10 ms·

Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which re

by mrb 11y ago

Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which reportedly achieve approximately 0.06 joule per gigahash. They also use immersion cooling which gives them an insane PUE of 1.02. So the mining capacity of this DC alone is ~650 Phash/s! We saw an increase of ~200 Phash/s in the last 30 days, so presumably they are at only operating at 1/3rd of their capabilities so far: 40e6 (watt) / 0.06 (joule/gigahash) / 1e6 (petahash/gigahash) = ~650 petahash/second BitFury's immersion cooling tech: http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/ http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s (shows the fluid boiling - starts at 0m42s) https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/BitFury-Launch-Energy-Efficient-Immersion-Cooling-Data https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit... BitFury's 16nm chips: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitFury-Announces-Mass-Production-Fastest-Effective-16nm http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...

keyle 11y ago
Are those crazy jargon words meant to translate to $ ? If so, is it profitable? Sounds like they've just cut their lunch by 40% too.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  It's a race to the bottom. It will end with the party that manages to just win that race by making the smallest profit possible at the highest efficiency of Joules per hash computed. Bitcoin is interesting for many reasons, the real-world effects of a couple of configuration settings and some cleverly picked auto-scaling parameters are immense. The number of orders of magnitude that the protocol has survived with minor tweaks to date is very impressive.
  - feelix 11y ago
    Anywhere in the USA who has to pay USA power prices is going to be at a disadvantage by that alone then. It would seem that locating the hashing equipment to the place with the cheapest power possible would be a logical step when things start to get cut that fine. Unless that could be overcome with clever usage of naturally generated local power (such as solar power).
    - douche 11y ago
      You'd think Canada would have more major data centers. They've got a lot of extremely cheap hydro power. You could surely lay ultra-high-speed fiber along the same right-of-ways that the transmission lines use. Also, it's cold as hell more often than not, so cooling is less of an issue than putting them out in the desert somewhere.
      - rockyleal 11y ago
        Bitcoin miner's dilemma: Should I mine where it's hot for the free solar energy or should I mine where it's cold for the extra refrigeration?
        Jtsummers 11y ago
        Cold air but hot ground. Take advantage of geothermal and hydroelectric in the arctic and near-arctic regions.
        karlkatzke 11y ago
        Photovoltaic power is actually less efficient where it's warmer. The ideal for photovoltaic generation is somewhere cold but sunny. And I'm not aware of too many solar thermal plants that are online and profitable versus other generating methods.
        geon 11y ago
        Iceland! Active volcano geothermal power and cold climate.
    - Jtsummers 11y ago
  - bertil 11y ago
    > It will end with What you describe is price-based competition. It’s probably the most documented situation in economics, and it present in many markets. It is a race to the bottom, but rarely ever ends; when it does, it is generally by disruption (something people on HackerNews know a lot about). In the mean time, it drives technical innovation after technical innovation—but I doubt, after 40 years of Moore’s law that it will suddenly end.
- lifthrasiir 11y ago
  Right at the moment the current hashrate is 723 Phash/s, so BitFury hashing at 200 Phash/s rate would get ~28% [1] of the newly generated bitcoin in average, i.e. 0.277 * 144 [block/day] * 25 [BTC/block] ~= 996 [BTC/day]. (Assumes that the difficulty approximately keeps up with the hashrate, which seems to be fine to me.) That translates to more than 400,000 USD per day if BitFury manages to sell them at the current price (highly unlikely) without disrupting the market (impossible at all), but yeah, that gives the rough order of magnitude. [1] This also means that putting 650 Phash/s gigs into the network is not as profitable as it seems, since it will double (55%) the ratio while three times more expensive (if it linearly scales).
