 Show Posts
|
|
Pages: [1] 2 »
|
|
Great thread.
So I had a chat with a 40 year veteran of the US Electric Power Industry over the weekend and based on what he was telling me, getting power in the US for under 3 cents sustained is next to impossible. You can get it in shifts, during off peak, do peak shaving and other tricks of the trade but here is the bottom line, at least in the US:
Generators will make more selling into the 'market' and to the ISO's even if it means taking generation offline. The example was that if a generator can generate power at 1 cent per Kwh and a miner came to them with a 40MW requirement and said they would pay 2 cents (100% margin), the gerator woul turn it down because they can get 7 cents per Kwh in the market someplace else. There are a bunch of other regulations that add to the reasons why buying direct can't or won't happen anytime soon.
I asked why not build a power plant and plug in a data center/mining operation into it and get a direct feed - regulation and the fact that you would need to have two generating plants for redundancy and your costs double. If you had grid tie in or wanted grid tie in to sell excess or to provide back up load, the regulations REALLY kick in and are prohibitive.
So the notion of continuous cheap power is a notion, at least in the US from what I was told, again from a guy who remembers the first NERC and FERC meetings.
The second thing I just looked at was hash rate to difficulty ratio growth for the last 6 months and the hash rate has gone up 5.5 times in the past 6 months while the difficulty has risen 4.3 times according to the data on blockchain.info I looked at. So the hash rate is growing ahead of the difficulty still, which leads me to believe that is a good thing and money can still be made but you need to go big (decimegawatt scale, 10MW at a time) and throw as much hash rate while the difficulty slips... Right?
|
|
|
|
I have been in the data center business for 20 years and there is another way to look at this as a business...
(...)
There is one important difference between a professional data center and a "mining" data center, that can make the second one an order of magnitude cheaper : reliability. A professional data center has contracts with clients who want an uptime for their servers that stays as close as possible to 100%. This means : - double entry of electricity plus local backups (batteries + fuel generators), - Internet access with very high availability and bandwidth, - 24/7 surveillance by qualified teams, - active cooling, - good fire security. In those datacenters, a downtime of one minute is a financial trouble, a downtime of one hour is a disaster. On the contrary, a mining data center can run : - on a single electricity line, with no backup, - over a single ADSL router, - with passive cooling, - and basic fire security (just to be sure that in case of fire nobody is killed) A mining center can be shutdown in seconds in case of problem, for a few hours or a few days if needed, and the only cost will be a "loss of opportunity". The photos of the "chinese mine" that were posted last months shows something that has nothing in common with the first world datacenters that I have know of. If the ultimate goal is the adoption and proliferation of BTC as a currency, then it needs to be treated like one in some regards. Ghetto colo or circus colo while OK when no one cared or was watching is one thing. To bridge the chasm between BTC as a Ponzi scheme, fad, or other such connotation it will take appearing like that which people think of. Do you want your fiat currency in a secured place like a bank or garage in a ghetto? As it relates to power, there are a number of Utilities that have been around for over 100 years who are investing in real infrastructure using real money (BTC or fiat) that needs to be paid for over time. If a utility has to spend $25M to deliver 100MW and a miner only wants a 5 month contract, good luck. The banks and financiers that underwrite these deals buy risk. Short term contracts that back a $25M spend means there is less time for the bank or lending entity to make money back. So for a $25M nut, the bank will expect a 10% return so the tab is $27.5M that needs to be paid back in 5 months or at least the replacement value needs to be recouped in the 5 months. Few utilities will take on that much risk for a 20 year contract with unknown entities that set up facilities that are lawsuits and fires waiting to happen. They see it as never getting paid pack. |
|
|
|
You can mine profitably so long as you build a business model that insures it. Thinking you can buy a couple of rigs and put them in your garage in scottsdale AZ from June-September and profitably mine is not going to work. Mining at scale and placing bigger bets to buy in is what is required. Fewer and fewer people will have the balls resources or desire to go bigger and bigger to get a seat at the table.
The coin foundry value prop as I understand it is:
The sites are there ready to go in a real building.
