Interesting white paper... barely mentions difficulty though
Are you reading the same document?
There is a difficulty chart on page 2, it says the difficulty will go up steep, estimates 175PH when ASICMiner gen3 is out in a few months and states that AM alone plans to dump 400 to 1600 PH/s on the market in 2014.
Difficulty will go up no doubt.
Isn't something that costs less to build and saves you money to run good for you in that case?
I think a lot of plans were hatched for large mining farms when BTC hovered around the $800-$900 mark, now with BTC in the $500, the ROI for these large farms is being stretched out.
Lower Bitcoin ($500 vs. $900), rising difficulty and more people getting into the mining business.
Isn't this exactly the reason why an infrastructure that wastes time, resources and electricity is not a good idea?
Traditional air cooling seems to be doing just fine.
Did you read the same white paper?
Is that why they are now all installing water coolers, refrigerators in cabinet doors, DX heat exchangers, compressors and chillers etc?
To cool 1MW of power electronics costs several (!) $$$ per W. Add to that the time and money you spend to build boxes with fans and radiators.
Immersion cooling costs less than $1 per W and you need nothing but boards and chips and a giant pool with liquid. Make your hardware dense and you can make more savings.
http://www.datacenterjournal.com/it/whats-stopping-liquid-cooling/http://www.electronics-cooling.com/2014/02/bitcoin-2-phase-immersion-cooling-and-the-implications-for-high-performance-computing/At high densities, liquid cooling is a necessity. Why not dump all of the gear in a liquid instead of using pumps, compressors, all that.
Supercomputers (Cray etc) and flying airplanes have proven that it works.
Bitcoin mining has proven that it's cheaper.
You may also want to watch this, they talk about all these problems and how this needs to be solved:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkBu5_hZgWI