  - sireat 11y ago
    Since the amount of Bitcoins introduced into world daily is near constant (except for the scheduled halving of the rewards every few years), SOMEBODY is selling most of the freshly mined coins without disrupting the market. It doesn't really matter how high the difficulty is or who the miner is the coins are mined and most of them sold. There might be a small fraction of coins which are still mined in pools using outdated miners and those people don't bother selling them coins(fractions of coins that is). It has been accepted wisdom that most mining operations sell most/all of their mined coins.
dopamean 11y ago
Could you translate some of that into an estimate of X coins mined per day and Y kwh used per day? Thanks.
- pmorici 11y ago
  The best way to think about the mining market is that the number of Bitcoins available to be mined each day is _constant_* no matter what the total hashing power deployed is. As a miner your share of that fixed pool of available coins is determined by your hashing power relative to the overall hashing power of all miners. So if you control 30% of the hashing power you should on average get 30% of the coins mined each day. Your profits are then determined by your costs and the value of a bitcoin when converted to the currency your costs are denominated in. * The constant amount actually changes periodically when the coinbase reward is adjusted downward but that only happens about once every 4 years and historically exchange rate price appreciation has outstripped the reduced coinbase mining rewards. eventually the coinbase reward will go to zero and the number of coins that go to miners each day will be their relative share of the total fees being paid by users transacting on the network. Miners choose which transactions to include in a mined block so in the future a large miner may have some pricing power over transactions because they could refuse to process any transaction with a fee that falls below some threshold.
  - elbigbad 11y ago
    The question I haven't seen answered that I'm intrigued by: Assuming I put my 2015 pretty-normal-specs (i7 processor, 8gbs ram) laptop to work bitcoin mining 24 hours a day, how long before I have a single bitcoin?
    - techdragon 11y ago
      At this point, basically never. Sad but true.
    - pmorici 11y ago
      Buy a scratch off lottery ticket you would have a better chance of coming out ahead.
sanswork 11y ago
So less than half of one datacentre entirely owned by one company is enough to commit a 51% attack. I get that they say they are going to work on distribution these chips to ensure they don't end up in that position but let's be honest they just destroyed any claim that the network is powerful enough to avoid malicious control by one miner now. They've not even raised that much money.
- brianpgordon 11y ago
  Not less than half of their datacenter, but less than all of their datacenter. See the current hash rate here: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&sho...
- craigyk 11y ago
  At any point since bitcoin's inception there have been plenty of major govts that could have easily afforded the resources to pull off a 51% attack.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    And now a single company can. Progress!
    - cgjaro 11y ago
      It has always been the case that a single company could 51%-attack the network. No regression here. In fact the cost has continually increased over time. So, yes, progress.
  - gritzko 11y ago
    A real bad thing here is the asymmetry. To prevent 51%, the network has to burn enormous amounts of energy 24x7 forever while the attacker only needs his energy for the duration of the attack.
    - 11y ago
elorant 11y ago
How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.
- burger_moon 11y ago
  After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW. 50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen. I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators. [1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-part-2/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa...
  - neurotech1 11y ago
