Bitcoin Forum

Life Inside a Secret Chinese Bitcoin Mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8kua5B5K3I

Video is from an article at Vice/Motherboard:
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitcoin-mine

Came here to post this, as I didn't want to de-rail another thread further - so just to pick up from there:


Well, it is old - 4 months - which puts it in 'last year'.  Not sure that qualifies as 'made over a year ago', unless you question the author's authenticity with regard to the timeframes mentioned in the article.

Boy, that mining farm is impressive but definitely looks like an inferno just waiting to happen!  Can't believe they have wooden planks laying across their cat5 cables to walk over :O

yeah, it is china. what do you except  ;) ?

To think that a few years ago you could mine the same amount with a rack of GPU's!

Yea, sitting their playing online games, and just monitoring electricity supply and airflow and temperature..... sounds like a dream job.

Not a VERY stimulating environment for people with drive and ambition.  ;)

I guess, if they pay is good..people would watch grass grow.  ;D ;D

while googling around, stumbled upon this article from August 2014:
INSIDE A CHINESE BITCOIN MINE (http://www.thecoinsman.com/2014/08/bitcoin/inside-chinese-bitcoin-mine/) - The Coinsman.
Same mine.  If Vice visited them two months later, you can see what their turnover must be like (almost all miners replaced).  Those declared obsolete Avalons on the floor have probably been there to show the odd press visit for quite a while.
( I'm still curious about the likeness to the Scrypt miners )

Very cool; I'm jelly.

I was also immediately curious about the miners when I saw the video, especially because they say they're a Bitcoin mine, and I didn't recall seeing those miners on the article published a few months ago...

I immediately recognized the design and I too think they're SilverFish miners.

Maybe their profits mining Bitcoin directly were going down and they decided to have a few Scrypt machines? Seems like a sensible strategy to me. Also, those machines are from China, so they probably bought them really cheap and didn't pay much to ship them, or they even picked them up themselves...

It makes me wonder what would happen to these sort of operations if bitcoin became vastly unprofitable to mine. How long could they keep running before the electricity costs just drive them into the ground?

Not for long. You might as well shut everything down immediately, sell the hardware and take your profits when that happens :)

Or you can turn them off an wait for the price to go back up if your land rent isn't too bad.

Or the difficulty to go down ;)

Arent they currently operating at a loss? I don't think it would be wise or very good business practice to just sell off as soon as you hit a rough patch.


Exactly. This would be a better option though they could keep them running and hold the coins until they're worth more whgich they might already do after they've sold enough to cover costs.

Yes But Btc price back  then was also  under .90.  So a 3 card rig costing 1500 minus  800 watts electricity  was negative  roi  also back then.

Same thing when first gen of ASICs came out. The ROI was 8 months to never, and still people were buying. Bitcoin is becoming trendy, comparable to a hobby.
When you buy a model of a plane for $100 you also don't have a chance to ROI, but you do it for entertainment :)