You overnight rigs today, you are mining in 24-36 hours with whatever rigs you can mount and turn on
How many BTC can you mine with 1 MW in 24 hours? (I don't know)
Is it enough to cover the cost for that day and the weeks required to squeeze 58% premium over mining 1MW of BTC?
Those are the business questions that need answering.
Someone who wants to put 500 rigs in the site over the next 8 weeks seems to think it's a screaming deal. Dallas will be gone by 9/30 or sooner. New rigs are shipping and they want the jump on the hash rate to get going now vs, trekking around eastern Washington for 2 weeks to find a building. Then another 4 weeks to have a utility design a distribution system for them and drop in gear to step down the voltage, and then coordinate rack implementations, cable runs, and wiring installs (2 weeks) before the rigs get there and then have the people, process, and space to unpack rigs and get em racked.
It's all super easy until you start...
I'm sorry but you sound like a used car salesman. Are you the same person who designed the website? (who clearly has no clue how bitcoin mining works) Your company is offering a horrible deal, no question about it. A 12 month contract locked in with such shitty rates would mean a guaranteed loss of ~$0.5m assuming you have free hardware and it starts mining today. Nobody gets free hardware so a more reasonable estimation would be a loss of ~$1.3m. http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=27428630902&dcosts=0&diff_mincrease=15&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=1000000000&diff_mincreasedecrease=3&btcusd=487.49&dpowcon=1000000&btcusd_mincrease=1&pcost=0.175&calcweeks=32&dleadtime=0&action=calcJimmothy, thanks for the guidance. I know the coin foundry guys and I know data centers. I clearly don't know as much about mining as most of the folks on here, I haven't had the time in Bitcoin that I have had in data centers. If it's a totally shitty deal, what's a good deal? What makes it a good deal? I have to assume that not everyone owns the fastest rigs. What if they did? What if they owned more efficient rigs? Why doesn't everyone just run those? Why aren't those the standard? What do you use? Is the only unit of measurement the Kw or Kwh? What does an efficient design of a rig or a facility do to the profitability? I appreciate the link to the mining calc. Where do you mine? At what scale? How do you get a good deal? What I don't see calculations for in that calculator are CapEx allowances, rent, taxes (ad velorum, sales, utility), debt service, insurance, infrastructure/tenant improvements, wiring, ducting, cabinets, labor, permits, security (physical & logical), and legal. Telecom services, shipping, travel, and all of the other things that are material costs of a business. So what makes a great deal and why? I know you don't speak for the global community, I am curious... |
|
|
|
It's $125,000 per month per megawatt all inclusive of power, cooling, rent.
OK got it. That's why we went to Sweden. Our all inclusive price for 1MW is $79,000. I assume the reason why thecoinfoundry is 58% more is that you are having to run conventional aircon in traditional DC space. As difficulty ramps it will become less and less possible to mine profitably anywhere that PUEs are not very close to 1. You can mine profitably so long as you build a business model that insures it. Thinking you can buy a couple of rigs and put them in your garage in scottsdale AZ from June-September and profitably mine is not going to work. Mining at scale and placing bigger bets to buy in is what is required. Fewer and fewer people will have the balls resources or desire to go bigger and bigger to get a seat at the table. The coin foundry value prop as I understand it is: The sites are there ready to go in a real building. You overnight rigs today, you are mining in 24-36 hours with whatever rigs you can mount and turn on How many BTC can you mine with 1 MW in 24 hours? (I don't know) Is it enough to cover the cost for that day and the weeks required to squeeze 58% premium over mining 1MW of BTC? Those are the business questions that need answering. Someone who wants to put 500 rigs in the site over the next 8 weeks seems to think it's a screaming deal. Dallas will be gone by 9/30 or sooner. New rigs are shipping and they want the jump on the hash rate to get going now vs, trekking around eastern Washington for 2 weeks to find a building. Then another 4 weeks to have a utility design a distribution system for them and drop in gear to step down the voltage, and then coordinate rack implementations, cable runs, and wiring installs (2 weeks) before the rigs get there and then have the people, process, and space to unpack rigs and get em racked. It's all super easy until you start... |
|
|
|
$125k/month/MW is absurd.
No sane person will ever consider hosting at those rates.
You might get some consideration at $125k/year.
