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AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility
- mdelias 13y agoThe original title of this submission was "A look at the future of Bitcoin mining".
- atwebb 13y agoWhich isn't really the title of the forum post, on HN post titles tend to be changed to whatever the article/original post's title is to discourage linkbait.
- iDemonix 13y agoI'd like to know how much a setup like that could produce and at what profit.
- anonymoushn 13y agoEstimates of this sort depend crucially on the rate at which other labs ship ASICs. A good guess is that the hashing power of the network will double monthly until whatever machines people have right now are barely worth running, but there's not a lot of certainty.
- omegant 13y agoIt seems that this will happen during the first or second quarter of 2014 at this rate of difficulty increase...
- redblacktree 13y agoIt seems at that point that it would be down to your power cost per hash.
- wmf 13y agoASICMiner is a "publicly traded" company, so here are their financials: http://thegenesisblock.com/new-asicminer-financial-statements-offer-performance-insight/ http://thegenesisblock.com/new-asicminer-financial-statement...
- sscalia 13y agoHas anyone said... buttcoin yet?
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoThis isn't 2011. Not sure if you've been here recently but Bitcoin is fairly well respected among HNers today.
- sscalia 13y agoYes, as a currency for money laundering and buying drugs online - highly respected.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoIt's also known for launching ETFs, buying subway sandwhiches, buying real estate, storing wealth, and feeding the homeless among other things.
- betterunix 13y agoBitcoin is respected among some HNers. There are still a lot of people who question its value, its long-term prospects, who call the current price spike a bubble, who call it a toy/gimmick/scam/etc., and so forth.
- GigabyteCoin 13y agoUnproductive comments have never been accepted on HN either way.
- nakedrobot2 13y agoIt makes me sad that all this computation can't simultaneously be used to fold proteins, or some other "externally productive" calculation.
- EricDeb 13y agowouldn't that have been cool. If bitcoin mining could have been done in a way that had practical significance yet also resulted in coins?
- termain 13y agoSo is there any problem to which ASIC miners can be repurposed?
- nwh 13y agoNo. They look for low hashes by incrementing an appended nonce. That's it. Nothing else.
- joezydeco 13y agoAre these most recent machines really incrementing the nonce? Is there an advantage over randomly picking them?
- nwh 13y agoThere's no advantage in selecting them "randomly", the resulting hash is always random. If there was a benefit in some sort of incrementing method, the entire system would be broken. They do some optimisation with the way the hash is calculated in some cases, but that's about it. The current processors are so fast that they can increment through the entire 32bit nonce space in under a second.
- fluidcruft 13y agoI suppose with an incrementing system, you could doll out the search space more efficiently. I imagine the more hash power you have, the more likely any two engines could randomly try the same nonce. (Assuming they were working off identical blocks). But it could be that there's a relationship between the way difficulty ratchets that keep the chances of testing the same nonces twice somewhat constant relative to the chance of finding a block.
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- mbreese 13y agoAnd this is why mining makes zero sense for any individual, at least as a profit making endeavor. When confronted with this scale of computational power, it will be impossible for "the little guy" to make any profit mining. As a side effect, it will effectively centralize control of the currency to a few major computational groups that have the resources to make such big investments. If they ever wanted to cooperate, just a few of these groups could be able to determine policy for bitcoin as a whole.
- applecore 13y agoMining pools were asked to switch to an earlier version of the Bitcoin software in March 2013 to roll back a blockchain fork[1]. [1]: http://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork http://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork
- unavoidable 13y agoI am curious - how do you think that these large groups will be able to set bitcoin policy? Technologically, they don't have much influence over the algorithms or the distribution of bitcoins as a whole. What meaningful policy decisions can be made?
- wmf 13y agoIn Bitcoin a block can be up to 1 MB, yet mining pools are only generating 150-250 KB blocks and leaving many transactions unconfirmed.
- betterunix 13y agoThey could selectively deny transactions. They might, for example, demand that you tie a real-world identity to your Bitcoin address before you can engage in any transactions, then deny transactions to people they dislike.
- mrb 13y agoThis is false. "Little guys", think the guy mining with 1 or 2 USB thumbdrive-sized miners, make more relative profit than large scale miners. Whether you spend $50 to mine at 3 gigahash/sec, or $50,000 to mine at 3,000 gigahash/sec, in theory the relative profit is the same, but the extra costs associated to the 1000x scale become non-negligible. For the little guy, space, power, and cooling are effectively free. He makes use of space that was already available and unused (eg. his desk), cooling is easy (a few watts can be passively cooled), and power is so small (2.5W per port) that he effectively writes it off as insignificant. But a large scale miner like friedcat has to build or rent a data center facility, has to pay for air conditioning units, has a electricity bill he cannot ignore as insignificant, has to pay people to deploy and maintain the dozen of racks, etc. Source: I have been mining since 2010, at some point I was mining with 20 killowatt of GPUs (ten racks or so).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- seiji 13y agoAnother title: Why the future of America is not bright. The Chinese computer engineers can go out and assemble this thing from spare parts in their city. Americans would have to order through five different middlemen and face language interop issues along the way.
