Bitcoin mining rig comparison to the ocean
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- What Is Bitcoin Mining and How Does it Work?
- E-waste from every two bitcoin transactions is the equivalent of throwing away an iPad
- How Bitcoin’s footprint is impacting water use
- Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining after blackouts
- Police Destroy More Than 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Rigs with a Steamroller
- AEP OnSite Partners signs LOI to develop solar field to power cryptocurrency mining
What Is Bitcoin Mining and How Does it Work?
Amid Singapore's humid equatorial heat, a group of researchers and faculty at the island's main technical education institute are sweating over an unconventional cooling solution — for litecoin miners. The institute , known more for strait-laced vocational courses, has partnered with litecoin startup CloudMining. No wonder the institute jumped at the project.
Its goal is to build a "beach cooler" sized module containing an exotic cooling fluid from 3M that quickly dissipates heat. Miners in the cryptocurrency world are locked in a zero-sum game to discover new blocks. As competition intensifies, miners must find an increasingly elusive edge to beat their rivals.
To do this, they're now turning to expensive and specialised cooling systems that were once the exclusive preserve of cutting-edge research laboratories and military installations.
According to Michael Bedford Taylor, director of the Center for Dark Silicon at the University of California, San Diego, liquid immersion cooling is currently "extremely rare" in general-purpose data centres, but it could become a common sight in bitcoin mining installations. Firms supplying liquid immersion cooling technology and services have reported a spike in enquiries from bitcoin miners. This means the boards are submerged in the liquid, typically in an 'open bath' system, where they lie uncovered, for easy access.
The 3M liquid works by changing from liquid to vapour at a very low boiling point, typically 49 degrees Celsius. As the submerged electronics generate heat, the liquid heats up and evaporates.
The vapour rises into a condenser, cools down and then returns to the tank as liquid. It calls its immersion-cooling technology the 'CarnotJet system' see image at top. While similar in principle, oil immersion cooling is slightly more complex than Novec-filled systems. The circuit boards are submerged in an oil-based coolant, as with Novec, but the oil has to be circulated with a pump to remove heat.
The oil travels to a heat exchanger, where heat is transferred to water-filled pipes that ultimately connect to a cooling tower, located somewhere outside the building. The cooling tower then dispels the heat into the air. Bedford Taylor says chips used in bitcoin mining are now so advanced that they are hitting the limits of semiconductor fabrication , as set out by the famous dictum, Moore's Law. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years.
Transistor counts on a chip are determined by the chip fabrication process. As process technology improves, it shrinks the size of the elements on a chip, allowing more transistors to be arranged on one chip. The size of transistors on a chip is measured in nanometres. According to the UCSD's Bedford Taylor, chips used in miners are now using the smallest transistors that can be fabricated. In a paper studying the progress of chips used in bitcoin mining, Bedford Taylor concludes that technological advancement in the area has been "amazingly fast" in the face of increasing difficulty.
He describes four generations of bitcoin mining chips, starting at regular CPUs and ending with the ASICs application-specific integrated circuits that miners currently use. The current generation of mining chips represent the first examples of a new era of "bespoke silicon" — custom-made chips produced in relatively small batches for a specific purpose — Bedford Taylor argues in a paper.
One question is whether this model can scale to other application areas and usher in a new era of bespoke silicon," he wrote. Bedford Taylor was one of the authors of a paper that described a phenomenon known as 'dark silicon'. The dark silicon problem says that, as transistor counts on chips increase, the portion of the chip that is actually utilised, given the the chip's power constraints, drops exponentially. As a result, a portion of the chip remains without power — the dark silicon — and is not utilised.
The researcher said that some bitcoin miners have been advancing so rapidly that dark silicon is already an issue and performance has been reduced as a result. So if liquid immersion is so effective at cooling these chips that are being pushed to the limits of current technology, why aren't all miners using it? It turns out that immersion cooling systems only make sense when miners face certain constraints.
