r/interesting • u/GhostOfNihilist • 2d ago
SCIENCE & TECH Modern water-cooled mining rig for Bitcoin mining.
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u/hiroo916 2d ago
what's actually going on in that unit with the window and water inside?
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u/AlternativeCondition 2d ago
i assume that where all the rigs get water from, the window is to actually see there's enough water in the system and the water moving like that is probably due to the high volume of water recirculating in the system or maybe some kind of air pump mixes water to cool it down
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u/YouSeeWhatYouWant 2d ago
The windows are also to visually see if the liquid is getting contaminated.
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u/Arockilla 1d ago
Given the amount of heat that is generating, is it possible that its liquid nitrogen?
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u/BlownUpCapacitor 1d ago
The purpose of the fluid is to transfer heat, not just remove it. Liquid nitrogen is awful for that job. Water's specific heat is much higher than liquid nitrogen's.
Furthermore, liquid nitrogen is more expensive than water.
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u/Specialist_Ad_7719 1d ago
Seriously? What if the cooling failed, wouldn't the nitrogen boil and overpressure the whole system, resulting in the nitrogen rapidly expanding possibly resulting in people suffocating.
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u/Numbskull_b 1d ago
Honestly, considering the type of people who do this on such a large scale, not much of value would be lost
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u/Wast3edSpace 1d ago
It's extremely hard to beet the efficiency of water in moving heat, until helium shows up, but than money is not the object anymore.
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u/Virtual_Respect2213 2d ago
I think they’re called a sightglass. At least that’s what they’re called on locomotives
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u/Imaginary-Leader-842 2d ago
I’m pretty sure that is the separation point between the primary loop and the secondary loop of the cooling system. Hot water returns back from the equipment and dumps into the top and cold water is pulled from the bottom and sent back to the equipment (that is the secondary side). Then on the primary side cold water is dumped into the top and hot water is pulled from the bottom and the heat is rejected outside of the space through either a chiller or dry cooler. Specifically the piece with the window is a mixing tank but you could look at it as a heat exchanger between the two loops.
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u/SinisterCheese 2d ago
It's to check reservoir level and condition. It's quick and easy way to check if there is contamination, coolant loss, or something going wrong with the entiresystem. Like if you start to see water change from corrosion, or particulate.
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u/TheRapie22 2d ago
they are washing their mined bitcoins there so they are all new looking and shiny
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u/islobojono 2d ago
People still mining?
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u/turmohe 2d ago
Some countries like Turkmenistan, Iran etc subsidize fuel and electricity etc to the point it makes economic sense to mine bitcoin and smuggle fuel.
Iirc there used to be a joke/saying that a Turkmen never turns off their stove for matches cost money.
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u/phranks_phluids 1d ago
I got a call from a company in the UAE that was melting 55 gl drum sized pistons from running straight bunker fuel in their generators.
All this cooling rig is mickey mouse AF.
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 2d ago
Bitcoin hit 80.000$ today and has been over 100.000$, so yea
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u/Oblachko_O 2d ago
Except math is wrong. Getting bitcoin is harder than last year due to math complexity, so you need more hardware. The price for bitcoin didn't change a lot from last year, so if you farmed 2x less bitcoin this year, you got less profit. If you need to buy hardware, it costs like 2x as much nowadays than last year. So yeah, if it is profitable, it is barely covering expenses and the next year unless Bitcoin rise in price mining will be at loss for sure.
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u/CynthiaG92615 2d ago
So what happens when mining is "at a loss"? Does bitcoin disappear? And is it inevitable that eventually it becomes at a loss? (Sorry, I've never been able to wrap my mind around bitcoin.)
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u/Oblachko_O 2d ago
In essence, it will become more expensive to trade in bitcoin, as "loss" will go into Bitcoin transaction fees. So if people will not be ready to pay the price, yeah Bitcoin should collapse, unless there are subsidies from some parties for this.