- scott_karana 13y agoThat was my takeaway as well. China looks like a fantastic country to live if you're a talented engineer. (Obviously, you might not make as much money, but what could you pioneer with the agility you'd have?)
- beachstartup 13y agoeh, no. you might get to work on some interesting stuff that's unique to china/asia, but quality of life is much higher in the US if you are a worker bee, aka a talented engineer.
- ck2 13y agoThis is a very strange hardware race. What are they going to do with all this hardware worldwide when the entire chain is finished in a couple years?
- mrb 13y agoThe chain will never be finished. Mining will (should) go on forever. This hardware will only become obsolete when Bitcoin's proof-of-work is changed from SHA-256(SHA-256(x)) to something else (which might happen in a few years/decades, but until then the hardware will have largely paid itself off).
- evolve2k 13y agoOh it was my understanding that at a certain date (2015?) the system would stop issuing new bitcoins. How are miners paid then?
- ck2 13y agoI don't think it stops issuing coins, I think the reward keeps halving until it reaches zero (beyond 8 decimals). The question is are people going to bother to use $10k gigahash machines with dollars/day in power to make 0.0000001 BTC
- zwily 13y agoIf the reward gets low enough that people stop mining, then the network adapts to make mining easier, keeping the mining rate constant. It's brilliant.
- gwern 13y agoTransaction fees.
- mrb 13y agoYear 2140 is when issuance will stop. So we have more than 100 years left: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply Beside that, transaction fees should make mining profitable for ever, in theory. Transaction fees, or transaction volume, only needs to grow by 10x in the next 10 years (from ~0.3 to 3 BTC per block), in order to make them generate more profits to miners than coin issuance.
- jrockway 13y agoWhat a waste. I can't wait until the bubble bursts.
- thisiswrong 13y agoThe USD bubble ? The whole world is waiting eagerly for it to bust. At least it will put a stop to the US war machine.
- fierycatnet 13y agoThe whole world is not waiting for the #1 economy in the world to tank with its currency.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWhile the bitcoin craze is on-going I've heard anecdotally of one retired GPU system being used to do CFD work, the reasoning was that people would pay $50 - $150 per hour for CFD analysis run time and that was more than the machine had been "earning" when it had been build for Bitcoin mining. That said, with an ASIC you're rather constrained in your choices. But something in the same form factor as the mining ASIC might make this a pretty powerful engine for computing 'X' for some useful definition of X, post BitCoin exhaustion.
- dmix 13y ago> a pretty powerful engine for computing 'X' for some useful definition of X Password cracking-as-a-service for China's government/companies?
- wlian 13y agoUnfortunately Bitcoin ASICs are only good at double SHA-256 hashing; meaning it only does sha256(sha256(INPUT)). Probably not remotely useful of any modern password systems.
- Everlag 13y agoSo... any major government site is a target? People use sha256 because it's easy and simple. Bcrypt? There be dragons!
- ChuckMcM 13y agoCorrect, the boards are not useful for anything other than bitcoin mining. However, you give an engineer that form factor and have them design a password cracking board, now you pull out and scrap all the Miner boards, replace them with Password cracking boards, and all of the investment in the infrastructure around the boards is preserved. My reasoning is that replacing just the boards should be less expensive than creating the entire system from scratch. It may not be much less if the infrastructure is cheap compared to the boards but less.
- seabrookmx 13y agoMaybe I'm blind, but did he mention what liquid they're using for immersion cooling? Something like 3M Novec maybe?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- VMG 13y agoI love living in a science fiction cyberpunk novel
- runako 13y agoAre there analogous racks of equipment supporting the use (vs mining) of BitCoin for e.g. purchases? If so, where?
- fiatmoney 13y agoWhy is the coolant boiling? Surely it must be more efficient to cool & retain the coolant than let it evaporate. Or are they using air bubbles to agitate or cool it?
- ams6110 13y agoPhase change (liquid to gas) removes a lot more heat. It's not being evaporated into the atmosphere, it is undoubtedly being recondensed to liquid state and recirculated.
- runeks 13y agoI believe you can see that in this picture: https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i41.tinypic.com/29nxc9x.jpg&fnr https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i41.tinypic.com/29nxc9x.jpg&fn... The coolant is pouring off the copper pipes, which it presumably has condensed on.
- sbierwagen 13y agoHuh, why immersion cooling? I thought the limiting factor in bitcoin mining was $/KWh, not floor space.
- marshray 13y agoPresumably things are different in Hong Kong.
- sbierwagen 13y agoYeah, but how could electricity possibly be any cheaper there? What are the real estate prices like, then, $1000/m^2?
- marshray 13y agoI dunno, but it's a lot easier to subsidize energy costs than it is to create more space. Plus, adding liquid cooling does not appreciably increase the energy costs, and could even decrease them if it allowed savings on, say, air conditioning.
- jimworm 13y agoSomeone else already noticed that the external pictures were easily identified. The location is no longer secret.