A MW in the Dallas facility is being negotiated as we speak. Megawatt scale industrial miner, hundreds of rigs to start. I guess there are crazy people who understand the path to profitability is to go at scale and go today. I know there are 2MW in NJ at a facility at $170/Kw plus power. They have more than covered their costs. Every. Single. Month. The data I see says that the trend is go big or go home, fix your costs and focus on fast rigs... |
|
|
|
The heat signature of a 4U rig is the equivalent of a 42U rack and most data centers are designed for the density spread out over 42U not 4. It's like trying to cool a heat gun in a shoebox. Very tough. The heat problem (at least here in the US) hasn't been much of an issue because it was winter and heat was a desirable benefit along with the bitcoin mined. There are the liquid cooled solutions that are available, and Martin Enclosures just released a new line of racks - http://www.martinenclosures.com/product/bitrack/ that sound like they were developed to help deal with the heat problem. This totally confuses me, let's take the most dense system on the market, the SP31, you are tell me most 42U racks don't pull more than 6K Watts (say single NEMA L6-30P)? I am not sure what rock you are living under but I have been running and/or hosting gear in data centers since the 90s and it was a rare rack that had such a low power usage.. I can point to three global banks, two media companies, 2 global ad agencies, a computer manufacturer, and an $8B outsourcing company and tell you will the degree of accuracy that only comes from being embedded in their operations groups on projects that the rack loads are 2.4-3.6 today. I wouldn't have believed it. Contrast that with animation and geospatial (oil & gas) who run 30Kw/cabinet or more for their applications. I have blogged about high density and the HPC markets, and how density will be a bazillion watts a foot, but the reality doesn't support the projections in a broad sense. In pockets, yes. generally, no. High density applications in *some* racks, not in every single rack from wall to wall. The building simply wasn't designed with that in mind. The high density environments I am most familiar with are in converted shipping containers. At one animation Studio they run 34Kw/cabinet in every cabinet in specially designed computer rooms. They exist, just not broadly. |
|
|
|
I say we all pitch in and help him take a class on web design
Totally. |
|
|
|
|
The capital raise has been pulled. Didn't need to raise that much. They will self fund.
|
|
|
|
The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents The Coin Foundry web site is hosted on shared hosting at 31.170.160.112, which is shared free hosting at 000webhost.com. They didn't even pay the $4.84/month to make the ad banner go away. It's probably a kid in their parents basement. Definitely. Their page is written by a kid -- http://www.thecoinfoundry.com/About-us/Do you know the founder? Definitely not a kid... |
|
|
|
The heat signature of a 4U rig is the equivalent of a 42U rack and most data centers are designed for the density spread out over 42U not 4. It's like trying to cool a heat gun in a shoebox. Very tough. The heat problem (at least here in the US) hasn't been much of an issue because it was winter and heat was a desirable benefit along with the bitcoin mined. There are the liquid cooled solutions that are available, and Martin Enclosures just released a new line of racks - http://www.martinenclosures.com/product/bitrack/ that sound like they were developed to help deal with the heat problem. This totally confuses me, let's take the most dense system on the market, the SP31, you are tell me most 42U racks don't pull more than 6K Watts (say single NEMA L6-30P)? I am not sure what rock you are living under but I have been running and/or hosting gear in data centers since the 90s and it was a rare rack that had such a low power usage.. I can point to three global banks, two media companies, 2 global ad agencies, a computer manufacturer, and an $8B outsourcing company and tell you will the degree of accuracy that only comes from being embedded in their operations groups on projects that the rack loads are 2.4-3.6 today. I wouldn't have believed it. Contrast that with animation and geospatial (oil & gas) who run 30Kw/cabinet or more for their applications. I have blogged about high density and the HPC markets, and how density will be a bazillion watts a foot, but the reality doesn't support the projections in a broad sense. In pockets, yes. generally, no. |
|
|
|
|
It's $125,000 per month per megawatt all inclusive of power, cooling, rent. The whole building is $250,000 per month all inclusive.
