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by jacquesm 4313 days ago
The scale of this is impressive regardless of whether or not you're a bitcoin believer (I'm neutral, if it works long term, great, if not something better will come along).

This bit in particular is impressive:

"The mine operators told me that each warehouse took fifteen days to construct, and an additional ten days to fill up with hardware and get it all hashing away. The concrete was still drying on some of the buildings."

8 of those... I wonder who supplied the chips that do the mining and how much energy that facility uses.

"This entire facility has several petahashes of mining power, accounting for perhaps 5% of the entire bitcoin network. Damn."

I like their cooling solution as well!
2 comments
nmjohn 4313 days ago
> I wonder who supplied the chips that do the mining and how much energy that facility uses.

Probably part of the reason this is in china - close to the factories where the majority are produced. The owner could walk into a chip manufacturer and make a much better offer than the cost of exporting and packing them to ship internationally.

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burgers 4313 days ago
Especially if said miner could pay to the chip makers offshore bank account with his offshore bank account funded by bitcoin mining.
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JoeAltmaier 4313 days ago
It is a crying shame that all the CO2 is being pissed away to produce imaginary points. What hubris humans have.
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innguest 4313 days ago
The cost of producing dollars is much higher (both in terms of energy waste, and in terms of human rights violations) and it is just as imaginary.
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JoeAltmaier 4310 days ago
That's interesting - does printing (not earning!) a dollar cost as much in energy? Valid idea.

The 'human rights violation' part seems thrown in there. I imagine some Treasury sweatshop with rooms full of slave engravers covered in ink, working 20 hours a day.

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innguest 4308 days ago
It is a human rights violation because printing more money steals value from currency holders. Stealing is immoral.
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JoeAltmaier 4308 days ago
Where do you stop with that? Everybody needs money; there are more people around all the time; you have to print more money. And is it 'stealing' to put more value-tokens into circulation - they have no intrinsic value?
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