Topic: $2 million+ bitcoin mining facility launched in Iceland (Read 11176 times)

Well, at least with the computers (GPU mining, I assume), he can switch to mine scrypt-based coins and sell it for bitcoin.

Your comment would suggest that buying mining power is in no ways profitable if a extremely intelligent and rich man buying the latest state of the art equipment which uses cheap power and requires low heating costs can not accomplish this?

This icelandic company is also hosting a few clusters: advania.com/datacenters

Interesting topic and notice aswell. Thanks for share!

Interesting read thanks

For every Amazon item you buy there has to be a Chinese/child labour manufacturer, a transport service and a website host to host the Amazon website.

Guess which one makes the most profit? Don't judge people to take the decision to be the web host / transport / manufacturer. We can't all be Amazon, then we would be selling vaporized air and promises.

It's perfectly sane if you have a low amount of money to burn on Bitcoin to just buy and hodl. But some investors should mine before we can actually spend a single Bitcoin, else our virtual account balance would just be sitting there in the dwellings of Cryptsy.

Wow that facility is one beautiful work of art. Iceland is indeed a land of opportunity. I am green with envy & full of hope. 

Like always people with money have advantage over others. Nothing special there.

Hardly. There have been big steps forward lately: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/breakthrough-in-quantum-computing-smashes-previous-records-8941862.html

Also: Bitcoin being "resilient to quantum computing": Citation needed

Wow, yet another prediction comes to fruition. Iceland is going to a major bitcoin mine for the world ... weird yet logical.

I've been speaking with a few DC operators here in Iceland. Datacell (the same company that sued VISA over wikileaks payment processing) had this announcement today.
https://www.datacell.com/news/special-offers-for-bitcoin-miners/

i agree

Bitcoin is resilient to quantum computing.
And quantum computing is currently an unproven fantasy anyway.

There is no Bitcoin DNA in those companies. They only focus on what they are good at. I believe when Bitcoin market matures, they will know how to make use or Bitcoin. May be accept it as a payment. Give it a few years.

pretty sweet sounding.

It is indeed something to consider. If the world's BTC mining consolidates into the control of a handful of people, we might see a sad loss of the democratic network.

People claim nobody with 51% will do double spends as it will devalue the currency. Are we so sure?

Is the future of BTC mining cartels like OPEC? What effect will this have on the BTC economy?

(I say this as a proud member of the DZ Coop...)

This is insane for a different reason.

Can anyone think of why such an article is a bad idea in light of current events? 

Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

How about this... isolated data center in tiny country responsible for 15% of world's BTC identified to world's SIGINT organizations (China, NSA, GCHC, etc).  Doesn't have to be that "the NSA is against bitcoin" - it only has to be a faction of one (possibly corrupt) organization with the ability to intercept and mangle communications and this guys in a world of hurt.

Mining installations greater than 1% of the network need to be secret.

>switch to another algorithm not quantum-vulnerable
>problem solved

not possible. never mind the fact that tech is light years away. every 2016 blocks(roughly 2 weeks) the difficulty is adjusted. so even if they had 99% of the hashrate the network would adjust in short order and put the average back at 10 minutes.

It's just waiting for a quantum computer that will render all mining farms useless and that will mine every bitcoin left in a small amount of time.

I think we more or less had a false sense of security because nobody had developed it yet and bitcoin wasnt really big enough for anyone to care. if anyone had developed the most crappy of crappy ASICs possible they could have dwarfed the network at the time(same for cpu->gpu). the fact we have people developing, building and releasing ASICs now means were gearing up towards the limit of technology. Even if some major force released a ton of advanced ASICs. if the current developers wanted to keep making money they would be forced to drop price and produce more advanced stuff. i think we could easily fend off most attacks on the system, even if it were a govt trying it. Worst case... i think these ASIC developers could sell them nearly at cost if it meant 'letting bitcoin die and losing its value or getting ASICs into more peoples hands so it survivies'. our devs are pretty smart too, and there are also allot of big investors in bitcoin now as well. im not sure they would be so willing to let it slip away.

Are you taking investors?

Noooooo, they will melt the icebergs near north pole and cause sea floor to raise and flood major cities along seashore  

BTW, I don't think any Jupiter can make back the bitcoin invested at current difficulty rising speed

That's cloud hashing.  Just do a search in scam boards here to see where he got the investomers for that mine.  Needless to say he definitely made money.  Others not so much.

If only I were so rich as to invest in such hardware...
But it might've been better to just buy 2 million dollars worth of Bitcoins, especially with the difficulty only to get higher and higher in time.

Looks cool but I wish I were reading about a start-up business accepting BTC as a means of accepting payment. I think one of Bitcoins flaws is the way mining rewards huge investment!

crazy. saw a similar building in asia. thats the next step in mining but far away from what we will see in 1-2 years.

Have you think about why Google, Facebook, or Apple are not interested in mining bitcoins? They have the biggest data centers in the world.

For them it would be too easy and with the big resources they have they could control bitcoin in only some months.


