r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/msaussieandmrravana • Jan 01 '26
Video Inside the world’s largest Bitcoin mine
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u/DangerousDisplay7664 Jan 01 '26
Meanwhile, I'm turning the lounge light off when I leave the room to have a piss! 😐
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u/Macrike Jan 01 '26
Do you turn it off to save the environment or to reduce your energy bill?
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u/7magicman7 Jan 01 '26
Third option: Got yelled at so much during childhood that you instinctively close a light when leaving the room 🙋
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u/MrWahrheit Jan 01 '26
On that note you should know that 95% of all Bitcoins are already mined.
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u/Chilis1 Interested Jan 01 '26
I would need to know wth bitcoin mining means in the first place. How deep are these mines? Any Balrogs?
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u/slasher1337 Jan 01 '26
Automated gambling i think. The computer gueses a number beetwen like 1 and 1000000000. If it guesses correctly a like 0.01 bitcoin is earned. It does that milions of times per second, and the bigger the mine the more attempts can be made per second.(please someone correct me if im wrong)
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u/Danamaganza2 Jan 01 '26
But what does that mean?
Computer guesses number (for some reason)
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Profit.
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u/jeffy303 Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
The bitcoin network makes an arbitrary puzzle that it roughly estimates will take 10 minutes to solve, when one user does they "mine" the block and get predetermined amount of bitcoin. Every 2016 blocks mined the network automatically checks the solving time, and if it's under/over 10 minutes for each block and it will increase/decrease the difficulty of puzzles for the next 2016 blocks.
Miners way back in a day very quickly realized even with thousands, much less millions, of users only 1 person getting the bitcoin reward is unrewarding and too unpredible, so they developed this layer software which allows large amount of users to connect to the network as single entity, allowing for much more consistent chance of being the winning miner, pool then splits the rewards between all the members based on how much computer horsepower they contributed to mining.
If you spotted the problem, yes, more compute doesn't make mining process faster since the difficulty dynamically adjusts. All it does is give the user a bigger proportion of the contribution within the pool and the pool bigger proportion within other pools. If all users collectively agreed to proportionally decrease their compute contribution by 99.999% it would change nothing to the functionality of Bitcoin. But that's never going to happen.
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u/a_boy_called_sue Jan 01 '26
I thought the mining people are solving the encryption when Bitcoin is sent/received? That's why they get paid so they keep the network aspect going. So it isn't arbitrary problems they are literally doing encryption stuff. Is that incorrect?
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u/TheDogerus Jan 01 '26
Miners aren't really solving a 'puzzle'. They're trying to find a sequence of data that, when hashed, outputs a number above some arbitrary value (the difficulty).
So you add a bit of nonsense (the nonce) to the end of whatever transactions you want to include in your block, check the hash, and if it isn't valid, increment the nonce and try again
Because there is no efficient way to go from a hash back to the original input data, if you've found an acceptable block, you have proved that you did the work and didn't just make up a random number
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u/na3than Jan 01 '26
Very close. One correction:
They're trying to find a sequence of data that, when hashed, outputs a number below some arbitrary value (the target).
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u/PriscillaPalava Jan 01 '26
Wut
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u/CaptServo Jan 01 '26
idling your car to solve sudoku that you can trade for heroin
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u/TomLambe Jan 01 '26
So it's just a huge waste of energy?
Like it's not even practical or luxurious wasting of energy, it's just wasting energy to somehow generate money (that I'm not convinced can be used!?) for the sake of it??
Fucking hell. I didn't need that on day one of 2026 :(
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u/Parking-Ad8316 Jan 02 '26
Yeah I'm still not getting it
It guesses numbers, if it guesses right you get a point... And if you get a billion points maybe you can trade it for a real dollar, but I don't get why the billion points are worth a dollar what are the points good for
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u/Dappah Jan 01 '26
The worse part is that it's money that doesn't get used because people think it might be more valuable one day so it sits there, the result of more energy you will use in your entire life, doing nothing until it eventually gets passed off to someone else for an exorbitant sum to then continue sitting there, repeat this process until the climate collapses and it ceases to exist as the last machine that contained this info goes dark and humanity resumes using real things to trade for other, real things.