There are no tenants in the building so there is no need to chop up power/rent, etc. as I did before. Because there are no other leases to provision resources for now, it is simpler to build out revenue and cost models. I wanted to figure out the all in number for the building, and so that is what I did.
|
|
|
|
I want to see how much additional energy it takes to cool per rig watt. For example. I wish to keep my rigs in an ambient temperature of 80, when it is 105 outside. It almost seems to me that more energy will be spent pumping the heat out of the room than will be spent on power the rigs. I don't remember physics that well, but I thought at least an equivalent amount of energy would be spent to remove the heat and even more because of the huge inefficiencies in cooling ? Anyone good at physics want to answer this ? Point me to where someone writes it up ? The link above was more about data centers and not the direct cost related economics of it as they relate to profitability. (and environmental impact  Anyone have an educated answer to this ? This is commonly expressed in PUE - Power Utilization Effectiveness - in the data center world. Maybe not the most accurate yardstick, but it measures the overhead of cooling required to cool the corresponding compute load - 1.5 PUE means that for every watt you spend on IT load, you will spend 50 cents in cooling costs. If you look at a data center contract, there is a 'cooling uplift' charge - this is to cover the PUE and associated electricity overhead to provide cooling. Immersion 2 cooling is below 1.1 meaning that you spend less than 10% electricity overhead on cooling, and 400% less than a typical water or air cooled deployment. There are two practical ways to mitigate costs - find the most efficient way to manage the concentration of heat from a rig and find the cheapest electricity you can. If that's the goal. One watt generates 3.41 BTU and it is the heat signature that is the issue and insuring as little power goes to run cooling as possible. Does that help? |
|
|
|
The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 8MW in Washington at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 2 MW in Virginia at 7 cents. The facilities are prepped and you can move into the Texas and Virginia ones this weekend. The Coin Foundry has 6 other buildings at 20+ MW each around the US at 5-7 cents power they are performing due diligence on. What kills me is the hair splitting over 1-2 cents for the guys at megawatt scale. You know what kills profitability fastest? NOT STARTING TO MINE TODAY. http://www.thecoinfoundry.com - only Dallas is up on the site, they just got control of Virginia and Washington Friday. Dallas may be gone by next week with a miner shipping 100 rigs this month and 300 next month. Yea, start mining today! Jump in with both feet even though difficulty is going through the roof and profitability is in the toilet. We offer prices so low that they are unbelievable. Hooray! Given that the mean average price is $300/kw for rent in a comparable facility, getting the same thing for $125 is a deal and will give you a 65%+ reduction in cost which could throw someone over the fence to profitability. Can't comment on the difficulty, can't you just buy faster rigs? |
|
|
|
The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 8MW in Washington at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 2 MW in Virginia at 7 cents. The facilities are prepped and you can move into the Texas and Virginia ones this weekend. The Coin Foundry has 6 other buildings at 20+ MW each around the US at 5-7 cents power they are performing due diligence on. What kills me is the hair splitting over 1-2 cents for the guys at megawatt scale. You know what kills profitability fastest? NOT STARTING TO MINE TODAY. http://www.thecoinfoundry.com - only Dallas is up on the site, they just got control of Virginia and Washington Friday. Dallas may be gone by next week with a miner shipping 100 rigs this month and 300 next month. Its $125,000 per MW per month, dumbfck. Do you know how to do math? Tell me how much it is per KWh. I did. |
|
|
|
I am cross posting this in the right place on purpose Wanted to let the community know that there is available MEGAWATT SCALE capacity out there ready to go, inexpensive (by data center standards), and finished space (you can move in this weekend). The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents (may be gone by 9/8/2014) The Coin Foundry has 8MW in Washington at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 2 MW in Virginia at 7 cents. The facilities are prepped and you can move into the Texas and Virginia ones this weekend. The Coin Foundry has 6 other buildings at 20+ MW each around the US at 5-7 cents power they are performing due diligence on. Stop the hair splitting over 1-2 cents for the guys at megawatt scale. You know what kills profitability fastest? NOT STARTING TO MINE TODAY. http://www.thecoinfoundry.com - only Dallas is up on the site, they just got control of Virginia and Washington Friday. Dallas may be gone by next week with a miner shipping 100 rigs this month and 300 next month, just FYI. I am a data center guy, and I tell everyone that there is limited product available (Tier I ) that is cost effective for miners. It's not the power but the cooling overhead that adds $$$ to the equation. The big data center players all overbuilt for mining operations (redundant electrical & mechanical systems that aren't needed for mining (no one dies if a facility loses power for a few hours). So they lose money to attract the miners and can't sustain keeping the miners as customers because you can lose money at scale too. happy to answer questions - mark at blunthammer.com |
|
|
|
|
So it's 2,000 square feet
~3 TH per rig and you said 30 TH so 10 rigs
1.95 Kw per rig, so 20Kw is the draw
What I deduce is that you are having trouble cooling 1 rig with 200 square feet of ambient airspace per rig. What is happening? Are wires melting or are people melting. Is there hardware failure? Fire?
