
AsicMiner's Immersion Cooling Mining Facility - mdelias
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.msg3709913#msg3709913
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nakedrobot2
It makes me sad that all this computation can't simultaneously be used to fold
proteins, or some other "externally productive" calculation.

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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.

~~~
angersock
So, this cooling is basically a ghetto monkey-copy of techniques Cray
pioneered two or three decades ago--right down to the use of 3M Fluorinert
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2)).

I don't think that this technology is going to be readily adaptable to
anything other than brute-forcing hashes. I don't know of any fundamentally
useful engineering or research being generated that would have application
elsewhere.

EDIT: Which isn't to say it isn't _neat_...I just don't think it'll bear fruit
anywhere else.

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msie
"ghetto monkey"? Really?

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angersock
Had I written "ghetto-monkey copy" your annoyance would be merited; note,
however, that I did not.

It is a monkey-copy (of the ghetto variety).

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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).

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jason_slack
So are you saying that someone could mine bitcoins from their day-to-day
MacBook Pro and actually see a return on that?

Edit: I get that I would need a USB miner. I could pick up a 12 port USB HUB
from Amazon and 12 USB Miners for a few hundred dollars of an investment.

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mbreese
No.

You'd need ~ $500 in upfront costs (12*~$40 + $20 USB hub, plus cooling -
unless someone knows where to get USB ASICs cheaper - if so, I want to know!),
and you're probably not going to make that back in any reasonable amount of
time.

There are online calculators to tell you what the time to get a return on your
investment is, but ballpark, you'd be looking at 30-50 weeks minimum to get
back your money. And that's factoring in running the system for 24 hours,
which would put extra wear and tear on your MBP. And by that time, your
effective rewards would be less for mining... etc...

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jason_slack
so it would be better to plug in this setup to a CentOS server that I have
running all the time anyway which has a faster internet, 32gb ram, etc, etc

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mbreese
Yes. If you have a setup where the _extra_ cost of power and cooling is
negligible, then you would be able to mine effectively for free.

But then you still have the issue of buying the mining gear. And you'll
probably never mine enough Bitcoins to ever pay back the initial purchase
price. You'd be better served to just buy some coins from an exchange.

I have a 330Mhash/sec USB ASIC miner running right now on an old netbook, but
I'm just doing it for fun. It's been running now for the past 2 weeks, and
I've made less than $2. I spent only $20 for my ASIC though, so it's not too
bad. A similar miner today would cost $35-$40 on ebay.

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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.

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scott_karana
That was my takeaway as well.

China looks like a fantastic country to live if you're a talented engineer.

(Obviously, you might not make as much money, but what could you pioneer with
the agility you'd have?)

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beachstartup
eh, no. you might get to work on some interesting stuff that's unique to
china/asia, but quality of life is much higher in the US if you are a worker
bee, aka a talented engineer.

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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.

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dmix
> a pretty powerful engine for computing 'X' for some useful definition of X

Password cracking-as-a-service for China's government/companies?

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wlian
Unfortunately Bitcoin ASICs are only good at double SHA-256 hashing; meaning
it only does sha256(sha256(INPUT)). Probably not remotely useful of any modern
password systems.

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ChuckMcM
Correct, the boards are not useful for anything other than bitcoin mining.
However, you give an engineer that form factor and have them design a password
cracking board, now you pull out and scrap all the Miner boards, replace them
with Password cracking boards, and all of the investment in the infrastructure
around the boards is preserved.

My reasoning is that replacing just the boards should be less expensive than
creating the entire system from scratch. It may not be much less if the
infrastructure is cheap compared to the boards but less.

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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?

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ams6110
Phase change (liquid to gas) removes a lot more heat.

It's not being evaporated into the atmosphere, it is undoubtedly being
recondensed to liquid state and recirculated.

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runeks
I believe you can see that in this picture:
[https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i41.tinypic.com/29nxc9x.jpg&fn...](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i41.tinypic.com/29nxc9x.jpg&fnr)

The coolant is pouring off the copper pipes, which it presumably has condensed
on.

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VMG
I love living in a science fiction cyberpunk novel

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

Something like 3M Novec maybe?

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alsocasey
Something called 3M fluoinert.

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

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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.

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fierycatnet
The whole world is not waiting for the #1 economy in the world to tank with
its currency.

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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?

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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).

~~~
evolve2k
Oh it was my understanding that at a certain date (2015?) the system would
stop issuing new bitcoins. How are miners paid then?

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ck2
I don't think it stops issuing coins, I think the reward keeps halving until
it reaches zero (beyond 8 decimals).

The question is are people going to bother to use $10k gigahash machines with
dollars/day in power to make 0.0000001 BTC

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zwily
If the reward gets low enough that people stop mining, then the network adapts
to make mining easier, keeping the mining rate constant. It's brilliant.

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

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

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marshray
Presumably things are different in Hong Kong.

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sbierwagen
Yeah, but how could electricity possibly be any cheaper there? What are the
real estate prices like, then, $1000/m^2?

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marshray
I dunno, but it's a lot easier to subsidize energy costs than it is to create
more space.

Plus, adding liquid cooling does not appreciably increase the energy costs,
and could even decrease them if it allowed savings on, say, air conditioning.

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

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anonymoushn
Estimates of this sort depend crucially on the rate at which other labs ship
ASICs. A good guess is that the hashing power of the network will double
monthly until whatever machines people have right now are barely worth
running, but there's not a lot of certainty.

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omegant
It seems that this will happen during the first or second quarter of 2014 at
this rate of difficulty increase...

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

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

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atwebb
Which isn't really the title of the forum post, on HN post titles tend to be
changed to whatever the article/original post's title is to discourage
linkbait.

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sscalia
Has anyone said... buttcoin yet?

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

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betterunix
Bitcoin is respected among _some_ HNers. There are still a lot of people who
question its value, its long-term prospects, who call the current price spike
a bubble, who call it a toy/gimmick/scam/etc., and so forth.

~~~
GigabyteCoin
Unproductive comments have never been accepted on HN either way.

