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Photos: Life inside of China’s massive and remote Bitcoin mines
- 5trokerac3 9y agoThis is the first article I've read that really made me feel that we live in a dystopia, instead of it being something on the horizon. These photos are straight out of a cyberpunk comic.
- austenallred 9y agoYou should see how most of the rest of China lives
- taway_1212 9y agoI think it's the combination of high-end tech with third-world everything else that gives off that Blade Runner vide.
- m-j-fox 9y agoWow. So damp. Someone's going to get electrocuted. Where's Chinese OSHA?
- odiroot 9y agoChabuduo http://boingboing.net/2016/10/12/chabuduo-chinas-culture-of.html http://boingboing.net/2016/10/12/chabuduo-chinas-culture-of....
- sizzzzlerz 9y agoIts not just the appalling dangers of water and electricity in close proximity but water on the floor indicates high humidity along with the heat causing premature failures in all the equipment. I guess those costs aren't a factor, however, when you're paying your workers pennies a day.
- oh_sigh 9y agoI'm 100% sure their workers aren't getting paid pennies per day. Why say something that's just patently untrue?
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoPremature failure isn't much of an issue when miners become obsolete in months. Very few miners are profitable to run after just 2 years, usually less.
- aphextron 9y agoGood god this is so cyberpunk
- euparkeria 9y agoCrazier than neuromancer
- mrskeltal 9y agoTruth is stranger than fiction
- mastazi 9y agoOT/Rant: In my browser, all pictures except the hero image are extremely blurred to the point that I can't even tell what's in the image. It could be because Privacy Badger is blocking some script or stuff like that but honestly I don't have the energy to find out why right now (it's 00:45 here in NSW), I believe users should be able to see a picture without going through executing some JS, accessibility is important. This is almost as annoying as those scripts that mess with your scrolling. It is also completely unnecessary since every modern mainstream browser since probably 5 years ago implements some form of lazy loading.
- sp332 9y agoIt does look like they're copying Medium's fade-in code, but these fallbacks should let the page degrade gracefully. Two examples: <noscript> <img itemprop="image" src="https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_002-e1499795756538.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=320" alt="Inside the World of Chinese Bitcoin 'Mining'" title=""> </noscript> <img data-srcset="https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=320 320w, https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=640 640w, https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=940 940w, https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600 1600w, https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=3200 3200w" data-src="https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/china_bitcoin_010.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=1600" sizes="(max-width: 320px) 320px, (max-width: 1024px) 640px, 940px" class="progressive-image-large" alt="Inside the World of Chinese Bitcoin 'Mining'">
- mastazi 9y agoAFAIK that degrades gracefully only if you have JS disabled but there are many other reasons why the progressive loading script may not work as expected.
- jdhawk 9y agoIn the quest for cheap power & better density, you'd think they would run direct DC to everything, instead of a bunch of ATX power supplies
- graycrow 9y agoThick copper wires for DC probably cost more than energy converted to heat on that power supplies.
- ty_a 9y agoThat's up for debate. Facebook and Google use DC in their datacenters to save costs. Azure has a requirement for optional DC power from their vendors and might be using it actively. I think AWS has looked into using DC power as well but isn't using it afaik.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoDo they use higher voltage DC and buck it down, or is it all 12V, 5V, etc. ?
- stablemap 9y agoThe original piece in ChinaFile has more pictures from Liu and a similar amount of context. http://www.chinafile.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/inside-world-of-chinese-bitcoin-mining http://www.chinafile.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/inside-wor...
- tudorw 9y agogood find, thanks for taking the time
- eatbitseveryday 9y agoI am unable to identify where the photos are in this page. Have they been taken down? I've tried multiple browsers.
- Sleeep 9y agoThey are still right there, front and center. Do you have a work filter that might be blocking them?
- eatbitseveryday 9y agoInteresting. I am using my home network, and after connecting with a VPN, I am able to see the images.
