Cryptocurrency mining boom flooded

Last year Kazakhstan became the second biggest crypto-currency mining country in the world, thanks partly to a vast mine containing 50, computers in the desert near the northern city of Ekibastuz. Young men work 12 hours a day for 15 days in a row without leaving the site, in order to keep it running round the clock. But the rapid growth of crypto-mining in the country has put pressure on the energy sector, which relies heavily on polluting, carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations. Earlier this month the rising cost of car fuel acted as the trigger for nationwide political protests. For five days the Kazakh crypto-mines could not connect to the internet, causing crypto-currency transactions across the world to slow down.

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Content:

• Here’s why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy
• Bitcoin Miners in China Will Move Operations to Other Countries in Wake of New Regulations
• Inside Kazakhstan's giant crypto-mine
• DeFi and crypto: The bridge to the future of finance
• Why China Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Mining and What It Could Mean for Other Countries
• Central Washington: epicenter of world-changing technology or ground zero for Bitcoin's epic fail
• Pakistan is working to bring its cryptocurrency boom out of the dark

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Here’s why you can’t buy a high-end graphics card at Best Buy

By Samantha Wohlfeil. In a gray warehouse tucked behind a tavern off one of the main drags in downtown Wenatchee, Malachi Salcido gets settled in his office, where a wall of computer monitors allows him to split his attention between live feeds of construction sites, photos of his family and websites tracking the real-time value of cryptocurrencies and their exchanges.

He's a master electrician, certified public accountant and owner of a successful design-build construction business. But it's his latest venture — "mining" for Bitcoin — that has people cold calling him, with some flying straight from China or Japan to knock at the door in hopes of grabbing a few minutes of his time. A mile down the road from his office, in a converted cold-storage warehouse, 1, machines with incredible computing power work 24 hours a day at Salcido's Columbia Data Center solving complicated algorithms to earn the digital currency.

At the same time, as Salcido watches on the live feed in his office, crews across the river in East Wenatchee are building a new mining facility for him that's five times that size. With even more sites in the works, the founder and CEO of Salcido Enterprises aims to make his firm the biggest player in Bitcoin and blockchain technology in the country, and, unfortunately for the cold callers, he's not about to build operations for other people. The "mining" process requires huge amounts of electricity.

For months, public utility districts or PUDs throughout the state have been hounded with requests for power at unprecedented levels: People are asking for 20, 50, megawatts of electricity, with one caller even asking the Pend Oreille County PUD where they could get 2 gigawatts — enough to power more than 1 million homes.

In response to this modern gold rush, many cities and utilities are pumping the brakes as they decide if and how to build out their infrastructure for an industry many people still don't understand and that experts warn could totally collapse. Since mid-February, a wave of Central Washington cities and utilities passed temporary bans or limitations on the operations.

For the record, Salcido thinks the moratoriums and interim controls on new digital mining are a good thing: He went through a similar years-long moratorium process with local agencies after he first got in the game in And he understands people's skepticism: What if this technology doesn't get adopted? What's the point? After first learning about Bitcoin, Salcido says he saw it going one of two ways.

Or it's going to disrupt every industry I can think of, and probably some I can't," Salcido says. It's one of those two. It won't be a niche technology. How liberal activist Nicolette Ocheltree went from warning Spokane about Jonathan Bingle to working for him.

Spokane's new planning director says being both careful and bold isn't a contradiction. While digital currency has been a concept for a few decades, it wasn't until that Bitcoin was invented, and other cryptocurrencies soon followed.

In a nutshell, Bitcoin was created as a way to exchange value with other people without needing a bank or other intermediary to verify a transaction and avoid fraud.

To do so, a network of machines constantly works to verify the chain of transactions leading up to the transfer of all or part of a coin to someone else. Each time a coin — expressed as a code of numbers and letters — is exchanged, it is encrypted and recorded publicly. After the network verifies that the digital receipt of sorts is the same as the copy they have, they add your new transaction to what's called a block.

Then the machines work to "mine" by guessing the password for that encrypted block. If they guess it, they essentially create new code to add on and make a new block, which is linked with others in a digital ledger known as "blockchain. As more transactions are made, it gets harder to hack the system, as someone would have to control more than half of the global network to deceive others into believing that a falsified block matches the other copies of the ledger.