That is plenty of space (ambient) to maintain a temperature, unless it is closed. If it is closed then you will have issues. Again, master the airflow. spread out the rigs, make sure hot air blows one way and is directed out of the building somehow with fans, chimneys or a combo.
Mark
|
|
|
|
|
Cloverme, I am guessing web design is not their strong suit, nor is it what they have to offer, not sure what to say. I guess I wouldn't call them to design a website. If I had a yottahash to plug in and I could do it this weekend, I am signing a contract today. If I am concerned about sketchyness, I pick up the phone and have a chat with someone.
In so far as other images appearing other places - I would bet they are in several places - they have a facility to lease and want to cast a wide net, smart of you want to get the word out in my humble opinion.
Thank you for the redirect Road Stress. I don't want to annoy peers.
ChuckBuck - for megawatt scale data center the price is breathtaking. The averages per Kw for up to 1 MW delas are $300/kw for rent, PLUS the cost of power, PLUS taxes, PLUS interconnects. Said another way, at $300/kw it's $600,000 per month in rent. I would pay less than half for the same thing all day long... The issue is scale. The price per pound is always higher than the price per ton...
|
|
|
|
|
Master airflow if outside air is available use fans
build/deploy hot aisles and cold aisles
Put chimneys on the back of your racks to direct the heat up and hopefully out
mark at blunthammer and I am happy to give you better answers if you can provide more detail
|
|
|
|
Wanted to let the community know that there is available capacity out there ready to go, cheap (by data center standards), and finished space (you can move in this weekend. It's ex data center guys who know where good inexpensive facilities are that can be leased cheap. The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 8MW in Washington at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 2 MW in Virginia at 7 cents. The facilities are prepped and you can move into the Texas and Virginia ones this weekend. The Coin Foundry has 6 other buildings at 20+ MW each around the US at 5-7 cents power they are performing due diligence on. What kills me is the hair splitting over 1-2 cents for the guys at megawatt scale. You know what kills profitability fastest? NOT STARTING TO MINE TODAY. http://www.thecoinfoundry.com - only Dallas is up on the site, they just got control of Virginia and Washington Friday. Dallas may be gone by next week with a miner shipping 100 rigs this month and 300 next month, just FYI. I am a data center guy, and I will tell everyone that there is limited product available that is cost effective for miners. It's not the power but the cooling overhead that adds $$$ to the equation. The big data center players all overbuilt for mining operations (redundant electrical & mechanical systems that aren't needed for mining (no one dies if a facility loses power for a few hours). So they lose money to attract the miners and can't sustain keeping the miners as customers because you can lose money at scale too. happy to answer questions - mark at blunthammer.com |
|
|
|
The Coin Foundry has 3.6MW of available capacity right now in Texas at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 8MW in Washington at 5 cents The Coin Foundry has 2 MW in Virginia at 7 cents. The facilities are prepped and you can move into the Texas and Virginia ones this weekend. The Coin Foundry has 6 other buildings at 20+ MW each around the US at 5-7 cents power they are performing due diligence on. What kills me is the hair splitting over 1-2 cents for the guys at megawatt scale. You know what kills profitability fastest? NOT STARTING TO MINE TODAY. http://www.thecoinfoundry.com - only Dallas is up on the site, they just got control of Virginia and Washington Friday. Dallas may be gone by next week with a miner shipping 100 rigs this month and 300 next month. |
|
|
|
|
