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Flooded Bitcoin mining farm
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Just lay some rice down
WELCOME TO THE BITCOIN FIELDS MOTHERFUCKER
techno remix of fortunate son approaches
eurobeat remix: oh, you're approaching me?
I didn't know this could exist in my life.
Now that I do, I don't want to be alive.
I’m crying
"I'm a bitcoin farmer motherfucka!"
Hey Ese, I'm breaking into your car!
Move over corn fields, here comes the Coin fields
Good idea, the rice attracts asians and they're really good at fixing electronics.
Well you wouldn't want Caucasians trying to help, they're just too damn tall
Best three consecutive comments in recent memory.
Way to ruin the chain!
This is great, I love it
Excellent movie.
“Jaguar, from men who’d like handjobs from beautiful women they hardly know.”
That can’t be real.
This is going to end up on some psycho rightwing website as an example of reverse racism.
How about potatoes? They’re a good absorbent, question is can the Irish fix anything other than DeLoreans?
Yes. -A drink.
That's ricist.
I see what you did there.
Place is already flooded. May as well farm some rice in there.
Also, have you tried turning it off and on again?
I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this but why aren’t they called mines instead of farms?
Because mines are more heavily regulated than farms.
Having been the MSHA liaison at a previous job, can confirm.
Because server farms were a thing long before bitcoin existed.
Bonus trivia; Server farms are called farms because Pixar set theirs up so that each computer made a different animal noise whenever it finished it's rendering task.
That cant be the only reason
Yeah they were definitely called farms before that.
That is definitely not why they are called farms. Humans have considered any kind of gathering of resources, whether it be electronic or not; farming, for a long time.
There is only a finite amount of bitcoin. Once it's all in circulation that's it. Just like other mined resources.
Bitcoin is an intangible construct of commerce created by humans. The reason it exists and has value is because we all agree it does through supply/demand. The supply is artificial. No tangible commodity is actually being cultivated. How can it run out?
What do you mean by the supply is artificial? It’s programmed by design to halve every few years and run out by 2140
Well their first problem was not putting the drives inside
Well it's a farm, how else is it going to grow?
In fact, I don't even see any hay here at all.
Huh they really needed this water too, look at that dirt. Shits unhealthy for the earth
Second problem was having them strewn all over the floor!
When it's outside, it's just the ground.
When it's the first floor, it's the ground floor.
Those are... graphics cards.
The GPU in them is suited very well for the algorithms it takes to crack bitcoin chains.
Unless I missed your joke somehow.
He meant indoor
Nah just some water cooling.
Omelette du Fromage. Omelette du Fromage. Omelette du Fromage. Omelette du Fromage. Omelette du Fromage. Omelette du Fromage.
I kind of hate how this random string of words is also a valid sentence.
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Burning tons of electricity for fucking nothing. Fuck bitcoin.
Seriously, the whole thing has always felt like a ponzi scheme. The diehards may be trying to make a decentralized currency and want the price to stabilize but most of the bitcoin bros just want to sell people on the idea to artificially increase the price. How are we supposed to replace the dollar and the euro with an unstable investment like bitcoin?
We aren't
They make money being able to manipulate the price
. We're just supposed to be pawns to sell to, nothing more
Furthermore, a 3% annual inflation rate like that of the dollar causes enough issues, bitcoin is bouncing around like a super ball dropped off a roof.
After multiple attempts to look into what actually gives crypto it's value, I've come to the conclusion that the answers are complicated in such a way that anyone who actually understands what's being said also understands that it translates to "it's bullshit but sounds legit and complex so people buy in."
So basically it's a "secret" bubble that may or may not wind up being the most important currency in the world or a "hey, remember that shit?" style scam depending on how many people buy in over the next decade or two.
Bitcoin is just a way for gambling addicts to get their fix while pretending it’s something other than a literal game
Don't get me wrong I actually am totally for cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is just the worst one there is. Most coins have moved to less energy intensive ways to manage their transactions like POS. If Etherium had the same market share as bitcoin I would be completely behind them but no, let's support the old crappy and wasteful coin I guess.
The electricity isnt "wasteful" in bitcoin mining. It's the price of security. Theres no way to co opt bitcoin without doing more work (burning more electricity) than the rest of the network combined.
