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?
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.
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
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