There's also less reward for the same electricity, as there are only 21 million Bitcoin possible, and the amount rewarded for finding new blocks is cut in half on a regular schedule. Early miners got 50 Bitcoins for their work. Now they get But with the price of Bitcoin ballooning from almost nothing in its infancy to thousands of dollars per coin currently, and with other coins like Ethereum and Litecoin gaining in popularity, the prospect is attracting big players.

By the end of this year, Salcido plans to have about 50 megawatts in mining power. In three or four years, he plans to have more than megawatts, and, eventually, he hopes to run 10 percent of the global Bitcoin network. Salcido likes to tell people not to focus so much on the fact that Bitcoin has value when they're trying to understand his motivations.

At the end of the day, his machines are working to build and support a network by writing code. While his machines work for new Bitcoin, they are also processing transactions on a regular basis and taking a small fee in the form of code.

Unlike credit card transactions, which can take 1 percent to 5 percent in fees, the miners take a tiny fraction of 1 percent, making it cheaper for people to pay each other while earning him income. But the underlying technology, blockchain, is really where he sees massive potential. He compares it to software: There isn't one "software," there are many kinds, with infinite applications.

Blockchain can be used to bundle services that were never bundled before, Salcido says, like a contract, the payment for that contract, and the verification and security for that contract. And other applications are being developed all the time. Major companies are investing in new ways to use the tech: Maersk, the largest shipping container operator in the world, and IBM announced earlier this year that they'll partner to see how blockchain can be used as a more efficient way to track global shipments; Amazon is exploring ways to use blockchain for financial services; and Starbucks is exploring use of blockchain as part of a payment app.

And with all those applications, someone needs to run the network. That's where Salcido is positioning himself. His strategic goal is to become the major hub for the network on the West Coast. It's not just digging a hole and throwing electrons in the ground. Even cities are looking into possible applications. Boise is working with a company called ULedger to explore internal business applications for blockchain.

Meaning neither party involved, or any other third party, can really question the validity of that record, because no one can change it or touch it to manipulate it. He can only throw a mile-an-hour fastball,'" Salcido says. Though it's still very new, Salcido argues Bitcoin's blockchain will ultimately serve as a sort of base code, and once applications are developed, "the adoption rate is going to be rapid.

But I kind of argue: Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. But while Salcido fully plans to remain invested in his town, Wenatchee, it's not as clear if the new operators from around the world have similar plans. Chelan County hugs the eastern edge of the North Cascades, a series of valleys separating its mountain resort towns from the world-renowned apple and pear orchards that grow in number as you head east toward flatter agricultural land in the Columbia River Basin.

On the southern shores of Lake Chelan, the city of Chelan is a popular vacation destination, with plenty of west-siders building second homes there and visiting its resorts in summer and winter months. But among the tourists and retirees, rogue cryptocurrency miners have started setting up shop in homes and other areas not designed to use the huge amounts of electricity needed to run their machines. The Chelan County PUD recently discovered an illegal setup that started in a single storage unit and eventually took over a chain of units before being discovered, says Chelan Mayor Mike Cooney.

Partly in response to concerns from the utility district, Chelan's City Council passed a six-month ban on would-be legal operations in February. Simply put, Cooney says he and the council don't think the clean power generated by the dams in their area should go to that type of industry.

About two-and-a-half years into what he plans to be his only term, the mayor says he gets two or three calls a week from people interested in setting up operations. They inquire from all over, and he suspects many calls from the Seattle area are on behalf of foreign investors from China and other countries. But that's not the type of industry they want to prop up, Cooney says. Instead, they want clean, light industry that matches the lifestyle there, maybe something like a backpack or snowshoe manufacturer, or other outdoor recreation business.

Plus, it's already hard enough to meet demand for power to new homes and resorts without getting pushback about electrical infrastructure interrupting views among the steep hills around the lake, Cooney says. There's enough growth we need all the power we have to go to that," Cooney says. About 40 miles south, the Wenatchee City Council passed interim controls in late March intended to limit mining operations to some industrial and commercial areas while city staff design regulations and the Chelan PUD looks for unauthorized miners.

The utility first realized the need to plan for cryptocurrency miners back in , after early operators started setting up shop. After working through a moratorium, they set rates and fees for users who want up to 5 megawatts of power enough to power as many as 4, Pacific Northwest homes and started allowing applications in early Plus, the cost of electricity used, of course. On top of that, utility staff suspect dozens of customers are illegally mining in their service area, and they've shut down about 20 operations already.

