Skyscraper design combines cryptocurrency mining with vertical water park | Hacker News Reader

Skyscraper design combines cryptocurrency mining with vertical water park

archdaily.com

46 pointsundefined153 comments

I chuckled at the number of people in this thread who don't seem to grasp the concept of an intentionally ridiculous or improbably difficult to build architectural concept rendering. Like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Mega-City_Pyramid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Seed_4000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_City_1000

Closest real world inspiration I can think of is this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_building

If you think someone is seriously proposing a 560 meter tall waterpark/cryptocurrency mining tower... I have a bridge to sell you?

It's named after the JCPOA nuclear deal, which no matter what side of the issue you're on, has significant follow on effects on Iran's civilian economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...

It’s really a great political/art piece but it takes reading a few paragraphs of the article to realize it.

> I chuckled at the number of people in this thread who don't seem to grasp the concept of an intentionally ridiculous

Some people simply don't read the article before leaving a comment.

And for others sometimes it's just the challenge of understanding written humor. Humor can be sophisticated, and written humor is more challenging since there is no speaker to make adjustments. You mix that with the fact that many users don't expect to see these kind of articles here in the first place (especially non-native English speakers), and you get a lot of serious opinions about a joke.

I find these 'design concepts' vexing; they consist of renders of impossible or non-existent materials and technologies. Are they intended as some sort of 'science fiction product designs', or do the creators believe that they can will things into being? And why do the concepts get so much press coverage?

I'm sure these renders look great in a portfolio, but as someone who does (a little) industrial design, I find unconstrained designs a bit pointless.

Literally the first line of the article:

> As an entry to the 2019 Evolo Skyscraper Competition, JCPOA Tower was designed to combine cryptocurrency mining with a water park

So it’s a design competition. It would be similar to you asking why teams build autonomous vehicles for the DARPA grand challenges.

It's like if Stanford brought a picture of an L5 self driving car to the DARPA grand challenge.

And it's a self-balancing hydrogen fuel cell unicycle.

A vertical water park with cryptocurrency mining facility as a response to an international embargo seems to be an art project.

I find it funny and endearing- its absurdity seems to be part of the message.

I think you're missing the point, it's an elaborate joke to draw attention to Iran's difficulties:

> As a way to get around the imposed embargo, mining would have to be done secretly and undercover. Hence, a hybrid type is proposed, a mining farm that is juxtaposed by a vertical water theme park. The water infrastructure hides the hi-tech facility [...]

And that's on a public website. No way they're being serious. I think it's pretty funny;)

I find unconstrained designs a bit pointless.

Competition's problem statement is at https://www.e-architect.co.uk/competitions/evolo-2020-skyscr... ... remember architects are not engineers. It's much easier to break than to build. What would you have proposed?

I probably wouldn't bother to enter these sorts of competitions, even if I were an architect, as anything realistic would lose.

I mostly design plastic enclosures, and assemblies for electronic products, and have to keep manufacturability top-of-mind.

The problem statement is the problem - it's way too broad and vague to yield useful results. If the aim is to find a solution to a specific problem (e.g. using less water), that should be the problem statement. If the aim is to find a novel improvement over the "standard" skyscraper, it should start with a reference design and then ask for an improvement subject to some reasonable constraints (e.g. improve one of the listed areas for at most a 10% cost increase).

> I find these 'design concepts' vexing;

I don't find them any more vexing than anything else that also exists purely in the realm of 3D rendering and visualization software. Do people also find vexing (haha, video game in-joke) the design of the Pyramidion in Destiny 2, or the giant world eating octopus/robot production annihilation machines frozen in place in Horizon Zero Dawn?

It's purely nothing more than a creative opportunity for people to do something cool and fun with 3D CAD software. And perhaps for the Iranians who designed it, to get their personal names ranked higher in google searches and gain some very small degree of recognition in the architectural community.

Tehran concept skyscraper combines cryptocurrency mining with vertical water park.

Is this a joke?

It says that it's "Disconnected From the Power Grid" with "Self Powered Sustainable System Including Generators" and "Taking Advantage of Water Flow for Cooling and Generating Electricity".

I can't think of a way that this works in reality. Electricity costs for the servers would be huge, and you still gotta pump water to the top of that tower.

Must be rain water, that comes from above.

The idea is stupid af, but the illustrations are really charming and fun.

The article says that the tower is a "self powered sustainable system including generators" and hydroelectric power. It also claims the tower would be disconnected from the grid. I wonder how many generators they expect to use?

Ah, that is simple. You see, the tower is also an over unity system! I mean, that is no less believable than the rest of the design, right?

Their theory seems to be that they could put a turbine into the water park to generate electricity. Which is obviously nonsense, and a great illustration of why open-ended "design competitions" like this are useless.

Duh, you just use the power generated from the water to pump the water right back up to the top. And to mine crypto. And there's unlimited free cotton candy. Because a 12 year old came up with the concept.

I can't believe this isn't the Onion or something. It was hilarious.

at what point is it substantive to say this is dumb

I think the moment the word cryptocurrency was used in the same sentence as skyscraper.

Hopefully a nonstupid example of skyscraper and cryptocurrency being used in the same sentence...