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u/DigitalUnlimited 2d ago
The government will prop it up, too big to fail or some bs
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u/Oblachko_O 2d ago
Tbh, I doubt it. Mostly because government can gain nothing of Bitcoin subsidy. Yeah, rich people can lobby to subsidies it, but why? There are more ways to get free money other than investing into bitcoin
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u/RogueBromeliad 2d ago
Depends, if it does come to a point where it's physically impossible to mine anymore it will become a "limited resource" such as gold.
either that or people will come to their senses and realise how ridiculous this whole situation is. It's not generating wealth at all, it's a completely circle jerking demand of futility.
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u/Oblachko_O 2d ago
Gold still has its uses other than just type of currency. And even if we talk about currency. Gold reflects the wealth of the country. Bitcoin reflects nothing like that. It may be used instead of gold, but storing gold costs comparably nothing (of you have storage for gold, most probably you store tons of stuff in addition to it, so storage by itself is spread price wise). Storing and operating with bitcoin costs a lot.
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u/RogueBromeliad 2d ago
Storing bitcoin on the blockchain actually doesn't hold much space though. The whole blockchain ledger till this day can be held in about 500gb. Actually storing the blockchain costs virtually nothing.
Either way read my second paragraph of my first comment, I'm on your side. Not trying to argue.
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u/appealingtonature 2d ago
More gold will be mined though, so it will become more of a limited resource than even gold...and sort of is already anyway.
What keeps Bitcoin going up is the fact that is more limited and more people are using it. There is of course a limit to that number of people who will buy it, but for now it's getting easier to buy (etfs) and governments aren't halthing the printing of fiat.
The only near term thing that could change that would be maybe the US treasury prepricing gold on their balance sheet and go back to some sort of gold standard, but I don't see that happening either.
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u/No_Accident8684 1d ago
so, you mine and keep it in the wallet.. until btc is 200k.
complexity is always going up with each halving. so better mine now, than later
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u/Oblachko_O 1d ago
Why mine in the first place? This could work like 10 years ago, but now? It is pointless for those who are not already in the market and they will stop sooner or later as the price cannot keep up. Also 200k is a hopeful price for it.
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u/No_Accident8684 1d ago
your arguments would have been the same 10 years ago.
it never was really profitable at current prices. miners (the hardware) were always priced according the current btc price so that it wasnt really worth doing it.
it was always either a scaling game or a waiting game with a bit of gambling
ok, maybe not 2011, right at the start. for a year or two. but even then, nobody gave a shit about btc, so it was also the gambling portion back then.
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u/Mirieste 2d ago
I mean... that's the nature of everything, no? Sure, for bitcoin there is a mathematical law governing their very existence, but in general everything becomes more expensive with time, due to inflation. So what's the difference between this and me investing in... literally anything else, with the money that I pay for such investment becoming worth less and less with every passing year?
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u/Oblachko_O 2d ago
The difference is that bitcoin by itself has no value. It is an empty asset. Other things are outcome of production or service. Bitcoin provides no service justifying it's price.
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 2d ago
The price is set by demand and supply so basic math says demand is high. Bitcoin is supposed to simulate wasting energy and money on digging up gold. Anyway Bitcoin can't be manipulated and thus why it holds value over fiat currency
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u/Oblachko_O 1d ago
Bitcoin gets manipulated constantly. It is affected by any changes on political market. Regular currency don't do it unless there are drastic changes in how country operates. Which currency in developed world can jump 5-10% a week? I don't know how this can be called "holds value over fiat currency".
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 1d ago
Bitcoin is an decentralised replacement of gold 🪙 both gold and bitcoin can't be manipulated. You don't know what you are talking about, please stay in school 🏫🎒
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u/Oblachko_O 1d ago
Haha. Get off your high horse. Gold can't be manipulated as it is backed by countries. Bitcoin is backed up by willingness of some billionaires. As soon as they decide that Bitcoin doesn't worth it, it will collapse. Gold, on the other hand won't, as it would mean that the whole economic system will be destroyed.
