Ye Olde Bitcoin Smithy*
From MoneyBeat:BitBeat: For Bitcoin Miners, A Hot Problem This Summer
- Here’s the thing: the hash rate of the bitcoin mining network – or in simple terms, its computational power – is about 60 times higher than it was at the start of last fall. What that increase means is that many Northern Hemisphere miners, whose increasingly high-tech computer rigs have been competing in an arms race to grab a limited flow of bitcoins, are about to run into a very big problem: summer.
As Mark MacAuley at datacenter consulting firm Blunt Hammer writes on his blog, the main output of bitcoin mining is heat. The faster, more powerful and more plentiful the computers in that industry become, the more heat they collectively produce. That means this summer will see a bitcoin ecosystem that’s exponentially more heat-producing than it was at the end of last summer.
In many of the big warehouse-like datacenters offsetting all that heat is going to be a very expensive proposition. Trying to cool those racks of machines “is like trying to blow into the nozzle on a heat gun to keep your face from burning,” he says.
For miners in cold places, this isn’t a big deal as the heat becomes a valuable resource to be recycled back into homes and offices. It also helps if you have a cheap electricity source, hence the big miner leasing operations in geothermal-rich Iceland and hydropower-energized Washington state. But mining capacity is spread across the globe.
So, what might happen this summer? In a telephone interview, Mr. MacAuley said he thinks many rigs will have to go off line. After all, bitcoin’s price in dollar terms is now less than half what it was in December, at the same time that the mining power they’re competing against is now 10 times what is was then. (Even between September and December, the hash rate increased sixfold.) This summer, the profit equation just won’t compute....MORE
...And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?...
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?...
-William Blake, "And did those feet in ancient time"