- Sleeep 9y agoYeah, that's certainly weird. My work has websense and I've seen it before that it silently doesn't load some content on a page when that content was loaded from another domain (which was blocked) which can be confusing, which is why I suggested that. But upon further investigation it looks like this page is loading images from it's own domain.
- icetoad 9y agoThanks!
- teknologist 9y agoVice produced a video called "Life Inside a Chinese Bitcoin Mine" which complements these photos with a bit of an eerie audio/visual experience. The noise of these machines is incredibly loud and annoying even in the edited video and the people running these things essentially live in squalor. https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/life-inside-a-chinese-bitcoin-mine/55b910f39820ecc47f68c306 https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/life-inside-a-chinese-bit... Non-Flash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I
- dvcc 9y agoI understand the need for a distributed ledger, but it still seems absurd to me. All of this power is just getting put into a slow append-only database.
- api 9y ago0.0000001% of the power runs a slow append only database. 99.99999999% runs a security system for it.
- bhouston 9y agoThat is just waiting for some type of disruption. Not that I can predict what that disruption would be but things this inefficient can not be an optimal end state for this type of technology.
- sp332 9y agoIt's true, work on other systems like proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work are in active development. It might be too hard to backport to bitcoin specifically, but other cryptocurrencies don't have to be this bad in the future.
- api 9y agoBitcoin was the first practical secure distributed ledger and cryptocurrency. The first of something is never the most efficient or capable. I'm sure there are better ways.
- hanklazard 9y agoIt's definitely a huge waste and a major impetus for moving to a Proof of Stake, Useful Proof of Work, or other model for cryptocurrency security.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoIt's a bit of a tragedy of the commons, not sure who will be the third party to impose a cost onto cryptocurrencies that consume excess energy. So far bitcoin has maintained it's lead as the largest cryptocurrency essentially entirely due to network effect. For most major complaints against bitcoin there is an example of a crypto currency that doesn't have those 'failings'. E.g. Deflationary good: siacoin Long tx times: Ethereum Proof of work consumes needless energy: Peercoin ASICs shift the power balance: Primecoin Not anonymous enough: Monero A singular append only blockchain is not enough: Byteball (it's simply a DAG of transactions) The problem is that there is no centralized player that is currently exerting a cost, above mining costs, on the individuals to move them to a crypto currency that doesn't have whatever negative property is being rallyed around at the moment.
- tmsldd 9y agoThe life of a bitcoin miner worker doesn't look that much different from the coal miners ones.. at least in this case in particular..
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blockmeamadeus 9y agoA bit less dangerous, perhaps?
- api 9y agoI've heard that some actually mine at a loss, since the real purpose is to get money out of China and they can charge fees for that service that compensate.
- coin 9y agoThat page has some sort of funky scrolljacking, -1 for usability. Yet another reason to disable JavaScript.
- tragomaskhalos 9y agoIs it safe to assume that this isn't quite what Satoshi had in mind back in 2009 ?
- monort 9y agoIt seems that no, he expected exactly this: At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. https://webonanza.com/2015/10/02/did-satoshi-predict-pooled-mining-big-farms-and-asics/ https://webonanza.com/2015/10/02/did-satoshi-predict-pooled-...
- culturalzero 9y agoSo... We're centralizing the production of the currency that's supposed to decentralize everything?
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoThere's a meaningful difference between centralized, decentralized, and distributed. I think you may be confusing the latter two. Decentralized systems can still form groups and have various hubs. In such a case, the security of the network depends on how large these hubs get, not whether they exist at all. Distributed systems ensure that most nodes are similarly sized and have similar connectivity to the network. In the case of cryptocurrency, many people imagine this as every user of the currency having a roughly equal stake in maintaining and securing the network. Distributed systems may be ideal for some applications, but they are (likely and thus-far) not required for Bitcoin. First, the degree of centralization is still relatively low. Individual miners remain small fractions of the network. Some mining pools have gotten quite large in the past, but miners can join and leave pools as they see fit. The risk they present is fairly limited as their network power is not controlled by a single entity. There's also the issue of geographical centralization. This may be largely the result of ASIC development. Right now, mining profitability relies on rapidly adopting new, more efficient miners as quickly as possible. It strongly favors cheap power and short timelines. As the ASIC market matures and runs into the same hard limits that CPU manufacturing is faced with, the economics change such that more capital investment can make sense. In these cases, mining may be profitable in more geographically diverse areas.