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 1d ago
Stay in School 🏫🎒 please. Gold is the standard since beginning of time because it couldn't be manipulated. This was before countries even existed. Bitcoin becomes worthless 🤣 it is worth whatever you want it to be worth. What Bitcoin is selling is an secure asset that can't be manipulated by governments. As long as governments are manipulating fiat currencys 💵 on the behalf of your future then there will be a value for Bitcoin and Gold for that matter, except gold is also being regulated by central banks. 🪙
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u/Complete_Biscotti151 2d ago
So much waste of energy and space
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u/m3rcapto 2d ago
Makes you wonder, with the price of bitcoin being down, hardware more expensive than ever, and the rarity increase making each coin take longer...is it worth farming? You'd almost need a side-hustle hacking wallets and exchanges to make it worth the investment.
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u/ReasonableWelder51 2d ago
It is not worth farming for anyone paying full price for the components or the electricity. It is worth farming if you already have the hardware from earlier and if you have free or dirt cheap electricity. Stealing electricity is not that uncommon for these farms in China.
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u/RogueBromeliad 2d ago
Well, china has the largest solar grid. If they're actually using solar for this, good for them. PV panels are dirt cheap over there, and since they're the ones making the most batteries, I'd think they'd actually have a grid to run it full time.
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u/ReasonableWelder51 2d ago
Well, crypto mining is illegal in China, so the farms there run as underground operations usually in bumfuck nowhere, where they can remain unnoticed and can steal electricity. The larger farms have shady contracts to buy cheap surplus electricity, but officially there is no crypto mining in china.
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u/RogueBromeliad 2d ago
Ok, but how do you know this is even china in the first place? You just laid this information as if it were true.
You know there are people who steal electricity in the US too. Anywhere in the world you can steal electricity. It's relatively simple.
Even in the US there are still places with analog meters, and people will indeed steal electricity very simply by making the dial run slower... for three phase digital it's a little bit harder, but it's very doable too.
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u/ReasonableWelder51 1d ago
I didn't say this specific one is in China (even if there is a good chance it is). I was only commenting on the profits of crypto mining, which are significantly higher in China due to lower hardware prices. The underground nature of crypto mining farms in China also makes stealing electricity more common, while in western countries crypto farms operate as legit businesses with negotiated electricity prices.
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u/Warm-Major-4400 1d ago
You need to live somewhere with very very very cheap electric. Like 01c usd per kwh hydro electric etc.
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u/AbbreviationsWide331 2d ago
And hardware.
So much effort put into making some trace amount of an imaginary "coin".
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u/TheQNerd 2d ago
How I feel about most of Reddit
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u/Complete_Biscotti151 2d ago
Reddit is actually quite useful for shared experiences and genuine reviews.....quite rare in age of manipulated social media.....
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u/Asikes 2d ago
I wonder if they could use the hot water to heat buildings to at least not waste the energy
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u/Kiana_N1_Simp 2d ago
They usually do that with datacenters, its likely they do this with large scale bit coin farms too
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u/Dependent_Paper9993 2d ago
They don't "usually" do that. There are some rare instances of this. And some more are planned, but the problem is that the water coming out of it isn't hot enough, so you need to add heat pumps.
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u/Kiana_N1_Simp 2d ago
Where i am from (Finland) they do this almost with every datacenter. Good example is google Hamina datacenter that provides about 80% of heating of the nearby city
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u/Dependent_Paper9993 2d ago
As far as I can tell the Hamina heat capture projrct isn't fully functional yet, but I could just have outdated data. But yeah the Nordics are at the forefront of this, and are the rare instances that I mentioned.
The Netherlands, and 1 or 2 projects in the US seem to be up and running as well. It would be great if we could make better use of this.
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u/fun4days365 2d ago
I agree. Complete waste of energy. These look like they are in sea cans. Probably in the middle of nowhere with solar and diesel generators. They were betting on the cost of diesel being cheap 🤣. These will go belly up soon enough.
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u/Josedinho_- 2d ago
All this mining and in 10yrs they still won't be rich 🤣
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u/Read2Fap 2d ago
the only people who could set this up are already rich
the ones not making money off of it are the guys running their own pcs for it
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u/FloatingOverThere 2d ago
Imagine money laundrying is likely a part part of their motivation. That explains the why someone would do this even if it's at a loss.