POS is still unproven. Ethereum isnt using it yet. ETH 2.0 has been a planned upgrade for years and has been delayed many times, because its risky. And even if it works, it's as simple as buying a shit ton of Ether (talking a few billion dollars worth or so) to turn into a gate keeper who decides what transactions to include and which to deny. It'd take a lot of money, but if POS cryptos ever become a threat to national fiat currencies, I dont think that's an impossible outcome.
Theres no way to do that with proof of work cryptos. If a country like china or the USA tried to spend billions of dollars on miners to try and 51% attack bitcoin's blockchain, nodes and honest miners would work together to fork.
It won’t be Bitcoin. It’ll be E-Coin from Evil Corp
How can you even have a currency that's going through deflation? The goal of the people trying to make money and the people trying to use bitcoin as money are completely opposed, I never understand how it even works.
Doesn't feel like it, it is a Ponzi scheme.
Replace "bitcoin" with damn near any other commodity and this statement remains true. Every single thing you buy has a price affected by demand.
And they make these “mines” in places with super cheap electricity, usually coal-powered, presumably with fewer environmental regulations like scrubbers, making it extra dirty.
China "controls" Bitcoin, most the mining happens there.
Some people actually brought up Bitcoin mining as a way to manage power fluctuations from green energy which was interesting, but it still there are better things to put it towards.
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I really liked the idea of Bitcoin when I first misheard about it.
See I thought it was like SETI@home where you took some of your processor power and solved large problems. How I thought it worked was Bitcoin sold that processor power and everyone who put in cycles got a chance at coins. The company had a guaranteed buy back of the coins and as the company became more valuable they would buy the coins for more. Too many coins? they buy some up, not enough? they make them easier to get.
So the power was used to crunch big numbers, the coins had a real world value to them, and we got a crypto currency (which I still don't really see what the deal is with that but it seems convenient).
But no it is more akin to buying blow with extra steps.
People have made coins based off of folding and other useful processes. None of them have really taken off as far as I know.
And there are loads of rare earth minerals wasted for these mining farms. Bitcoin is a scourge on the environment.
I thought rare earth's were for monitors and batteries. These ASICS have none of that. They're basically just special purpose processors and support chips, nothing fancy. Silicon and copper.
Sure bitcoin mining is power intensive and the second hand value of mining equipment is low but the amount of e-waste from bitcoin mining is minimal in comparison to other big pollutants.
IDK those ASICs have a useful lifetime of months.
It's not just rare earths. Semiconductor fabs use plenty of hazardous chemicals like arsenic, hydrofluoric acid, nitric acid and sulfuric acid. Many of these Fabs are located in countries where labor is cheap and environmental regulations are lax, so chances are there's a lot of pollution going on.
Burning tons of electricity for the war of financial independence from the state printing press.
Honestly. The only reason I can think of as to why bitcoin shouldn’t be completely abandoned and banned from use is because it’s good for buying illegal drugs from other countries on the darknet. But that isn’t worth the environmental toll imo. Also from a governments point of views, the point I just made is a reason TO ban it, not to keep it, and they’re the ones who make the laws lol
At least there's still green, that's pretty nice
Much could be salvaged. I had a buddy who managed a state university restoration after a 500 year flood invaded many buildings on campus. He said power supplies and disk drives are usually shot, but surprisingly digital electronic salvage experts can clean and sterilise boards, dry them out, verify operation via testing procedures and put much back in service. They have to be on site pretty quickly to avoid corrosion. This was a couple decades ago and the modern digital equipment is more exacting, but there may be some egg frying capability left in those processors.
Can verify. Salvaging liquid damaged electronics was part of my job description years ago. Surprising how true this is; I've even managed to save a few pieces here and there with advanced corrosion.. I'm not saying I'd have used any of it for anything mission-critical, but they worked!
Pro tip: The trick is removing electricity from the equation as soon as possible.
Yah, a surprising number of electronic devices might be OK once they dry out (including phones). One can greatly increase the chance of success by not powering the device back on until it is 100% dry.
Electronics and water is fine.