- colordrops 9y agoIf you read about this in a science fiction book 20 years ago you'd think the author didn't know anything about computers or programming.
- nsxwolf 9y agoI was thinking something along those lines but struggling to put it into words. This sounds right.
- MarkMc 9y agoIceland has very cheap geothermal electricity and a very cold climate to cool the servers. How does China compete with Iceland?
- himlion 9y agoCloseness to the chip manufacturers?
- jmknoll 9y agoSubsidized electricity? Just one data point, but my electricity bill last month in Shanghai was ~$15.
- ty_a 9y agoExtremely cheap hydro power at around 0.01-0.02 USD/KWh. China has more hydro power than customers in a lot of areas. Labor and regulatory costs are a huge factor as well.
- tim333 9y agoChina is kind of corrupt and under regulated. I imagine the capital to build the miners comes from some banks or nationalized corporations that are not going to get it all back while the bitcoins disappear into the organisers pockets.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThe Tibetan plateau is huge - 25x bigger than Iceland, and at an average elevation of 14000 feet. The amount of water that comes out of the plateau and needs to make it to sea level is mind boggling. There is a lot of cheap energy to be had there.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 9y agoI think the rapid development of ASICs is a large part of the issue. The capital lifecycle of Bitcoin mining is currently on the order of months to perhaps a couple years. That, combined with the volatility of Bitcoin price, makes the Chinese approach ideal. As the ASIC market matures, and perhaps as the price becomes more stable, I think we'll see mining begin to occur in more areas as planning for 2+ years begins to make sense. Iceland would be one attractive area, as would some desert areas with low costs and solar energy. Certainly difficult to predict, though.
- bpodgursky 9y agoIf you have even the slightest concern about global warming or the environment overall, you should consider Bitcoin a horrible mistake we should be trying to eradicate. It's a currency backed by willingness to waste electricity doing useless work. And worse, as it gets more popular, the willingness and price will continue to drive higher. Hopefully China recognizes that this is in odds with their efforts to clean up their environment, and crushes Bitcoin fast before the damage is too catastrophic.
- benmowa 9y agoI couldn't find anything but I wonder how global energy consumption changes on track with the predicted bitcoin processing growth? are we talking 1% of global power consumption in 10 years or 10%?
- petertodd 9y agoIt's possible to estimate an upper bound based on the dollar value of the BTC miners receive as revenue from inflation (subsidy) and transaction fees. The inflation rate in Bitcoin drops over time; transaction fees will likely increase, although not in proportion to the total economic value of transactions (and other uses) secured by Bitcoin (bitcoin is not "backed by energy", it is secured by energy expenditure). Currently miner revenue is less than $7 million/day. It's a bit tricky to convert that into, say, CO2 emitted as miners tend to use the cheapest possible sources of energy, which are stranded renewable resources like hydroelectricity dams built in places distant from consumers (apparently China among others have built a lot of uneconomic dams for various political reasons). The PoW security model doesn't require the amount of energy destroyed to increase indefinitely as a percentage of total value secured. Rather, the amount of energy destroyed by PoW simply has to be more than the highest funded attacker can afford. That's easy to do, as attackers who would attack via PoW are few and far between - as your attacker gets more powerful (governments) there are much cheaper attacks that can be done than naively attacking PoW directly. In any case, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the amount of CO2 emitted by Bitcoin mining operations is dwarfed by the amount of CO2 emitted by plane travel associated with people attending Bitcoin conferences...
