Large bitcoin mine in Ordos, Mongolia - video and photos

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.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGeim9E24Wk

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/.

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.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?

I think the developers of bitcoin and the blockchain technology have already anticipated the future with quantum computers and can stay a few steps ahead of the hackers in algorithm improvements. There is always the random chance of getting lucky but hacking occurs due to human error. You have to be very diligent in the code development and make sure no one has encoded a backdoor as failsafe measure.

Quantum computing is real and will eventually replace the deep thinking/reasoning of computers like IBM's Watson for solving many difficult problems in medical research, weather & climate prediction and oil & gas exploration where the current gigaFLOPS speeds are not fast enough. My specialty was using gigaFLOP calculating speeds of supercomputers in oil and gas exploration. The computer runs were measured in CPU months, not minutes or hours, and all the computations were done in double precision because after billions upon billions of floating point calculations we were left only 3 or 4 digits of significant values. We did check-start reset after every four hours just in case the supercomputer went down and at worst would lose only 4 hours out of the CPU months of calculations. In oil and gas exploration getting the correct analysis can be worth billions of dollars in well production return on offshore Gulf of Mexico prospects. It was interesting work.

If necessary, bitcoin developers can release an update that will make the bitcoin network safe against a variety of threats, including private key solving via quantum computation.

There are other theoretical possibilities (like time travel) that could also threaten the bitcoin network.

I'm not a cryptographer, but I know that it's commonly argued whether a bitcoin key can be brute-forced even if all stars in the universe were surrounded by Dyson spheres, and all their energy used for computing, at perfect efficiency, and all of that computing power continued until the Heat death of the universe.

Of course this assumes zero human error or fallibility. There is a classic XKCD comic illustrating this point:

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LOL Jon. But after reading about the hacker in Kingpin I will no longer doubt there are truly some geniuses out there. But I would say the vast majority are more like your cartoon no matter what tv would have us believe.

One of the points made in the comments was that the use of the next better SHA 384(?) would have to be approved by the miners. Would it just be a simple majority, or unanimous or? Does your vote relate to your computing power or?

Anyone on the bitcoin network (you can join too) can choose to accept an update to the bitcoin software or not. So there isn't exactly a winner-takes-all vote. But yes, it's largely about hashing power. You can consider a real-world "mine" as an example. Let's say a new mine opens up down the road. Any of the miners can leave the old mine and go work at the new one.

Recently, the bitcoin software forked off; some agreed with the fork, some didn't. Some stayed on the "core" bitcoin blockchain, and some departed to a new blockchain called "Bitcoin Cash". Similar thing happened with Ethereum.

You can fork off bitcoin and start C-BagCoin; there are even websites that will do this for you automatically in 5 minutes. Of course, to profit from this, you would have to convince people to devote their computer processing power to C-BagCoin in the hopes that the C-BagCoins that they mine will be more valuable than any other coin.

The blockchain technology is extremely secure and is being considered as a technology to do voting without absentee ballots (my preference for over 30 years) or going to polling locations.

Looks like NASA is dipping their toes into blockchain technology. Published a few weeks ago: Bitcoin, Blockchains and Efficient Distributed Spacecraft Mission Control.

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