Electricity and water is bad
Very true. The water doesn’t ruin them, most PCBs go through a wash process to get excess solder off of them at some point. It’s the power plus water combo that ruins them.
So I’ve heard of being able to put toasters and other electronics in the dishwasher or garden hose, assuming you dry them out...as best as possible.. there should be no issue?
No, because most water has minerals that can short circuits. You have to clean them with alcohol after or use the right water (distilled maybe, I forget).
Yup. Distilled water. Alcohol - perhaps, a weak concentration or quick rinse would be acceptable. My recollection is multiple baths to eliminate dirt, debris and mold or bacteria
Yes and the risk of pressurized water dislodging connections and whatnot
Unless the flood was super sudden and unexpected, you'd think they'd cut power to the operation before the water got in.
Man, I didn’t know thy had PCB boards 500 years ago. The more you know, eh?
The aboriginal peoples were sophisticated in the early 16th century. Roads, high-speed communication, space ship runways and large cities were all here prior to the Spanish invaders.
You know who it's really expensive for? The dozens of people thinking they're getting a cheap GPU on eBay but it doesn't work cuz it's from this lot.
These aren't GPU's. They're ASIC's.
Most are ASICs but there's a bunch of GPUs in the pic.
What does mining bitcoin even mean. They’re just pulling bitcoin out of the internet air. I’m so confused and always have been when it comes to this shit.
So bitcoin transactions get written on a digital piece of paper. Every fifteen minutes that piece of paper gets saved by every computer on the network. Each piece of paper has a new chunk of bitcoin that did not exist before (12 rn I think). That chunk goes to exactly one computer that "mines" it while saving the paper pieces. This is decided by lots. Each computer runs a bunch of pointless calculations that give more lots. More processing power means more calculations done means more lots means a higher chance to get the bitcoin in a piece of paper. That's the basics.
I've re-read that paragraph 11 or 12 times now... Nope... Still don't get it.
This is what I don't understand about bitcoin mining. If it's just a bunch of pointless random calculations, then it's like telling students to do lots of Calculus for a lollipop. Sure, whoever does the calculation fast enough wins the lollipop, but at the end of the day it's basically like a computer version of a MLM(Multi-level Marketing Scheme).
I had thought these calculations were were trying to solve quantum physics or some high level goal. It's not.
It’s pointless overall, kinda. What they’re calculating is the answer that let’s all previous transactions be verified.
It would have been cool if they were trying to solve Grand Unified Theory or SETI radio signals. Oh well.
I have so many questions. Like do these calculations somehow help update bitcoin counts every 15 minutes, and they get to split the extra 12 bitcoins based on who helped the most?
Or is it like you’ll get a bitcoin lottery with a tiny chance to make it big with 12 whole bitcoins?
It's the second one.
Roughly every 10 minutes, a new block is added to the chain (hence blockchain). The block contains all the transactions in that preceding period that have been verified by the miner. As a reward for doing that verification work, the miner is given 6.25 bitcoins (down from 12.5 a few weeks ago).
The verification process is intentionally difficult to balance scarcity of computer power with the inflation of the new coins.
In reality, each miner is a consortium of hundreds or thousands of people all contributing computing power to the group and the 6.25 BTC rewards are distributed to the group in proportion to how much computer power was contributed.
There are lots of other coins that have different processes. Bitcoin is just the first and biggest.
The underlying mechanism is called hashing. You can feed anything into a hashing algorithm and get a 256 digit long line of 1s and 0s. The word 'Hi' or a picture file or a movie or whatever. The process is irreversible, and you can't predict what you would get without putting it through the hashing. But, once you have hashed something, everyone can repeat the process easily, because the same input always gives the same output.
Here's how Proof of Work works. We'll hash a random word, and get a result like 0101011111111100010000... (256 digits in total). The first digit was 0. There's a 50% chance of getting at least one zero. On average you have to hash two random things to get one zero. There is a 25% chance to get a hash that starts with two zeros. There's a 1/256 chance to get a hash that starts with 00000000. Meaning, on average, you have to do 256 random hashes to find a hash with that many zeros. And, again, you can't predict how many zeros a given message will produce before putting it through the hash. In Bitcoin, and some other cryptocurrencies, a block contains a reference to the last block, as well as a bunch of transactions, plus some random letters and symbols. 'Mining' is the process of trying new sets of random letters and symbols trying to find a really long string of zeros. How many zeros are needed is calculated automatically by the network, and depends on how much processing power is being used, in an attempt to keep the average time it takes to mine a block at 10 minutes. Mining a block makes you a lot of money (Currently 6.25 Bitcoin, or ~$55,000). Every ten minutes. So there is kind of a lot of money involved.