- Ono-Sendai 9y agoSuch an incredible waste of power and hardware, for a payment system that does something like 3 transactions per second globally. Off the top of my head idea: What about a system that uses a bit of real-world, legal responsibility to generate consensus. Something a bit like ICANN and the domain name system. Take 10 or so trusted people or organistions worldwide, get them to each run a node, each of which coordinate via the Raft protocol or whatever. A distributed ledger is agreed on by each of those 10 nodes. This should use far less power and be able to handle more transactions per sec than bitcoin.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoOr we could all switch to Ethereum, which will have Proof of Stake (low electricity costs) instead of Proof of Work (insanely high electricity costs) mining soon.
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoPOS networks already exist. No need to way 3+ years while the Ethereum team reinvents the wheel.
- xtracto 9y agoSee PeerCoin ( https://peercoin.net/ https://peercoin.net/ ) which has been around for quite some time and has a POS/POW combination.
- runeks 9y agoHigh electricity costs needed to rewrite the blockchain is a feature of proof-of-work, not a bug. We could all switch to proof-of-stake, but then anyone would be able to create a valid-looking blockchain in a few minutes, and the only way to get the right chain would be to connect to nodes you know or trust, at which point a blockchain becomes meaningless in the first place. The challenge is about coming to agreement. Reaching agreement on information which determines how much money people own is hard. Proof-of-work reaches consensus by having a vote -- on which transaction history is correct -- constitute something that cannot be forged: energy.
- thomasdd 9y agoWhat about "Bitcoin-Mining-Water-Power Plant" :) Would be cool!
- peercoin 9y agoWhy not move to proof of stake? Proof of Work mining used in bitcon to secure the network as originally proposed in Nakomoto's paper has huge energy requirements. The result is large energy hungry mines as shown by the article. In addition, there is a centralization of governance by the miners. One such example of a long running proof of stake is Peercoin. Peercoin is a legit energy-efficient contender to Bitcoin. It's one of the first publicly known implementations of proof of stake has been around for close to 5 years now. Peercoin is energy-efficient and runs on raspberry pis. It's been running successfully for years now. https://peercoin.net/ https://peercoin.net/ There are also academic proof of stake chains which virtually eliminate the chance of forks, such as algorand. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341 https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341
- runeks 9y ago> Why not move to proof of stake? Because it doesn't make sense. If a chain, on which a token exists, needs securing, you can't use that chain's token to secure itself. > Mining has huge energy requirements as shown by the article. Mining has no requirements at all. People just follow the best chain, and miners can sell the bitcoins they earn by extending the best chain. It's entirely voluntary.
- peercoin 9y ago> Why not move to proof of stake? >> Because it doesn't make sense. If a chain, on which a token exists, needs securing, you can't use that chain's token to secure itself. I mean I'm not entirely sure what this argument is based on? In addition to existing proof of stake systems which have been running for years now, there exist several papers with rigorous formal proofs. Including Turing Award winner Silvio Micali's algorand. Refute his paper. You will became very famous overnight. https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341 https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.01341 > Mining has huge energy requirements as shown by the article. >> Mining has no requirements at all. People just follow the best chain, and miners can sell the bitcoins they earn by extending the best chain. It's entirely voluntary. I assume this is trolling or extreme nitpicking. Securing the network in proof of work requires that the majority of computing power is held by honest miners.
- dis-sys 9y agoFor me, the really sad fact here is that they picked that place to run their bitcoin mine because the electricity there is cheap, but what that poor place can benefit from those mines after providing them with such more affordable energy? I just saw pollution and greedy there.
- oh_sigh 9y agoIf that mine wasn't there, the energy would just be shipped off onto the grid, never to be seen again. That town does look depressing, but that's what like 90% of little western Chinese towns look like.
- dis-sys 9y agoif that mine wasn't there - people, actually poor people, living next to those mines won't hear those noise 24/7. they don't need to witness the greedy saw in those photos/videos. the depressing town is still going to be depressing, but at least with less electronics junks. the issue is pretty simple here - what is the benefit for this little depressing town or the society? nothing. it is just a cancer.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThe hydro plant, which predates the bitcoin mining operation, creates far more noise than some electronics churning out hashes. Why don't you let the residents decide what they want? Maybe they want access to the internet and cell phones, which the mining operation helped provide.
