
Pioneer of Central Washington cryptocurrency boom falls on hard times - geephroh
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/pioneer-of-eastern-washington-cryptocurrency-boom-falls-on-hard-times/
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hinkley
I smell logistics failures here.

The article says 24 prefab buildings. Building 24 buildings at once as a new
company sets off alarm bells for me. It also talks about cost overruns. On
prefab buildings? Oof.

From the picture, if you look carefully I think you can see almost a dozen of
them in an incomplete state (the one on the far left might be done).

It sounds like they didn't stagger the buildout. I can't imagine the property
in Central Washington was the expensive bit. If I were involved in this
project I'd have been much more comfortable if they had bought all the land,
and come up with a three phase plan where they figure out how to do
construction without interrupting operations in the other buildings. If the
contractor screws up the first 8 you switch contractors.

Or maybe even better, you plan for 32 buildings and do it in 4 phases. Give
your salesforce a story about growth and good things in the future. They can
work with that.

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stephengillie
They could have used cargo containers instead of buildings. This is definitely
a cart-before-horse situation.

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hinkley
In the final years of Sun Microsystems, they converted containers to
integrated server rooms and were (starting to? planning to?) sell them.
Servers, cooling, access, everything but the power IIRC.

Still one of the more impressive pieces of tech I've seen.

[Edit] I had forgotten that Google was up to something pretty similar during
the same time frame.

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nonamenoslogan
Sssssssssss...ahh the sound of air leaving the bitcoin balloon slowly. Smells
like wasted energy to me.

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weedking
You have no idea what's coming.

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stevehawk
As in?

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allthecybers
I feel like this might be an opportunity for a larger provider to buy up this
infrastructure for what would amount to pocket change for them.

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pugworthy
Curious what application you'd see said provider use the infrastructure for.

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sp332
Since GigaWatt doesn't seem to have working pods deployed yet, it's a bunch of
buildings with really good power delivery and (I assume) pretty good internet
access. You could move in any kind of computing applications. A competitor in
the article mentioned renting time to AI researchers.

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duskwuff
Network requirements for Bitcoin mining are minimal. And the primary cost
factor for AI research will be the computer hardware, not the physical
facilities.

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fipple
I feel bad for people who were too ignorant to realize that cryptocurrency is
a massive fraud perpetrated by a few very shrewd insiders the same way that
Wall Street bankers manipulate financial markets.