In reality, you might be looking to find a random hash that starts with 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. If you find one of those, you tried a lot of times. You put a lot of money into it. You get a reward. Now, the reason the network uses this approach is that, if you just put all that effort and money in, you can be trusted not to try to fuck with the rules (Also, other miners will check that your block didn't break any rules. They check this automatically).
There are other cryptocurrencies that use a different approach to securing the network, but Bitcoin is still the most well known. It uses truly insane amounts of electricity, but what it accomplishes is it allows you to hold money in something like a bank account but without a bank. It lets you send that money to your pal in China in minutes (10 minutes for Bitcoin, faster for most newer cryptocurrencies). And it does shield you from inflation etc if there are issues with your local fiat currency, like in some African and South American countries. New bitcoins are minted with every new block, but the inflation rate is currently about 1.8% - less than many countries' currencies, and every four years that inflation rate is cut in half.
All of that said, Bitcoin is cool to learn about, but a lot of us crypto fans prefer some other cryptocurrencies to grandpa Bitcoin. It was the first, and it is the most famous, but newer currencies have learned from Bitcoin and build faster, cheaper, more environmentally friendly networks.
If you think the people running banks are generally dicks and/or leeches, check out this lecture on how crypto cuts out banks for a lot of services.
It secures it. Without the difficulty, it would be easy to fake transactions. With mining, it is the work that makes it nearly impossibly expensive to fake a transaction on the ledger. Without it, there is no security, there is no value.
Now why at all? Because currency free of any governmental control is an idea many people of many different political ideologies can get behind. Prior to Bitcoin you had to trust someone else and there would be a single point of control/failure. Crypto can't be easily stopped by governments. Though I suspect that they fuel the ignorance you find in this thread and do their best to sabotage the ideas, while pushing their own, controllable cryptocurrency.
Who ever gets the right answer, gets all 6.25 bitcoins.
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This guy knows how to conspiracy.
Ultimately, I wouldn't be surprised if it was being used for some nefarious reasons. So many floating-points can't just be only used for making money?
Laughs in Ferengi
It’s not trying to solve anything. But you can’t call them pointless since they actually attempt to get something valuable—if you were in a gold mine and pickaxed through a ton of stone to try to find a vein of gold, people wouldn’t say you were just digging for pointless rock. Your digging has a purpose, and the purpose is what drives the value.
Still so confusing haha thank you tho!
I'm still confused how it was determined that these digital pieces of "paper" would be worth real money and everyone just sort of went with it.
Isn't that the same as regular paper money? We decided that a $20 bill has value and everyone just went with it. Except instead of being backed by a government, it's backed by the hashing algorithms.
Some guy decided it would be worth paying someone a few thousand bitcoin for them to buy him pizza with their credit card online. Someone else decided that was a good deal, and that set the beginning rate.
So it's a gigantic waste of electricity to keep a speculators market going. Got it.
It's my understanding that most offshoots of bitcoin use much more energy-efficient methods and rely more on transaction fees to pay the people running the computers, bitcoin itself is just the biggest still because it was the first and is the most recognizable.
Mining is in essence pulling lottery tickets out of a hat. The more computing power you have, the faster you can pull tickets. But, the network automatically adjusts so it gets harder to pull tickets when more computers are doing it, so on average one person wins every ten minutes, even though more computers are being used.
And the act of pulling tickets from the hat also helps secure the network. So the incentives are aligned to do the thing that makes it more secure.
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It's no longer done with GPUs. Much faster ASICs are now used for bitcoin mining. GPUs are still used for some cryptocurrencies, depending on the mining algorithm.
