A Bitcoin mine went up in flames, affecting the entire network | Hacker News Reader

A Bitcoin mine went up in flames, affecting the entire network

qz.com

67 pointswxs20 comments

Err... No, the network didn't even notice. There's so much noise in the hash rate that any signal is lost. See https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate and try to find the "disruption".

Wow, rate of increase there is crazy. I don't know a ton about the whole bitcoin ecosystem, but it's pretty interesting that in the past year, the hashrate has grown 100X while the value of a bitcoin has fallen about 66%.

The advent of ASICs designed for bitcoin mining made the difference. More hashrate for less electricity, and thus lower costs.

This is allegedly what a fire in a bitcoin mine looks like: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/11/grim-meathook-mining-disaste...

Wow it did actually go up in flames. I thought that was just going to be hyperbole in the title, but I was incorrect.

Me too. Add fires to energy consumption among the perverse results skeptics will harp on for the arbitrary constraints imposed by bitcoin.

Are you saying that energy consumption isn't a problem? Why not?

Because the blockchain is awesome and the government is bad. They'd use bubble sort, efficiency be damned, if they could find a way to keep the bankers out of it.

I'm surprised at the severity of the fire; it doesn't look like bitcoin mining equipment would be comprised of much flammable material - it's mostly metal and silicon and PCBs. The former two are essentially nonflammable, while the latter usually being made of FR-4 is flame-retardant (UL94V0).

There's always at least a bit of plastic. That's quite flammable, and produces toxic smoke as a bonus.

Steel burns without oxygen at 4000 degrees.

The article has a sensational title, nothing at all was disrupted, not even slightly.

Well, someone's mining rig was disrupted

I'm just thinking someone lost a lot of money. I doubt there was any sort of insurance.

Sadly, I can't find the link now, but I was reading about this yesterday. According to someone who worked there, there was no insurance.

Agreed. Taking out insurance on expensive facilities requires a degree of intelligence and forethought that one doesn't really expect in the kind of person who builds said facilities with flammable tiles and doesn't include a fire-suppression system.

> But Gizmodo suggests it could have spread due to flammable acoustic foam and suggested that the facility probably lacked in a sprinkler system that most high-end data centers in the US would have as standard

Are sprinkler systems in data centers really the standard? How well does standard server hardware operate after contact with water from the sprinkler system?

I work at a company that runs a data center that has a nitrogen-based fire suppression system, so that the servers can continue to run uninterrupted. That sounds a lot more expensive, but also seems to make more sense to me.

Sprinklers are very common, mostly dry-pipe systems to avoid water leakage. There are some alternatives like HI-FOG, which uses less water and therefore may do less damage to the room's equipment.

It is very undesirable for the equipment in the room to get wet. A sprinkler activation generally results in partial or total loss of the equipment in the room, and even if you can get stuff running again, it's going to take a while. However, it's even less desirable for people to die or the building to burn down.

Fire suppression systems that operate by removing oxygen from the room (such as Halon) can kill people who are trapped inside. I haven't seen a facility with this type of system in a long time.

Also, most datacenters have very strict rules about flammable material (like cardboard) on the datacenter floor. Most sites aren't super diligent about enforcing it, but just having the rules shifts the blame onto you. Imagine being on the hook financially for tens of thousands of servers because something caught on fire in your cage.

I sure hope they had an offsite backup or address for their mined coins.

I'm sure they do. Unless they had insurance though, the investment into the datacenter and servers will be lost forever.

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