    They do. Natural Gas fueled generators are practical at 50MW capacity. GE basically sells a 747 engine (CF6) driving a generator, known as the LMS6000 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 [1] http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/ http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/
    - mpnordland 11y ago
      That's probably the most awesome thing I've heard tonight.
    - burger_moon 11y ago
      I understand that gas turbines can produce that kind of power, in fact I used to work on some pretty large turbines and turbo generators in the 500-1000MW range. However they aren't used as backup generators where they have to be online in a minute. These are the types of generators I was referring to, https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/waukesha-vhp.html https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/...
shmageggy 11y ago
I will forever refuse to spend my 0.5 BitCoin just so one day I can say to my grandkids in a creaky old voice, "See! I mined that myself on my own computer in a couple of nights!"
- iSnow 11y ago
  "What are you even talking about, Bitcoin? And what's the big deal about the $0.5 you got there?" :)
cryowaffle 11y ago
I find this style of commenting passive aggressive... "Nobody has pointed out this great fact?! I guess I will be forced to do it." Just lead with "This is BitFury..." we don't need to know how annoying it is for you to have to post this.
throwaway45872 11y ago
(Note: Since most HN readers are technical, this comment is being downvoted by bitcoin enthusiasts among them. You won't see many replies from them to this comment, since their reaciton is political and not a technical statement. Still, I'll keep it up. This comment is currently at -2.) To put this into context, by comparing it with a centralized version, an equivalent number of actual transactions could be done at a bank with a crud app running on a $5 complete desktop PC which the Raspberry Pi foundation just released[1]. It is a 1 ghz computer with 512 MB of RAM. It draws up to 0.7 Watts. Wait, wait, wait. did I say an equivalent number? Since Bitcoin is limited to 7 TPS (7 transactions per second), I should modify this to 100x more transactions (700 transactions per second), if you wrote it in C, or if not a hundred times, then at least ten times as many in python. If it were a crud app running at a bank, a $5 computer could do 100 times the transactions that 650 Phash/s of wasted effort collectively give. And 40 megawatts. Bitcoin is a supreme waste of resources through the proof of work hack. It is like emulating a GPU in a CPU...in javascript. I mean, sure, you can do that. You can run Open GL by emulating a GPU in single-threaded Javascript. But it's a stupid, wrong solution. The basic idea sucks. It's bad. (by the by my target price for btc is $600,000 based on a comparison with how bad gold is physically, and the market cap of gold. :-P.) I love fiat currencies, they're one of the great achievements of modern civilization. (This sentence isn't ironic, it's actually how I feel.) Despite my target price I don't hold any bitcoins at all. I hope some of the numbers I've given can put into perspective why. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/
- ikeboy 11y ago
  You're wrong. Even without any mining, running a full node requires 2GB of RAM. Even if you do less than a full node, you'll find it hard to fully process 100x transactions on less than 2GB. Also, you don't seem to understand the point of PoW.
  - lsseckman 11y ago
    You misunderstood him. He was talking about running a non-bitcoin program on that small computer.
amai 11y ago
The fluid they use for cooling is either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230.
- noetic_techy 11y ago
  Are these systems totally self contained? Seems a bit unsafe to have fire retardant chemicals vaporizing constantly in a confined space. Has anyone given any thought to the health effects of these type of data centers?
danmaz74 11y ago
I'm wondering, isn't this going to put lots of current miners out of business, as their return-on-watt used to mine bitcoins is severely cut? Doesn't this risk to make BitFury even more dominant in hashing power, until somebody else can get comparable economies of scale?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