- dis-sys 9y agowhat a joke. the "hydro plant" generates electricity, noisy or not, at least there is some benefit. Internet and cell phone network is available in like 99% of Chinese towns. Do you have any evidence showing it was the mining of bitcoin that brought those thing to such small towns? If you don't, how about stop using your imagination as proof?
- tedd4u 9y agoJust, picking my jaw back up off the floor. The conditions there are shockingly unsafe (pun intended) -- all that standing water on the floor? And it's a firetrap -- all that trash lying around, no fire supression. In fact the opposite -- those box fans that will very effectively oxygenate the flames. Disaster there is almost certain.
- Havoc 9y agoFunny. I thought it was actually pretty organised and neat considering this is rural China and an operation aimed at doing things @ least cost.
- GrumpyNl 9y agoThese images are even more proof that a bitcoin is worthless and the market is manipulated.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nodesocket 9y agoThanks China for wasting resources and being extremely pollutive mining coins for tiny profits. Anybody who complains about the Paris Agreement needs to be informed and look at the real climate offender China.
- brighton36 9y agoIt's not china's government, it's the Governments of the world that put a premium on anonymous value. Most of the demand for that comes from the US. If you feel strongly about it, petition the USG to allow alphabay to take credit cards.
- nodesocket 9y agoSo China cannot be held responsible because their citizens are poor and economically disadvantaged? Must be the US's fault. Big bad USA. Typical.
- lprubin 9y agoDoes anybody know why the bitcoin mine has customers? If you can mine bitcoin, why do you need to sell it to anybody other than on the open market? I could see needing investment to build the infrastructure, but those would be investors not customers. Is there value in buying direct from the miner or selling direct to a customer and not on an exchange? Maybe avoiding transaction fees?
- bhaak 9y agoExchange transaction fees might be one thing (cut out the middle man) but if you buy directly from a miner it won't influence the price as it would if you buy on a public exchange. If you buy a big amount this is significant. Such OTC (over the counter) transactions are also anonymous compared to exchange buys.
- lprubin 9y agoCan you say more about how buying at an exchange influeces the price and why that's bad?
- bhaak 9y agoThe price we usually see for any traded asset is a weighted average of public exchanges. It's a somewhat artificial number insofar as it only tells you that somebody in the past was willing to pay that much for the asset. There's no guarantee that you'll find a seller in the future for that price. Consider if you wanted to buy a large amount of Bitcoins, like 10000. If you look at exchanges, you will see that the sell and buy offers are public and you can only buy as much Bitcoin right now as are offered on the orderbook. If there are more than 10000 BTC for selling, you can just drop your money on it. But those Bitcoins will be with different price tags. The cheapest offer will sell 1000 for $2400, the next 1000 for $2450, etc. If you blindly buy, your average buy price might be much more than the average price was! Now that you cleared a portion of the orderbook, you have cause a price imbalance. On this exchange A, the cheapest sell offer might be now $3000 but on other exchanges B, it is still around $2400. Now bots and people will scramble to take advantage of that price imbalance. You've create a volatility wave that affects all public exchanges. And you never know how people will react to that. Will the price keep increasing as people think "the price is skyrocketing" or will people start selling massively because "oh, better cash out before the price drops again". So, you bought an asset which you payed more for than the market thought it was worth before you bought it and you are uncertain what price it will settle on afterwards. Also, you might want to buy more in the future, so you don't want to let people know that you are interested in acquiring it. If you buy publicly, people will notice. If you do an OTC, that is much more hidden and you don't create volatility, especially if your OTC agents get them from miners directly and are not accumulating them from exchanges in small amounts themselves.
- amai 9y agoRussia: http://englishrussia.com/2017/06/26/russian-biggest-bitcoin-mining-farm/ http://englishrussia.com/2017/06/26/russian-biggest-bitcoin-...