Inside one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines | Hacker News Reader

Inside one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mines

qz.com

66 pointsmdelias27 comments

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

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.

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?

IOTA

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

hmm, fair point, but i'd have to see proof that the difficulty is linearly adjustable with 256 bits of granularity

Make a pull request =)

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

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

some of these miners use many kilowatts of power. Take a look at those power cables, all that energy has to leave as heat.

http://en.hotmine.io/

"Bitcoin Boiler"

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.

I know you said air-cooled, but what about a Peltier cooler? Silicon stays cool, water gets hot, win-win.

I don't know if it's a frequency illusion or if a lot of people are playing with them lately, but I've seen tons of people mentioning peltier cooling lately.

I've been working on a design to cool my cpu with one. The best part about peltier modules is also the worst part: the cold side gets really cold. So cold you get below the humidity threshold, and end up with water all over your system. I'm trying to hook up a bunch of humidity, and temperature sensors to an arduino that will regulate the power to the peltier module to try to only let it get as cool as the relative humidity will safely allow.

What I'm getting at is you could do it, but a peltier cooler would need to be manufactured for it to be reasonable at the scale they're looking for.

Separate from the condensation problem they use a LOT of power. They're not terribly efficient, which would likely defeat the purpose. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling#Perform... )

I remember them being used for "extreme" overclocking.

Nowadays people in that department seem to have moved to the elegant solution of manually pouring LN2 on to a cup that sits on top of the CPU (or GPU).

How about water cooling?

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

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

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

Looks like unintended consequences of the worst kind to me.

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

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

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

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

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