Crypto AM Daily in association with Luno
This week in Bitcoin – A Crypto AM report from Russia
With Jason Deane
This week I was lucky enough to visit several Bitcoin mining facilities, including my own, in and around the area of the Russian town of Irkutsk, a few hundred miles north of the border with Mongolia.
Although I’ve been mining consistently in one form or another for almost five years, I had been doing it all remotely via trusted third parties and monitoring systems. This was, in fact, the very first time I found myself in the vast ultra-secure warehouses, actually touching the collection of hardware that had been happily whirring away over that time.
It was quite the experience, and I tweeted out a video trying to get across the size and scale of the place, not to mention the sheer volume of thousands of machines competing for the icy Russian air being blasted in by giant fans.
Of course, this was only one of many operations and I was able to visit several others locally. Some had setups like the one in the video above, but others were container based systems and one was even a liquid immersion system designed to cut heat output and power consumption. All, without exception, were powered by hydroelectricity from the local Soviet era dam which, even with all this power consumption, still operates at only a fraction of its full capacity. The potential for further growth without any environmental impact is significant.
The interesting thing is that even after visiting several sites back to back, my fascination with the process was undiminished – quite the opposite in fact. There is a genuine enthusiasm about what people are doing here – and not just from the financial perspective. These people are believers in the power of the Bitcoin network and are passionate advocates in the same way that many of us are.
So, in a week where the relentless increase in mining hash rate has begun to approach pre-China ban levels and the country appears to have had a vague second thought about whether it was a good idea to do it in the first place (spoiler: it definitely wasn’t), I can safely report back that the Bitcoin network is in extremely good hands with ever increasing investment and optimism.
And I have a feeling this is just the beginning.
Happy Halloween!
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Yesterday’s Crypto AM Daily in association with Luno
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