AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility

[nakedrobot2]

It makes me sad that all this computation can't simultaneously be used to fold proteins, or some other "externally productive" calculation.

[jnbiche]

The answer to this question can be found in the response of David Schwartz (professional cryptographer and long-time Bitcoiner) to this same question on StackOverflow: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/11651

The long answer is: you cannot secure the network using another any other work. The work done has to be specifically tied to the previous block on the blockchain (made of up transaction data, which is of course unrelated to proteins or anything else "useful" in the view of the questioner). Otherwise, you cannot demonstrably prove the integrity of the blockchain.

The short answer is: they are doing useful work -- they're securing an increasingly large and distributed financial network.

[nilkn]

I'm a cynic, but I like to think of this as an unusually direct measurement of the cost we all have to pay for human selfishness. We simply can't trust each other, so we must expend all this effort so that we don't need trust in the first place.

[DanBC]

> simultaneously

Worse, the ASICs can't be used to fold proteins when they've finished being used for Bitcoin mining.

[swalsh]

Think about how much computing power is currently being used to "shoot people" whether it be virtual... or not.

[GigabyteCoin]

It makes me sad that so many food manufacturers out there create crap for our bodies. They could be synergizing the world's healthiest superfoods.

We all live in the same capitalistic world, for better or worse.

[csomar]

Sorry but this computation is being done to secure the network and secure a wealth estimated at around $10bn at today market prices.

I don't think it's unproductive at all.

[aortega]

I'm sure way more computation power is used to determine your candy crush score.

[kurige]

While I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the "me too" altcoins, Gridcoin[0] was created for exactly this reason. Solving blocks contributes to grid computing for real world problems. Using ASICs would prevent them from switching, though.

[0]: http://www.gridcoinnetwork.org/

[NathanKP]

The way I see it Bitcoin is inspiring people to create these insanely powerful mining rigs. Once they've developed the technology then its possible to make a more general application to other fields, not with the exact same hardware of course but with similar setups.

[blhack]

There is an altcoin called "primeCoin" that addresses that. The minining is dedicated to finding ~~new prime numbers~~ mew prime number chains.

(I don't know why this is useful, as I am not a mathematician.)

[AlexCoventry]

I put some thought into how to do this. I think it would be hard to get right. One way, which is total vaporware and probably riddled with security flaws:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3qaT-ZL6aeKOHNEQWdpZEtRYWc/... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.5

[joosters]

Surely they can make use of the heat output at least?

[Xdes]

I don't think this can be practically done. Is there an algorithm for folding proteins? Where is the protein data going to come from?

[melling]

Not to worry, the unintended consequence of the increasing need for large computational power will lead to faster and cheaper computers. The fact that someone can directly justify spending large amounts of money means that they will. We all win in the end.

[dllthomas]

It could lead to strong demand for a "print your own high-performance ASICs" product.

[termain]

So is there any problem to which ASIC miners can be repurposed?

[brfox]

Its better (for the environment) than mining for diamonds or gold.

[EricDeb]

wouldn't that have been cool. If bitcoin mining could have been done in a way that had practical significance yet also resulted in coins?

[mbreese]

And 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.

[mrb]

This 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).

[ihsw]

Absolute rubbish -- the only thing centrally controlled will be the generation of new BTC. That eventuality is expected and after all coins are mined then the reward will be transaction fees.

Up until then, you are correct -- the rate of new BTC generated will be dominated by the few.

[applecore]

Mining 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

[unavoidable]

I 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?

[redblacktree]

I mined 14 coins last year with a GPU I had anyway. My only regret is selling them immediately. At this moment, they'd be worth $11,704

[seiji]

Another 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.

[ChuckMcM]

While 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.

[fiatmoney]

Why 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?

[VMG]

I love living in a science fiction cyberpunk novel

[seabrookmx]

Maybe I'm blind, but did he mention what liquid they're using for immersion cooling?

Something like 3M Novec maybe?

[alsocasey]

Something called 3M fluoinert.

[jrockway]

What a waste. I can't wait until the bubble bursts.

[thisiswrong]

The USD bubble ? The whole world is waiting eagerly for it to bust. At least it will put a stop to the US war machine.

[ck2]

This 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?

[pilom]

Miners earn bitcoin from 2 sources when they find a block. One source is the award. This award is halved periodically so each block is worth fewer and fewer bitcoin. Theoretically, these awards will continue to decrease until the awards are extremely tiny and eventually (A REALLY LONG TIME FROM NOW) the last award will be given and there will be about 21 million bitcoins.

The second source is transaction fees. When you make a transaction (for instance when you buy a flight on Virgin Galactic) you have no guarantee that the rest of the world agrees that you made that transaction until someone finds a block which includes your transaction. You increase the likelihood of your transaction being approved by offering a transaction fee. This incentivizes miners to look for blocks which include your transaction.

Eventually, the awards will be very very small but there will be more transactions and thus more transaction fees available to miners. Thus miners must continue for as long as bitcoin transaction are being made.

[mrb]

The 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).

[runako]

Are there analogous racks of equipment supporting the use (vs mining) of BitCoin for e.g. purchases? If so, where?

[sbierwagen]

Huh, why immersion cooling? I thought the limiting factor in bitcoin mining was $/KWh, not floor space.

[iDemonix]

I'd like to know how much a setup like that could produce and at what profit.

[jimworm]

Someone else already noticed that the external pictures were easily identified. The location is no longer secret.

[mdelias]

The original title of this submission was "A look at the future of Bitcoin mining".

[sscalia]

Has anyone said... buttcoin yet?

[GigabyteCoin]

This isn't 2011. Not sure if you've been here recently but Bitcoin is fairly well respected among HNers today.