Large bitcoin mine in Ordos, Mongolia - video and photos

[Jon]

This bitcoin mine, one of the largest in the world, is in Ordos, Mongolia, and it's run by Bitmain. 8 buildings (one for Litecoin), 25,000 machines, 50 employees, and an on-site dormitory for workers to live. This mine accounts for about 4% of the processing power on the bitcoin network, which is the most powerful computer network in history. Roughly, this mine probably earns around $250,000 per day in revenue.

If you're struggling to wrap your mind around why cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have any value, try approaching it this way:

Why does gold have value? Gold has been valuable for thousands of years. All gold in the world is worth about $7 trillion. And it's NOT because of gold's industrial value. Judging solely by utility, steel is probably more valuable than gold.

Once you can create an argument supporting gold's value, try applying those same value characteristics to bitcoin.

More: https://qz.com/1055126/photos-china-...bitcoin-mines/.

[C-Bag]

I had seen Bitcoin and not really looked into it. And then a neighbors Forbes mag got mis delivered and the cover was about Bitcoin, and now your post about Bitcoin "mines"? Too much coincidence so I sat down and watched a 3pt YouTube Bitcoin 101, wow. Truly genius. And yeah, all $$ is fiat currency. It only has as much worth as you believe it does. And all the banks are just generating debt, nothing else. At least with Bitcoin it's open source and anybody can see the books. Can't say that with any of the banksters.

[Jon]

Yup, interest is definitely on the rise. You can see this via searches for "bitcoin" in Google Trends:



And, you can see the increase in the purchase volume of LocalBitcoins.com, which allows for person-to-person bitcoin exchanges



Bitcoin's market cap is about equal to PayPal's. You can buy $1 (or less) worth of bitcoin and play with it if the technology interests you.

[Paul Jones]

Jon,

The bitcoin concept used in combination with blockchain technology is a fascinating endeavor (the lower case "b" refers to the currency and the upper case "B" refers to the technology/protocol stack).

There are many authoritative in-depth series on bitcoins but this five part series is pretty through ( https://chrispacia.wordpress.com/201...-1-incentives/ ) . It gets a little heavy on explaining the cryptographic hash function SHA256 developed by NSA, Merkle Tree or hash tree, and how it is used so hackers to bitcoins have to be very lucky to pull off a double spend.

Thank you for posting the articles.

Regards,

Paul

[Jon]

Very nice. I knew there had to be some bitcoiners among us!

Also the excellent 8-page whitepaper by the pseudonymous inventor(s) Satoshi Nakomoto: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

[C-Bag]

So, Paul and Jon, do you guys use Bitcoin? Or like me just watching?

[Jon]

I play around with it a little. We've also paid out some of the Homemade Tool of the Week awards in bitcoin.

There are many other crypto currencies. You can see the top ones here: https://coinmarketcap.com

[C-Bag]

At this point it is an idle curiosity. I adopted using PayPal because it was so complicated to do overseas transactions with my dealers and customers. I'm also attracted to the low transaction (for now) fee. And because everything I do is mail order there is no problem with waiting for confirmation. Once learning the basics, it's kinda comforting to see the layers of confirmation. It would seem the inventor was also very smart to keep his true identity a secret as several other crypto currency inventors have been nabbed on dubious charges. It will be interesting to see how it holds up under the onslaught of hackers and gov's. There are still a lot of things I don't understand and to me it's only weakness is having to rely on the net.

[Paul Jones]

I stick with PayPal because I understand it better (did you know Elon Musk was one of the early founders after Confinity (they started PayPal) merged with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk).

Bitcoins and blockchain is just curiosity for me because I work in information technology for the last 40 years. I had been a big supercomputer and massively parallel computer user in the 1980's and 1990's and enjoyed the work before they promoted to exec positions. Learning about the new ASIC chips and massively parallel computing used by Bitcoin miners is interesting and will only get more interesting with quantum computing (and cybersecurity in the wrong hands with super fast computers - see https://news.bitcoin.com/is-bitcoin-...tum-computers/).

It is a whole new world for artificial intelligence when the speed of the computer is no longer the constraining factor.

[C-Bag]

Thanks for the link Paul. And yes, I read Musk's bio. But I'm definitely a user, not that great of a grasper of the convoluted tech involved. I tend to agree with some of the criticism of the article. I think there might have been more fanboy of Bitcoin than actual tech expertise on the part of the journalist. How much is actually known about what a quantum computer can actually do? What did you think of the article? Is there any such thing as unhackable?