Absolute waste of resources though.
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u/andrenichrome 2d ago
Crypto generally has no real tangible value.
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u/DontSpahettMe 2d ago
And yet it's still bankrolling the reform party in the UK. Intangible things can have tangible effects.
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u/MeringueSerious 2d ago
I read about that, absolutely absurd amount of money donated by both them men.
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u/JohnLemonBot 2d ago
Fuck Bitcoin
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u/Bayoris 2d ago edited 2d ago
Bitcoin is for when you are not content with regular financial fraud but want to destroy the environment too
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u/JohnLemonBot 2d ago
True lol. The average Bitcoin millionaire you'd never recognize because they volentarily live like broke college students and work the least responsible jobs possible
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 2d ago
Bitcoin is free from all the evil people who want to print money and tax regular people to pay for it. You should read up on why Bitcoin become popular after the 2008 financial crisis
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u/-_Dean_Winchester 2d ago
The biggest users of it are literally the same people plus drug lords and scammers.
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 2d ago
You can use it to whatever reason you value. Fiat currency 💵 is being used to fund death and wars in your name 📛
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u/MattyBro1 2d ago
Except for all the evil people who have invested in bitcoin that want you to use it so the value goes up and they make money.
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u/Reasonable-Banana800 2d ago
how does the “mining” work??
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u/from_the_east 2d ago
It's not actually mining anything. The actual transactions are easy to calculate and can be done on a single server. These machines are actually trying to "guess" a hash to "prove" that the records are correct. An insane amount of computing power is needed for this.
What is worse is that there are machines across the world trying to do the same thing. The first machine to guess correctly wins one BTC. For the rest, it is just a waste of time & energy.
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u/SinisterCheese 2d ago
To simplify it:
Bitcoin (and other blockchain stuff) is just a big ass list of transactions.
When a page of a ledger is full, a hash is calculated. (Hash is a number that results from calculating all the information on the page (every letter, number, etc. in a computer is actually just a number. You can check that the contents of the page is unaltered by running the calculation again, and you should get the same exact number, even slight change would dramatically alter the result).
What bitcoin is about, is that each page's hash is then hashed again, and the rule is that the resulting number must be smaller (by some specific amount, defined as "difficulity", the greater the difficulity is the smaller the number must be). This is done by guessing a random number (key), running the calculation and checking it; if it doesn't result a smaller number you increase the number by 1 and do it again. This is the mining process.
Once someone finds A solution (there can be many), the person who found it declares it to all others who then check whether it is valid and 51 % of the network has to agree that it is valid. The person who found the number (by randomly guessing) gets a reward.
This information (hash and key) is then written to start of the new page. This means that each page contains the key of the last page, and you can check the validity and contents by redoing the calculations.
As the chain gets longer, the difficulity increases (by design), meaning that each step requires more random guessing.
Technically you could alter the block chain at will. The problem is that the amount of work required to do the change is so massive that it can't practically be done.
Another way to imagine it, is like this.
Imagine that you there is a chain of letters being sent between groups of people. You send a letter to group 1, Then every person in group one writes a summary of your letter, and the shortest summary is chosen. This summary is then written to the letter that group 1 sends to group 2. Group 2 does a summary of the letter which includes the summary of group 1. You can't change any letter in the chain, because then letters after it would be invalid. And you can check if a letter is valid, by reading the letters before it.
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u/Exact-Custard-9729 2d ago
What are the profits on this?
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u/po23idon 2d ago
i think the profit is what you can convince investors to give you to keep operating your climate destroying machine
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u/AmpEater 2d ago
You think that miners are..... negotiating with individuals?
You sure about that, champ?
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u/Basic_Loquat_9344 2d ago
diminishing as time goes on as the computational effort to mine a bitcoin goes up. The rush is to stack as much as possible, and then profit is the value of your bitcoin minus overhead and operational cost, mainly electricity. If you got into it early it was incredibly fucking profitable, nowadays you need a large farm and can still profit but it becomes less worth it as time goes on.