They don't care because they don't see a value in bitcoin.

You have a point.  The transition to ASIC's scared me just for this reason.  Bitcoin is going through a period where security has declined substantially since the days of purely GPU mining.  It's changing though and I feel that it will diversify further, just give it some time.

If Bitcoin survives this, it's only going to strengthen it in the long run.

I just keep thinking that the higher the efficiency, the power and cost of every new generation of equipment, the fewer miners will be out there because they can't compete. This seems like we will soon know where the Bitcoin mining hubs are - 15% of the network is expected to be in one place in Iceland according to this report. Others my follow.

When you know where the majority of the hubs are, you stop having a true p2p system and instead you have something where governments can go and unplug the network. That would be ok if there are enough networked pc's out there to take over, but what if the majority switch off their machines, sell their equipment, etc?

I'm not an expert in these things - I just think it looks a risk factor for the future stability and prosperity of the currency.

The more secure the network, the more valuable it becomes.

Price drives mining investment and price is (partially) a valuation of the utility of the network.

What is scary is that just a year ago, a special interest group which secretly developed ASICs, could have taken over the network. So be thankful for these operations for strengthening Bitcoin.

Of course I was being a bit sarcastic.

I'm wondering what you mean by the fully diverse p20 nature of the system.  Adoption?

I guess he means price. That was hard work, should have put an ice pack on my head while thinking about it.

My 2 cents worth - Difficulty increases, but so does something else - the fully diverse p2p nature of the system.

Nope.  Think waaaaay outside the box.   

I am going to guess network hash rate? 

That's fairly narrow minded.  Diff increases, but so does something else.  Think hard enough and it might come to you.

Thank you, it is nice to meet someone who know that game, one of the best game out there.

Iceland is also becoming a general data centre hotspot, they got lots of cold air for free.

Well, Iceland's a great place to pick in order to host such a facility. As a country, they have a very forward way of thinking, which goes hand in hand with Bitcoin!

Great news.

We need many independent such operations.

I don't know ... I like to think people will look at a story like this and think "ok, this bitcoin is some serious shit, look at that hardcore hardware!" ... basically when you examine a big bank today what you should really want to know about is what their IT hardware set-up looks like ... after all vast majority of money is a fiat number in a database server somewhere.

money is in essence a value information technology ... get the IT bit wrong and the value will disappear

They'll barely get a ROI given that the difficulty will soon rise again. Would have been better to just buy $2 million of coins from an investor.

Interesting. Thank you, nice find!

Estimate 600 GH/s for B1 Jupiters and we're talking about 60 TH/s in KnC hardware for 100 units.

Our co-op only has about 8 TH/s online at the moment, with 4 Jupiters online as part of that hashrate. Interesting to note that our tiny co-op of only 4 team leaders that are working this co-op part-time, has 74 TH/s on order with Black Arrow Prosperos alone, at a fraction of this $2MM, albeit in late February.

That's very interesting that he brought up points that has already affected our future planning for our third miner hosting facility which is likely going to be located next to a major river somewhere for power/cooling. I'm guessing that mining power will necessarily evolve to pockets of:

- friendly BTC/ALT stance by govt.
- friendly business stance by govt.
- super cheap electricity
- ample water (which is another one of the 21st century's forms of "Gold") and or frigid conditions

He has a head start on us, but we are catching up with about 92TH/s of nominal hashrate on order so far, because our prices beat the pants off of Cloud Hashing prices.

Then again: as the co-op founder, I'm a bit biased in the matter.  

This hashrate number doesn't include the miners being hosted or to be hosted with my business partner at Miner Hosting LLC, bobsag3, who is also one of our co-op leaders.

Disclaimer: I am his direct competition and instead of being former bankers that helped wreck the world economy, I/we are essentially GB forum vets that banded together to TCB and take care of customers together (apologies if you're a reformed world economy destroying banker).  

You have great taste, possibly the best quote in the game.

"Last Wednesday ... the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices."

Wow sounds like they will make their investment back pretty quickly.

Thanks for sharing. It's proof that rich investors are going to get richer off of Bitcoin. These stories are interesting but I prefer hearing about new start ups that actually accept Bitcoins for product over mega miners looking for a quick buck or companies that cater to miners looking for a quick buck. Oh well, I suppose without mining profit Bitcoin wouldn't be nearly as successful as it is now.

That's exactly from where i took it 

That reminded me of the Alpha Centauri Spartan Battle Manual.

Superior weapons, superior technology, this is the way to the victory.

This is pretty insane: thanks to some outside investors, a former HSBC programmer has dumped more than $2 million (100 computers at $20K a pop) into a custom-built bitcoin-mining facility in Iceland. Energy's cheap there, and the cool climate's used to keep the equipment from overheating. To get into the windowless facility, you have to go past a fortified gate, a guard behind bulletproof glass, then through a "man trap."

"Last Wednesday ... the entire operation unlocked 225 Bitcoins, valued at around $160,000 at recent prices." Not bad! The full story is here:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/into-the-bitcoin-mines/