They warn that mining without proper service can be dangerous: One residential setup overtaxed its wires, causing them to melt and start a fire that burned what was luckily an empty lot, Stoll says. But it also took out power to three other homes in the process. So the utility has been working with local governments to pump the brakes on mining operations while they plan how to handle new electricity loads while keeping power available for other customers. They know if they build, miners will come.

The question is: Will they stay? The Chelan PUD has stopped accepting new applications for cryptocurrency mining operations for the time being, and the city of Chelan's temporary ban will come up for review this summer. Since mid-February, the cities of Leavenworth, East Wenatchee and Wenatchee have also restricted where the operations can be in city limits, excluding them from residential zones.

Instead of a moratorium, the city of Wenatchee passed month interim controls on where operations can locate, as city staff wanted to allow some use while exploring the best ways to update codes, says Steve King, economic development director for Wenatchee.

We just wanted to make sure it was in the right place," King says. As of February, the Grant County PUD, which already serves a number of data centers, had 79 such requests for a total 1, megawatts of potential new load, which would also more than double their existing load, according to Ryan Holterhoff, a Grant PUD spokesman.

The district is now studying how to upgrade its infrastructure and change its rates. One of the main risks of operations setting up shop only to leave if cryptocurrency values drop would be stranded assets — all that equipment left behind with no one to serve. So the utility districts all require customers to pay for infrastructure upgrades up front.

But the equipment is less of a concern than stranded "hedge," the power a utility could be left on the hook for if they sign contracts for more market power, explains Kimberly Gentle, director of power and risk management for the Pend Oreille PUD. Most of the inquiries Pend Oreille has gotten have been for a few megawatts up to about 20 megawatts, but Gentle says one customer asked where in the area they could locate if they wanted 2 gigawatts, an inconceivably large request for a utility whose roughly 8,customer base has basically remained unchanged for decades.

While concern about the electricity needed to mine cryptocurrencies has been a large focus for Washington agencies, the digital currencies themselves have raised red flags with governments and companies around the world for several years. They warn that the digital currencies and decentralized markets where they are traded are highly unregulated, and some worry about how they could be used to fund criminal enterprises or cheat people out of their investments.

Bitcoin first gained infamy with its ties to the Silk Road, an online black market run on the dark web where all sales were conducted in Bitcoin. The founder of the site, Ross William Ulbricht, is serving life in prison for crimes related to the Silk Road, ranging from drug trafficking to money laundering. Google and Facebook both announced this year that they'll ban ads related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, citing policies against ads for financial products associated with deceptive practices.

In January, Alaska and Idaho both warned people to be extremely cautious when investing in cryptocurrencies, which are not controlled or insured by central banks or governments. Idaho's finance department warned that the highly volatile markets may be tempting to unsuspecting investors even though they come with a high risk of fraud. Those markets are already moving large amounts of money.

Aside from concerns about people purposely inflating the value of cryptocurrencies, making them look favorable on markets so they can quickly turn around and sell them for a profit, agencies also warn about Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs.

Some tokens constitute, or may be exchangeable for a new cryptocurrency to be launched by the project, while others entitle investors to a discount, or early rights to a product or service proposed to be offered. The Securities and Exchange Commission is starting to bring charges against people offering ICOs without registering them as a security or promising something they can't deliver. But those who've invested in the technology most in Central Washington argue that they're OK with regulations, that the technology actually makes it easier to trace criminal actors and they believe cryptocurrency has the potential to change their community for the better.

The number of people jumping into cryptocurrency mining in the Wenatchee Valley and beyond has ballooned not only due to rogue operations, but also thanks in part to above-board companies like Giga Watt, one of the largest mining-related companies in the region.

Bitcoin Miners in China Will Move Operations to Other Countries in Wake of New Regulations

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Inside Kazakhstan's giant crypto-mine

Another Quebec town is slamming the brakes on future cryptocurrency mining operations as concerns grow about the demands they are placing on Quebec's supply of low-cost electricity. Elected officials in Magog, about kilometres east of Montreal, voted Tuesday to withhold approval for any future mining ventures. Two companies — Bitfarms and BitLinksys — are expected to open operations shortly in former factory buildings in Magog. Together they will use about 20 megawatts of electricity per day. The municipality wants to spare the rest of its excess energy supply for companies in different sectors of the economy. Magog joins the 21 municipalities of the Brome-Missisquoi regional council which have already imposed a moratorium on future cryptocurrency mining operations. Last month, the Brome-Missisquoi council approved a three-month ban that prohibits the creation and expansion of digital currency mining businesses across the region.