by mrb 11y ago

keyle 11y ago

Are those crazy jargon words meant to translate to $ ? If so, is it profitable? Sounds like they've just cut their lunch by 40% too.

jacquesm 11y ago
It's a race to the bottom. It will end with the party that manages to just win that race by making the smallest profit possible at the highest efficiency of Joules per hash computed. Bitcoin is interesting for many reasons, the real-world effects of a couple of configuration settings and some cleverly picked auto-scaling parameters are immense. The number of orders of magnitude that the protocol has survived with minor tweaks to date is very impressive.
- feelix 11y ago
  Anywhere in the USA who has to pay USA power prices is going to be at a disadvantage by that alone then. It would seem that locating the hashing equipment to the place with the cheapest power possible would be a logical step when things start to get cut that fine. Unless that could be overcome with clever usage of naturally generated local power (such as solar power).
  - douche 11y ago
    You'd think Canada would have more major data centers. They've got a lot of extremely cheap hydro power. You could surely lay ultra-high-speed fiber along the same right-of-ways that the transmission lines use. Also, it's cold as hell more often than not, so cooling is less of an issue than putting them out in the desert somewhere.
    - rockyleal 11y ago
      Bitcoin miner's dilemma: Should I mine where it's hot for the free solar energy or should I mine where it's cold for the extra refrigeration?
      - Jtsummers 11y ago
        Cold air but hot ground. Take advantage of geothermal and hydroelectric in the arctic and near-arctic regions.
      - karlkatzke 11y ago
        Photovoltaic power is actually less efficient where it's warmer. The ideal for photovoltaic generation is somewhere cold but sunny. And I'm not aware of too many solar thermal plants that are online and profitable versus other generating methods.
      - geon 11y ago
        Iceland! Active volcano geothermal power and cold climate.
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
- bertil 11y ago
  > It will end with What you describe is price-based competition. It’s probably the most documented situation in economics, and it present in many markets. It is a race to the bottom, but rarely ever ends; when it does, it is generally by disruption (something people on HackerNews know a lot about). In the mean time, it drives technical innovation after technical innovation—but I doubt, after 40 years of Moore’s law that it will suddenly end.
lifthrasiir 11y ago
Right at the moment the current hashrate is 723 Phash/s, so BitFury hashing at 200 Phash/s rate would get ~28% [1] of the newly generated bitcoin in average, i.e. 0.277 * 144 [block/day] * 25 [BTC/block] ~= 996 [BTC/day]. (Assumes that the difficulty approximately keeps up with the hashrate, which seems to be fine to me.) That translates to more than 400,000 USD per day if BitFury manages to sell them at the current price (highly unlikely) without disrupting the market (impossible at all), but yeah, that gives the rough order of magnitude. [1] This also means that putting 650 Phash/s gigs into the network is not as profitable as it seems, since it will double (55%) the ratio while three times more expensive (if it linearly scales).
- sireat 11y ago
  Since the amount of Bitcoins introduced into world daily is near constant (except for the scheduled halving of the rewards every few years), SOMEBODY is selling most of the freshly mined coins without disrupting the market. It doesn't really matter how high the difficulty is or who the miner is the coins are mined and most of them sold. There might be a small fraction of coins which are still mined in pools using outdated miners and those people don't bother selling them coins(fractions of coins that is). It has been accepted wisdom that most mining operations sell most/all of their mined coins.

dopamean 11y ago

Could you translate some of that into an estimate of X coins mined per day and Y kwh used per day? Thanks.

pmorici 11y ago
The best way to think about the mining market is that the number of Bitcoins available to be mined each day is _constant_* no matter what the total hashing power deployed is. As a miner your share of that fixed pool of available coins is determined by your hashing power relative to the overall hashing power of all miners. So if you control 30% of the hashing power you should on average get 30% of the coins mined each day. Your profits are then determined by your costs and the value of a bitcoin when converted to the currency your costs are denominated in. * The constant amount actually changes periodically when the coinbase reward is adjusted downward but that only happens about once every 4 years and historically exchange rate price appreciation has outstripped the reduced coinbase mining rewards. eventually the coinbase reward will go to zero and the number of coins that go to miners each day will be their relative share of the total fees being paid by users transacting on the network. Miners choose which transactions to include in a mined block so in the future a large miner may have some pricing power over transactions because they could refuse to process any transaction with a fee that falls below some threshold.
- elbigbad 11y ago
  The question I haven't seen answered that I'm intrigued by: Assuming I put my 2015 pretty-normal-specs (i7 processor, 8gbs ram) laptop to work bitcoin mining 24 hours a day, how long before I have a single bitcoin?
  - techdragon 11y ago
    At this point, basically never. Sad but true.
  - pmorici 11y ago
    Buy a scratch off lottery ticket you would have a better chance of coming out ahead.

sanswork 11y ago

So less than half of one datacentre entirely owned by one company is enough to commit a 51% attack. I get that they say they are going to work on distribution these chips to ensure they don't end up in that position but let's be honest they just destroyed any claim that the network is powerful enough to avoid malicious control by one miner now. They've not even raised that much money.

brianpgordon 11y ago
Not less than half of their datacenter, but less than all of their datacenter. See the current hash rate here: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&sho...
craigyk 11y ago
At any point since bitcoin's inception there have been plenty of major govts that could have easily afforded the resources to pull off a 51% attack.
- sanswork 11y ago
  And now a single company can. Progress!
  - cgjaro 11y ago
    It has always been the case that a single company could 51%-attack the network. No regression here. In fact the cost has continually increased over time. So, yes, progress.
- gritzko 11y ago
  A real bad thing here is the asymmetry. To prevent 51%, the network has to burn enormous amounts of energy 24x7 forever while the attacker only needs his energy for the duration of the attack.
  - 11y ago

elorant 11y ago

How those 40 megawatts of energy consumption compare to known companies? How much energy for example consumes an average cloud storage company? Or a corporation? 40 megawatts sound a lot but it would be nice to have a reference.