It's like a demented game show.... everyone competes by doing a fuckload of math really fast, and the person who finds the number that matches the desired output, "wins"
You have a ledger - a file which keeps a record of transactions. That's all a cryptocurrency is: a public file listing the amount of coins in each account, and all transactions. Every computer on the network has a copy of this file. When Alice wants to pay Ben, the ledger (every copy) is updated with 'Alice pays Ben 5 coins. Alice now has 50 coins, Ben now has 17 coins.'
So far so obvious. But this clearly causes a problem: what is to stop Ben from updating the ledger without Alice's approval? In fact, what's to stop any computer from sending out a false alteration to the public ledger? Any type of password requires a central authority to hold the password in secret, and verify transactions. But the whole point of a cryptocurrency is to avoid a central point of failure.
So you make a password needed to modify the ledger that isn't like a regular pre-set password, like the original programmer's birthday, but is a password that can be computed from the current ledger. For example, the password could be the numeric value of the first letter of each line plus 5, so if the ledger looked like this:
The password would be '678' (this is what's called a 'hash': a number based on simplifying a larger set of data)
The point is to introduce a cost in time and energy to get the password and hence modify the ledger. Of course, the time it would take for a computer to work out that A = 1 and add 5 to it is infinitesimal. So the actual computation to get the password involves checking through trillions of hashes one by one until you get one that has the right mathematical properties; a random but statistically predictable process. It therefore takes computing time, and a cost in electricity, for the computer doing the verification to modify the ledger for a single transaction. This is 'mining': performing computationally expensive calculations to find a particular hash, thereby participating in the network's verification process.
The clever part of the mathematics is that the algorithm doesn't take the same time both ways: i.e, it takes ages to find the password, but only a moment to check that it meets the mathematical requirements.
So when Alice and Ben want to make a transaction, they send the record of their transaction to several other computers on the network; with the power of all of them working together, one will find the password fairly quickly. The one that does sends out the modified version of the ledger with the password to the whole network, and all the other computers on the network check the password (which they can do instantly because of the asymmetric nature of the algorithm), see that it's correct, and modify their ledgers, resulting in a new version of the public ledger accepted by the whole network.
When the ledger is updated with Alice and Ben's transaction, the network also automatically adds a coin to the account of the address that provided the verification, thereby paying them for mining.
People used to mine on their own computers, but these days the computing requirements are so heavy that you need an entire rack of GPUs to actually make any kind of money doing it.
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No. it would be very stupid to use quadros for mining
they're reference model of rx580 from AMD
nah, those are sapphire rx470 or 470D cards. worse than reference cooler (no copper core), and worth less than $100 each on a good day
This pictures a few years old now, but when this pic was taken they were worth about $3-400 second hand. Now the big silver blocks on the ground are dedicated miners for bitcoin and cost like 5-10k each. Presumably we are seeing $¼-½million+ of dead hardware.
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It’s a shame it’s not a great performer, since it’s such a beautiful card.
No way, they are ASIC for bitcoin mining
Thank goodness for insurance!
"Hello insurance? I left a quarter million dollars worth of computer equipment outside on my patio, and you won't believe it, it rained!"
Pretty sure it rained inside the sweat shop/mine then they put the etronics outside to dry
Still looks wet outside, the yellow cord in the bottom left is still partially submerged. Maybe if they figured it was ruined anyway, but I suspect they had a fair weather mining operation that encountered a rainy day
good riddance. cryptocurrencies are an environmental disaster.
I had never thought about the effect that it had on the environment. Any source that might show how much it contributes to that kind of thing?
Bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as all of Ireland.
Got it. We need to shut down Ireland to stabilize this mess.
As an Irish person I understand that sacrifices must be made. Green Harp going dark, over.
Had enough of those.... checks notes.
Electricity using bastards!
I see this as an absolute win.
Magazine source:
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/07/09/why-bitcoin-uses-so-much-energy
https://jsis.washington.edu/news/the-political-geography-and-environmental-impacts-of-cryptocurrency-mining/
Bitcoin is limited. There is a hard cap as to how many bit coins can exist. In order to hash the last coin the amount of electricity used will consume more than several countries output in a year.
