hand.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  15. No mining farm needed with APKoin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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  16. c6gunner's impersonating me & lying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

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