A Brief Glimpse Into the Lives of Chinese Bitcoin Miners
Ever wonder what it’s like to work at a bitcoin mining farm in China? Just recently two reports revealed the inner workings of Chinese bitcoin mines operating in the country’s Sichuan province.
China’s Central Television’s Bitcoin Mining Facility Documentary
Last week on July 11, China’s Central Television (CCTV-2) channel aired a special documentary on bitcoin mining operations located in Kangding county in the southwest region of the country. The channels news reporter drives to a desolate mountainous area in Sichuan to visit a three-story mining data center. Each floor is filled with mining rigs housed on metal racks and surrounded by massive fans. CCTV also interviews Wang, the young data center owner in his twenties who runs five mining sites in the area. According to a translation from the local publication, 8btc, Wang says he runs a medium sized data center that can grow bigger. The twenty-year-old native says the operation mines 16 BTC (US$30,000) a day.
“We are a middle-sized mining factory with 5000 bitcoin miners,” explains Wang. “We still have room to run another 5000 mining machines.”
Wang and the data center’s operations manager Xu says lots of people are choosing to set up mining sites in Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Inner Mongolia. The reason for this is cheaper electricity from hydropower stations located in the mountains. Wang details that typically electricity in China is 0.7 yuan per KwH, but by partnering with neighboring hydropower stations mining facilities are paying 0.3 yuan per KwH (about 0.045 USD at the time of writing).
“[Electricity] is directly transmitted from nearby hydropower stations,” Wang tells the CCTV journalist. “This is mainly why we set up the site here. Bitcoin mining is electricity-consuming and 50 percent of our profits go to the electricity bill.”
One of the bitcoin mine workers explains that the nearest town is roughly 20 miles away and there is nowhere to spend money near the facilities. “The good thing is, there isn’t anywhere to spend money, so you can save your whole salary,” one miner told the photographer Liu Xingzhe.
https://news.bitcoin.com/brief-glimpse-lives-chinese-bitcoin-miners/
