Techrecipe

Coin factory and mining world in flood damage

In June 27-28 in Anhui province, Jiangsu province, Sichuan province, Shandong province, Jilin province, such as northeastern China, the heavy rain in the area, the cryptographic coal mine has suffered massive damage. In Sichuan province, there is a place where all villages have been flooded, and a crypto-mining factory using hydroelectric power in Sichuan province and using cheap electricity rates was in operation. It was intended to save electricity bill, but the pond was eventually hit by the heavy rain this time.

If you look at the pictures around the damaged pit, you can guess the damage scale. Graphics equipment and dedicated ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) mining equipment are carried out of the factory. In the area, which has been under heavy rain for two days, the river is flooded right next to the plant and there is a risk of secondary disaster caused by the earth. All of the equipment that’s taken out is muddy. I spray water on the main board or the power supply, but it is unclear whether I can use it again.

It is unclear how much damage will be caused by the heavy rain this time. But at least the mining equipment is said to have flooded thousands to tens of thousands.

China is also the largest cryptographic plant in the world. China is 70% of the total. The largest of these is the mining plant in Sichuan. It seems to have affected the processing of bitcoin network computing as the local factory was damaged. Of course, the fact that bitcoin network hash rate has risen again in the same period has also pointed out that the impact of heavy rain on the whole bitcoin network was not bigger than expected.

It has already been reported since 2013 that large-scale mining factories are operated in China. The bit coin records transaction records in a distributed ledger and maintains the system by mining to allocate new bit coins according to the contribution to this calculation process. This is why the Bitcoin mining plant came into being.

Sichuan province also suffered from heavy rain due to the fact that it makes mining factories where electricity rates are cheap. It is said that there are many cases where the location is decided according to the electric charge such as the electric power cost is low due to the thermal power generation using the coal or the hydroelectric power can be utilized. Usually bitcoin digging equipment is used in a factory from 20,000 to 25,000 units. The number of employees working at factories is only a few dozen.

Because of the significant heat and noise, a circulating cooling system is necessary to extract the heat generated inside the plant by using a huge fan. As mentioned above, we need to supply a large amount of power to the crypto-mining power supply, so we can supply power to the PC-dedicated mining machine ASIC through a power outlet with a fuse box. It is enough to spend more money. Of course, the mining factory does not stop for 24 hours, but decrypts the password.

The level or scale of these mining plants is beyond imagination. Bitmain, the world’s largest bit coin miner, has reportedly ordered more wafers than semiconductor maker Nvidia, as bitcoin prices skyrocketed last year and mining competition overheated. BitMain said it bought 20,000 wafers from 16nm manufacturing process from TSMC in the fourth quarter of last year. This is the level that exceeds the order of NVIDIA, the world’s largest GPU maker. Of course, Bitmain, the ordering semiconductor, is used for manufacturing chips for ASIC, which is a mining device. As many as 5,670 ASIC chips can be manufactured per wafer. Based on this estimate, BitMain can produce 600,000 chips per month.

In April, BitMain announced the Antminer E3, a mining device that supports the Etherium and Etherium Classic. The ASICs enable more efficient mining than traditional GPU-based systems. Since the Etherium has attracted attention from last year, it can be obtained through mining as well as bit coin.

This dedicated machine has added efficiency by adding algorithms. For example, Antmore Miner E3 needs six NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti units to get the same computing power. If you build everything up to the actual power, $ 6,000 is enough. But the price of the plane is around $ 800. This is because you have a much higher price / performance / efficiency ratio.

Of course, there are a lot of points about such ASIC problems. Cryptography itself is trying to get out of the center, but ASIC is emerging and competition between bigger companies such as mining factories is becoming a centralized monopoly by big companies or organizations with funds. Indeed, in 2014, China has already accounted for 40% of the world’s bit coin mining, but it has been 70% since 2016.

In addition, there has been an increase in the price of graphics cards due to an increase in attempts to utilize general graphics cards without the problem of diggers. Nvidia said its sales of $ 3.27 billion in revenue for the second half of April this year amounted to $ 289 million. AMD has also seen the benefits of mining. One-third of AMD’s total graphics card profits are due to mining demand. Of course, during the past year, the cipher money soared, and the graphic card products had dried up in the market due to the use of the graphics card for digging, but now it is pointed out after the password cessation bubble is turned off do. It is pointed out that demand for graphic cards may disappear if the mining bubble collapses because the graphics card market is affected by the decline in demand for digits.

As such, the cryptographic market and the mining market for it are already forming a significant market, but it is obvious that the value of the cryptographic currency is not always fixed, and therefore it is always floating risk. It is already in the world of rollercoasters that have been plunging and soaring like floods caused by heavy rainfall in Sichuan province.

lswcap

lswcap

Through the monthly AHC PC and HowPC magazine era, he has watched 'technology age' in online IT media such as ZDNet, electronic newspaper Internet manager, editor of Consumer Journal Ivers, TechHolic publisher, and editor of Venture Square. I am curious about this market that is still full of vitality.

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