A skyscraper might not be the safest place to store a cryptocurrency private key - many companies use bunkers instead!

Should add "conceptual" or "design of" to the title otherwise it's a bit click-baity

To get this off grid, are they planning on having the guests have to carry a 5 gallon bucket of water every trip and spend 30 minutes on pedal power generators for every lap?

Also, if this is supposed to be some kind of covert way to mine crypto... they failed at go.

> they failed at go

Do you even realise what you're commenting about? A 500 metres tall water park with slides to hide a giant crypto farm to save a country of 80 million from a near total embargo? Come on.

This sounds like one of those procedurally generated Netflix shows

.... they are procedurally generated right?

Both the headline and the serious tone of the article makes people here very confused thinking this is a real plausible thing that will help Iran's economy.

I can imagine broken sewage pipe juices flowing down the circular slides

They could get even more traction by adding a blockchain ride.

This reads like a headline invented by GPT-3.

Or a prompt given to GPT-3 to have it write the rest of the article.

Does someone here with access to GPT-3 want to try? Would we know if this was how the linked article was written?

(2019)

It looks cool. But talk and concepts are cheap, I hope they actually build it.

So the real reason? Far less likely for the US to Tomahawk a crypto mining organization if it looks like a waterpark and has kids in the structure.

In civilized worlds we don't use children as shields.

In civilized worlds, we don't fire Tomahawk missiles at crypto mining server farms.

But sure, maybe Iran are the bad guys in this hypothetical scenario.

You could do this, or you could stop being a theocratic dictatorship? One sounds a lot easier IMO.

On the other hand people from all over the world travel to Egypt to experience the product of ancient theocratic regimes.

Is ancient egypt actually considered a theocracy, rather than a monarchy? Also, I think the parent poster's point is that theocracies fell out of fashion a long time ago.

Not even close. What they want is their natural resources. Nobody in USA gives a crap about Iranian people's problems.

This is why the US has sanctioned Norway?

As near as I can tell the criteria for the us government getting involved is you have natural resources and you mistreat your people. Neither one alone seems to be sufficient.

if (has(flammable_liquid) && does_mistreat_people()) { make_people_suffer_more(); }

I don't see any relation between two inputs of that and gate.

Norway shares oil revenue with UK and EU companies and therefore has strong defense against colonialist USA.

If you want to think about causality here it would be more like:

    Group a:
    If(has(flammable_liquid))
        Try to acquire it

    Group b:
    If(behaves morally)
        Prevent group A from causing suffering

The group consisting of both a and b act like what you describe, but not because that's rational behavior.

> As near as I can tell the criteria for the us government getting involved is you have natural resources and you mistreat your people. Neither one alone seems to be sufficient.

Surely, you must be aware of the history of US involvement in Iran.

How do you reconcile the difference between the reality of US foreign policy, and your idealized view of its foreign policy?

Iran has always has always had policies that the US populace would consider mistreating people. Sure their "intervention" didn't help (it generally doesn't) and in fact made things worse, but the conditions were satisfied.

>As near as I can tell the criteria for the us government getting involved is you have natural resources and you mistreat your people. Neither one alone seems to be sufficient.

the US seems to be pretty chill about saudi arabia, which does have oil and mistreats people. I'm sure the rest of the countries around that region aren't exactly a bastion of human rights either.

Thats because the US requires juvenile moral arguments to maintain support for things that have nothing to do with juvenile moral arguments.

It derives it’s power from a population that has little history, prophecies or goals in common, so childish moral high ground is all it has to continue stewarding its massive resource appropriation efforts.

The US is involved in Saudi Arabia though, just as an ally instead of an enemy.

Sorry but it's never that simple.

Iran is very different than Norway. Iran was actually a friendly ally to US. Biggest ally in the region. So close that US designed a coup to overthrow Iranian democratically elected leader in favor of the monarchical rule of the Shah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Iran

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

Problem started when Iran became a founding member of OPEC. And Shah was controlling (raising) oil prices with his influence at the OPEC.

"NYT: Shah warning US and UK to increase oil price in 70s": https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/20/archives/shah-warns-oil-p...

Their relationship was damaged to the point that US intentionally didn't support Shah during Iranian revolution and he was overthrown and replaced by Islamic Republic of Iran. There are even conspiracy theories that suggest CIA even did aid the revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Reza_Pahlavi#Criticis...

And after that a few more events completely destroyed their relationship.

"Siege of the American embassy in Tehran" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

"Siege of the Iranian embassy in London" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Embassy_siege

"US supporting Saddam Hussein to invade Iran, and during the Iraq-Iran war"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against...

"Iran Air Flight 655"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

Both sides had many many more since then and the last major one was US withdrawal from JCPOA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...

Is Iran a good democratic country now? No!

Do they deserve it? I don't think so.

Iran had a democratic leader. He was toppled in a 1953 coup and replaced by their last monarch, who was himself overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979.

That 1953 coup was orchestrated by the United States (TPAJAX Project or "Operation Ajax") and the United Kingdom ("Operation Boot"), because the leader was too far left from them. The name Ajax refers to cleansing communist influence, because Iran wanted to nationalise the oil controlled by what is now a part of BP.

What does one have to do with the other?

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