burger_moon 11y ago
After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW. 50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen. I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators. [1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-part-2/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa...
- neurotech1 11y ago
  They do. Natural Gas fueled generators are practical at 50MW capacity. GE basically sells a 747 engine (CF6) driving a generator, known as the LMS6000 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000 [1] http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/ http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/
  - mpnordland 11y ago
    That's probably the most awesome thing I've heard tonight.
  - burger_moon 11y ago
    I understand that gas turbines can produce that kind of power, in fact I used to work on some pretty large turbines and turbo generators in the 500-1000MW range. However they aren't used as backup generators where they have to be online in a minute. These are the types of generators I was referring to, https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/waukesha-vhp.html https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/...

shmageggy 11y ago

I will forever refuse to spend my 0.5 BitCoin just so one day I can say to my grandkids in a creaky old voice, "See! I mined that myself on my own computer in a couple of nights!"

iSnow 11y ago
"What are you even talking about, Bitcoin? And what's the big deal about the $0.5 you got there?" :)

cryowaffle 11y ago

I find this style of commenting passive aggressive... "Nobody has pointed out this great fact?! I guess I will be forced to do it." Just lead with "This is BitFury..." we don't need to know how annoying it is for you to have to post this.

throwaway45872 11y ago

(Note: Since most HN readers are technical, this comment is being downvoted by bitcoin enthusiasts among them. You won't see many replies from them to this comment, since their reaciton is political and not a technical statement. Still, I'll keep it up. This comment is currently at -2.) To put this into context, by comparing it with a centralized version, an equivalent number of actual transactions could be done at a bank with a crud app running on a $5 complete desktop PC which the Raspberry Pi foundation just released[1]. It is a 1 ghz computer with 512 MB of RAM. It draws up to 0.7 Watts. Wait, wait, wait. did I say an equivalent number? Since Bitcoin is limited to 7 TPS (7 transactions per second), I should modify this to 100x more transactions (700 transactions per second), if you wrote it in C, or if not a hundred times, then at least ten times as many in python. If it were a crud app running at a bank, a $5 computer could do 100 times the transactions that 650 Phash/s of wasted effort collectively give. And 40 megawatts. Bitcoin is a supreme waste of resources through the proof of work hack. It is like emulating a GPU in a CPU...in javascript. I mean, sure, you can do that. You can run Open GL by emulating a GPU in single-threaded Javascript. But it's a stupid, wrong solution. The basic idea sucks. It's bad. (by the by my target price for btc is $600,000 based on a comparison with how bad gold is physically, and the market cap of gold. :-P.) I love fiat currencies, they're one of the great achievements of modern civilization. (This sentence isn't ironic, it's actually how I feel.) Despite my target price I don't hold any bitcoins at all. I hope some of the numbers I've given can put into perspective why. [1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-zero/

ikeboy 11y ago
You're wrong. Even without any mining, running a full node requires 2GB of RAM. Even if you do less than a full node, you'll find it hard to fully process 100x transactions on less than 2GB. Also, you don't seem to understand the point of PoW.
- lsseckman 11y ago
  You misunderstood him. He was talking about running a non-bitcoin program on that small computer.

amai 11y ago

The fluid they use for cooling is either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novec_1230.

noetic_techy 11y ago
Are these systems totally self contained? Seems a bit unsafe to have fire retardant chemicals vaporizing constantly in a confined space. Has anyone given any thought to the health effects of these type of data centers?

danmaz74 11y ago

I'm wondering, isn't this going to put lots of current miners out of business, as their return-on-watt used to mine bitcoins is severely cut? Doesn't this risk to make BitFury even more dominant in hashing power, until somebody else can get comparable economies of scale?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]