DeFi and crypto: The bridge to the future of finance

Ignored throughout the bull run, China is once again trying to make itself relevant by employing its classic approach of bitcoin doom. Since MT Gox has gone in , China has been the main source of FUD over and over again, with this time some committee declaring they want a crackdown of bitcoin mining and trading. On trading they have been cracking down since , which is why during this bull run no one paid any attention to China with the country isolating itself where the crypto boom is concerned. Crackdowns on mining have also been an occasional theme. Some local authority here or there publishes some diktat about ree bitcoin mining now and then, but generally nothing happens.

Why China Is Cracking Down on Bitcoin Mining and What It Could Mean for Other Countries

But the former Soviet republic has little choice in the matter — almost half of its electric power is generated by hydroelectric plants, the biggest of which has suffered this year from low water levels due to drought across the region. Unable to import power from neighbours who face deficits themselves for various reasons including a cryptocurrency mining boom, Kyrgyzstan has urged citizens to heat their homes with coal rather than electric boilers and heaters, and offered them discounted supplies. Therefore, I stand in line for three-four hours. And what are we supposed to do, freeze? According to environmental engineer Kanykei Kadyrova at the Movegreen NGO, the combined emissions of city power plants and households burning coal are the main factor behind the heavy smog that chokes Bishkek at all times. The country of 6.

Central Washington: epicenter of world-changing technology or ground zero for Bitcoin's epic fail

The market for high-end graphics cards used to work like the market for almost any other piece of computer gear. You'd go to your local electronics store, pick one up off the shelf, and pay an amount right around the manufacturer's suggested retail price. But the rise of cryptocurrency mining has created an unprecedented global shortage of graphics cards. If you go to your local retailer, you're likely to find bare shelves where the beefier cards used to be. Gamers thinking about building a new gaming machine are being forced to put those plans on hold until the market settles down.

Pakistan is working to bring its cryptocurrency boom out of the dark

Mining frame reddit. We sell products from all the major manufacturers Bitmain, Innosilicon, Canaan, MicroBT and many more so we offer you the best service and prices from Europe. Crypto Currencies.

By Samantha Wohlfeil. In a gray warehouse tucked behind a tavern off one of the main drags in downtown Wenatchee, Malachi Salcido gets settled in his office, where a wall of computer monitors allows him to split his attention between live feeds of construction sites, photos of his family and websites tracking the real-time value of cryptocurrencies and their exchanges. He's a master electrician, certified public accountant and owner of a successful design-build construction business. But it's his latest venture — "mining" for Bitcoin — that has people cold calling him, with some flying straight from China or Japan to knock at the door in hopes of grabbing a few minutes of his time. A mile down the road from his office, in a converted cold-storage warehouse, 1, machines with incredible computing power work 24 hours a day at Salcido's Columbia Data Center solving complicated algorithms to earn the digital currency.

At the site of a former cocoa factory in Canada's Quebec province, tiny holes punctured in the walls of a warehouse allow fresh air to cool thousands of whirring processors connected by a tangle of wires. Yessoulou Coulibaly watches over the sea of 7,odd computers hidden away in this industrial park at a center operated by Bitfarms, one of the emerging players of the cryptocurrency "mining" boom. Unlike the dollar or the euro, cryptocurrencies are not issued by central banks. Instead they are "mined" or created thanks to server "farms" like the one in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Hyacinthe—which crack increasingly complex computer codes in order to unlock new batches, or blocks of virtual coins. Mining on a large scale requires massive computing power , which in turn requires a lot of electric power. That is where Quebec comes in the picture: luring miners with its plentiful, cheap electricity and below average temperatures—akin to Iceland, where a sister cryptocurrency blitz is also underway.

Earlier this month it was confirmed that following a huge crackdown on mining operations in China , largely due to the exploitation of the relatively low cost of energy there, many industrial-level Cryptocurrency operations were, rather quickly, shutting themselves down. Well, it was either do that or face being thrown into prison, fined, or sent to a reeducation center to learn the errors of their ways. It is literally being flooded with inexpensive modern graphics cards. While we freely concede that this will vary depending on the seller, and also that conversion rates are never entirely accurate, this is how much the following graphics cards are largely hitting the Chinese second-hand market for right now:.