As Brandon Moore of GRC notes, three factors drive adoption of immersion cooling systems: expensive electricity, expensive real estate and the absence of a legacy cooling system.
Hook up a cooling tower and we're done," he said. Garceau of 3M agrees with Moore's assessment, although he notes that the bitcoin miners he has spoken to are increasingly interested in optimising their installations even without physical or monetary constraints. Immersion cooling can slash running costs. Green Revolution Cooling, meanwhile, claims to cut running costs in half with its oil-based cooling system. Even with the potential savings, immersion cooling remains expensive.
Research firm IHS finds that special cooling fluids are about five times more expensive than a traditional chilled-water system. As immersion cooling gains traction, mining farms may take on even more outlandish forms.
Both GRC and Allied Control are offering 'containerised' solutions for miners who might want to take advantage of, say, a plum location near a hydroelectric dam. Green Revolution Cooling can build its CarnoJet system inside a foot shipping container, which it promises is 'plug and play'. Allied Control, meanwhile, touts its DataTank modules, which offers remote, high-definition security cameras as an option. Bitcoin mining enterprises may be buying cooling fluids by the litre now, but they remain an oddity to the vast majority of data centres.
Almost all existing data centres rely on air-cooling systems, as they remain cheaper to run, less complex to manage and more widely available. However, the firm also found that demand for liquid-cooling systems is growing, driven by rising energy costs and the emergence of high-performance data centres. For the likes of 3M and GRC, that's a trend to keep an eye on.
The leader in news and information on cryptocurrency, digital assets and the future of money, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group , which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups. As part of their compensation, certain CoinDesk employees, including editorial employees, may receive exposure to DCG equity in the form of stock appreciation rights , which vest over a multi-year period.
CoinDesk journalists are not allowed to purchase stock outright in DCG. By signing up, you will receive emails about CoinDesk product updates, events and marketing and you agree to our terms of services and privacy policy. Neal Blackburn, who runs business development for the startup, said:.
With the Institute of Technical Education, they want commercialised research, we were signing the paperwork in 48 hours. Exotic cooling provides an edge. We're seeing a transition [of bitcoin mining] to an industrial scale now. Different immersion systems. The chief competitor to Novec-based systems is liquid cooling using mineral oil. Green Revolution Cooling.
Moore's Law and miners. He said:. The first chips were in nm, a relatively old process. Bespoke chips and dark silicon. When immersion cooling makes sense. But bitcoin miners are looking for the best economics they can get all round. Costs and benefits. Is the future containerised? Allied Control's DataTank container. GRC's Moore said:. You can be efficient anywhere in the world, whether you're in the Amazon or Canada.
Air cooling remains dominant. As GRC's Moore says:. When you're cooling your equipment on shelves with box-fans, there's only so much you can do. Joon Ian Wong. Subscribe to First Mover, our daily newsletter about markets. Sign Up.
E-waste from every two bitcoin transactions is the equivalent of throwing away an iPad
Mineral extraction — gold, silver, copper or iron — has always been constrained by access to water. To be sure, that footprint varies by location and energy source. Yet based on current trends, and documented water requirements to generate electricity, a back-of-an-envelope calculation suggests bitcoin mining drives both a prodigious and fast-escalating demand for water. Start by recognising that a single transaction burns as much electricity as a household consumes in a week.
How Bitcoin’s footprint is impacting water use
Read all articles. Bitcoin mining facilities are not your traditional data processing centers. Over the past decade I've had the opportunity to review the property specifications of dozens of data centers, including many cryptocurrency mining facilities. As the price of Bitcoin increases, so do the number of data processing facilities dedicated to mining it. Crypto-mining requires vast amounts of computer processing power and is therefore extremely energy intensive, often resulting in facilities that are located in more remote areas where land or buildings are less expensive to lease, but adjacent to a power supply able to meet its requirements. The downside to remote locations is that they typically receive a delayed fire-fighting response. Due to the sense of urgency involved in digital mining, the equipment is usually pushed to its operating limit and I encountered one risk with a temporary, sub-standard cooling arrangement. This is an ingenious way to use a site that might have otherwise remained idle. It does, however, result in some non-traditional construction types and unusual building configurations that also lack the automatic fire suppression systems common in other data centers. I've also reviewed a few submissions that included an electrical substation and power generating unit as covered property.
Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining after blackouts
TOP, are suspending their China operations after Beijing stepped up its efforts to crack down on Bitcoin mining and trading, sending the digital currency tumbling. Crypto miners use increasingly powerful, specially-designed computer equipment, or rigs, to verify virtual coin transactions in a process that produces newly minted cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin took a hammering after the latest Chinese move and is now down nearly 50 percent from its all-time high. It shed as much as 17 percent on Sunday, before paring some losses and was last trading steady in Asia. Investor protection and prevention of money laundering are particular concerns of governments and financial regulators who are grappling with whether and how they should regulate the cryptocurrency industry.
Police Destroy More Than 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Rigs with a Steamroller
In , an 11th grader named Greg Strebel wrote the introduction to a book about Ocean Falls, the tiny town in the British Columbian hinterlands where he lived. But the one thing that mattered above all, according to Strebel, was the paper mill. The security provided by the mill turned out to be fleeting. It went silent when Strebel was in his 20s. A population that peaked at 5, has fallen below But this summer, the mill began to emit a new sound.
AEP OnSite Partners signs LOI to develop solar field to power cryptocurrency mining
City of the big shoulders, hog butcher for the world, Chicago is looking to add another title for the digital age: cryptocurrency finance center. With little regulation and no backing other than the faith of its fervent believers, cryptocurrency has turned into digital gold for early adopters, despite wild market fluctuations and no shortage of naysayers. Launched in by anonymous computer developers , Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer payment network. While there is no central bank, the encrypted digital transactions are verified by blockchain technology, a type of database that forms a permanent ledger of all transactions across the shared computer network. Other major cryptocurrencies include Ethereum and Dogecoin, which was started in by a pair of software engineers as a joke.
In the last year, cryptocurrency firms have talked about adding as much as 5, megawatts to BC Hydro's electrical load. That's about 40 per cent of the power it currently generates, and four times the maximum capacity of the yet-to-be-completed Site C dam. Just a tiny fraction of that business has materialized so far, but BC Hydro is keen to attract it and wants to offer discounted rates on electricity. What these firms do is known as cryptocurrency mining, which uses powerful, automated computers to solve the complex math puzzles that are necessary to produce digital currencies like Bitcoin.
On 3 July , the FSC, by issuing a ruling, officially designated cryptocurrencies with the nature of securities, i. According to the Ruling, security tokens refer to those that:. Please see the below summary of certain key provisions of the STO regulations i. There is currently no regulation specifically governing the taxation of cryptocurrencies; however, by referring to the tax laws and tax rulings in connection with the taxation of cross-border e-commerce transactions and online sales of services, it is possible that the tax authorities might take the following stances.
These are the core obsessions that drive our newsroom—defining topics of seismic importance to the global economy. Our emails are made to shine in your inbox, with something fresh every morning, afternoon, and weekend. The process requires legions of electricity-hungry computers that work around the clock to unlock new coins by cracking math problems. Because these problems get increasingly complex over time, the system rewards energy waste : Any downtime makes the next coin harder to earn, and the only way to get an edge over competitors is to run more computers. The annual carbon footprint today is comparable to that of the London metro area.
Nearby, an audiovisual repair shop and an agricultural lab specializing in the detection of livestock pathogens vie for space with a massive disused dairy processing plant. Tucked behind all three sits a worn, low-slung building that previously served as a warehouse for a soup company and, before that, a factory producing diapers. You might think it, too, had since been forgotten, were it not for the plastic sheeting hinting at new construction inside and the small fleet of shining company cars stationed in the parking lot.
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