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I'll preface this question by saying that I definitely don't know better than you about how it works, but I'm a little confused about this. You say that additional miners join the network to keep the block mining interval at 10 minutes. Does that mean that without additional miners, it takes additional computational cycles to mine a block over time? If so, wouldn't that mean that more electricity would have been used anyway, simply because it's taking longer to mine?
This thread has been eye opening for me as far as how few people understand cryptocurrencies. And its surprising how hostile people can be toward something they dont understand when they could increase their knowledge of the subject by 100x in ~30 minutes on YouTube.
Thanks for being one of the educated voices here.
Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies (e.g. Bitcoin) are an environmental disaster. There are other types.
Hopefully they take over then
For what it's worth, my money is on precisely none of the current cryptocurrencies surviving in the long run. The idea behind cryptocurrencies is certainly thought-provoking, even interesting, and some of the key concepts have their place in modern currency markets. As they exist now, however, I don't see it. There are glaring flaws which need to be ironed out, and I believe they will, in time.
My bet is that there will be a bunch of banking systems which use some form of crypto in the background but so far as public cares it's still just a bank, just with better records
It's an old pic, they were decommissioned I thought, and just sat in the weather
Don't really have any sympathy, they were kinda asking for it.
Is this the reason mid teir graphics cards are like 300$ nowadays.
Good fuck them. They make it impossible for anyone but the 1 percent to afford good cards
I got a 1080 GTX and it paid for itself by mining shit coins. If it wasn't for crypto is still have my old 960.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting crypto, but I am saying it isn't doing people from getting GPUs.
Good.
Yes, just throw it all out in the street.
That hurts me in ways i didnt think were possible...
This picture is very weird. I get drug dealer vibes
Water cooling, Nice
Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it in again?
But can it run Crysis?
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i’d say the building was flooded and this pic is them all laid outside to assess damage and what not
Building was made of cotton candy. This is all that's left.
OOOOOF
Ok someone needs to explain to me wtf Bitcoin is. I'm even more confused after seeing this picture.
Best definition: Bitcoin is a non tangible real asset. Gold is a tangible real asset. Fiat money is a tangible financial asset.
Bitcoin is the first (that I know) non tangible real asset.
One of the datacenters our equipment is in had a customer with a bitcoin mine farm in it. You could always hear the screaming fans from inside the rack. Not sure how well they ever did but it was pretty cool to see
Man fuck these people they the ones who made ram so expensive.
this is why they’re so expensive
I think without the flooding it would still belong in this sub
How do you mine bit coin ive never understood this
These assholes are why graphics cards are so expensive
All those GPUs. Fuuuuuu.
There are no GPUs in this picture. They are ASICs. Some look like GPUs because of the form factor but they are not.
Gotcha. TIL.
Every Gamer needing an upgrade felt a disturbance in the force with this one.
If they had insurance to cover the loss, would they be mad if the insurance company paid them in traditional currency instead of Bitcoin?
Sudden inrush of gtx 1650's on Ali Express. Lol
I'm so confused, what am i even looking at? What is Bitcoin mining
Will be a flood of used video cards on the market now..
Are bitcoins still a thing?
With all the Bitcoin they can totally just build a new one.
This is some graphical content.
That hurts
Good. It's terrible for the environment
Good
bitcoin mining should be forbidden. such a waste of energy.
Fuck these assholes for driving up gpu prices.
Yes, because more demand is bad for a market.
Looks ready for harvest
At least there won't be heat disipation issues
The equipment was getting hot and one of the interns heard something about 'water cooling.'
If they weren’t powered on when this happened then most of this can be saved.
How is no one getting that this after they got them outside the building in front of them? Do people seriously think they just leave them outside all the time.
From August 2019 https://news.8btc.com/bitcoin-mining-farms-in-sichuan-are-destroyed-by-raging-flooding-again
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You can't mine Bitcoin profitably with a traditional server, you need hardware built specifically to mine Bitcoin called an ASIC.
This hurts to look at
coughs I think I’ve got the black lung, pop
Did they never expect it to rain? Like never?
Water cooling
Are those 5700s
I'm curious, how much money would this cost? And how much would it make you a week?
If they weren't on when it flooded I bet most of those are still good. They'll need a good cleansing though.
Can someone explain to me what bitcoin is and how it works?