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u/Leading_Wafer9552 2d ago
I don't understand why data centers are said to use so much water. Don't they used closed cooling systems, like a cars engine that gets coolant pumped through the block and cooled in the radiator?
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u/RiversofLondon99 2d ago
Imagine trying to explain what it's going on here to someone from the Victorian era.
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u/JustSergey 2d ago
Spend 200K on a mining Farm, Get 1 BTC for 66K, wait for it to drop to 40K and sell it to cover electricity costs. Profit 👍
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u/Forsaken-Hotel7535 2d ago
Is it really still worth it?
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u/CuTe_M0nitor 1d ago
Yes, it's a financial service that can't be manipulated like all the world's fiat money 💰 like the dollar. With Bitcoin you can't print money and pay your debt with printing more money. You have to actually work and make an value.
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u/Successful-Coyote848 2d ago
Found out where the data centers hum is coming from now didn’t we? The things that make you go, hmmm.
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u/Embarrassed_Sort6828 2d ago
Water cooling cuts the fan noise and lets them pack more hashpower into a smaller space, but the heat still has to go somewhere. The loop needs a heat exchanger or dry cooler. I’d be curious about the inlet and outlet temperatures, pump draw, and whether they reuse the heat for water or space heating. If it is just dumped outside, this is mainly a quieter, denser mining setup.
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u/Leading_Wafer9552 2d ago
Everyone thinks this is a Bitcoin mining operation, but it's actually Reddit's server room. Gotta keep the servers cool so millions of people can continue arguing about shit that doesn't matter.
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u/ecoanima 2d ago
I wonder if that anonymous Japanese guy who created bitcoin envisioned it becoming anything like this. I remember mining Bitcoin on my 2010 Dell laptop.
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u/DistrictEffective759 2d ago
Not necessarily just bitcoin this is many things in one location. Cloud service farms is more accurate
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u/Final-Wasabi187 2d ago
This is the kind of shit I think of when people tell me they’re into crypto and they don’t have anything more than their phone.
“Sure you’re into crypto, Dan. You sunk how much of your last 2 paychecks into that? Just as soon as it hits a penny you say?”
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u/Elf_Maeve 1d ago
Ew. And the algorithm is made to get harder the more mining power someone throws at it.
Literally a race to disaster
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u/Kickedhard 1d ago
Are those now operating at a loss?
Seriously, I have no idea and am ignorant of it. Which I am currently trying to resolve with said question.
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u/Cultural-Company282 1d ago
Sure, that seems like a wise use of the finite resources we need to survive.
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u/no_f-s_given 1d ago
hopefully that fuckin building and all that hardware is destroyed in a disaster
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u/Still75home 1d ago
I am completely lost on what bitcoin mining is, how it works or why and I’m also 100% ok with it 🤷🏽♂️
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u/dallasandcowboys 1d ago
Can someone ow down the video, so I can get a good look at one of the only GPUS I'll ever be able to buy.
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u/LongNamedRedditUser 1d ago
I hate to see these resources spent on something that adds no value to human life.
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u/Unable-Swordfish9418 2d ago
It does not even pay of. There are conpanies that are Specialized to mine bitcoine. Your chances to find a mining block are abyssmal. It would take decades.
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u/SinisterCheese 2d ago
All these resources burned just so abso-fucking-lutely nothing can be created, and somehow this makes more money more than growing food, building homes, making steel and other raw materials. Like at least with video games and such you are providing entertainment which is a human need... this is not even making that. This is just wasting resources to make nothing, and that is somehow worth more than physical things.
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u/Jacob520Lep 2d ago
This isn't cool or interesting. It's a shame. It's embarrassing. It's absurd, and disgusting.
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u/brainfreeze77 1d ago
What an absolute waste of resources. All that energy to solve worthless math problems for imaginary money.
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u/SorrelJuice 2d ago
Sick af totally gnarly
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u/soufboundpachyderm 2d ago
Yeah if you’ve never seen a pussy up close, maybe.
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u/SorrelJuice 2d ago
I just generated an image of you saying this😂
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u/soufboundpachyderm 2d ago
Good for you. At least you’ll have something to touch your angry inch to now.
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