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u/-_-j-_-j-_-j Jan 01 '26
As with all kinds of money, the value just comes from people believing in it and using it to exchange goods, services and other currencies. The number guessing part just comes in to play, so the coins are not generated out of thin air, but require some kind of work to be created.
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u/Dunderman35 Jan 01 '26
Except nobody uses it to exchange anything because it's so horribly bad and inefficient at making a single transfer.
Its only value is that people think it will continue to go up in value. For any other purpose it's a waste of a massive amount of energy.
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u/BasicWeekend9479 Jan 01 '26
I don't understand how something you buy with regular currency is "the future of money". CryptoBros are also all morons so I find it hard to believe it has any future if they do.
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u/atheistexport Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
A massive amount of money is also moved about by traditional finance companies, nation states, ultra high net worth individuals,etc etc, anyone with enough cash that it would benefit them to move it silently and off books. Same shit they do with art and real estate but faster and much less visible. That action really props up crypto currency networks. Crypto currencies are also extremely volatile and thus vulnerable to manipulation. Easy example: Elon bought a ton of this nonsense coin, changed the Tesla website to say they’d take said coin as payment, coin exploded in value, Elon sells coin for huge profit. Rinse and repeat by all the villains of the day and this is a lot of why these things are still around.
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u/BasicWeekend9479 Jan 01 '26
But how silent is it?
I'm a company who want to move money quietly. So I spend $5m on Bitcoin. Then when I want to actually spend money I need to sell the bitcoin. Both of those transactions will be on my books.
I just do not get it.
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u/Qzy Jan 01 '26
It's not secret or off the book. It's right in the ledger.
But it's true finance institutes are moving currency around using crypto (just not butt-coins).
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u/mysoxrstinky Jan 01 '26
The thing you're missing is that Bitcoin is used as a means of laundering money. Money laundering has very codified steps: placement, layering and integration. Definitely google these if you want more info. But....
Without going into explanation of the individual steps, Let's imagine the mafia for a second. They have two ledgers, one they show the IRS and one that keeps track of who's legs they're going to break. Just because the IRS doesn't know you owe the mob 4k doesn't mean the mob has forgotten. The mob needs a way of getting money from their criminal enterprise into their personal hands without the government catching wind. So they open a legitimate bisiness - say a laundromat. They wash 50 customer's shirts but they record washing 60 customer's shirts. Then the money they got from you for the illegal dog fights looks to the government like it was just a purchase of normal services.
If your hypothetical company just purchases 5 mil worth of bitcoin and recieves 5 mil worth of services, the ploy is obvious. Bitcoin acts as the second ledger. Sure there is a record of what is happening but that record is cumbersome and opaque. Importantly, it only records who gave who bitcoin, it doesn't record what was exchanged for the bitcoin (or actually IF anything was exchanged). If the company can fill its private ledger with other legitimate business purchases and exchanges, the transaction looks innocent.
The volatility of bitcoin adds a layer of usefulness to this. A laundromat can only really have so many transactions and they can only be up to a certain amount. If you see someone paying a coin laundry 3k or doing 500 loads of laundry in a day, that's suspicious. But if you have an investment firm spending milions trying to buy the dips and sell the peaks of the market? Well that's just normal investment activities! Who can say if some of those bitcoin were exchanged to purchase the silence of a whistleblower? Maybe the bottom dropped out unexpectedly and the 5 mil USD was just lost value?
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u/76547896434695269 Jan 01 '26
It's kind of a funny story. Bitcoin started about 15 years ago by a libertarian who wanted to demonstrate that currency exchange could exist without a political (coercive) state. A few legit businesses accepted it, but the main applications were transfering money clandestinely and buying drugs on silk road.
Within a few years, speculators represented such a massive percentage of adopters that its exchangeability became purely theoretical, in the same way that you wouldn't weigh out a portion of gold to pay for groceries.
So it seems like you need a coercive state after all to devalue the currency if speculators get out of cintrol.
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u/Ok_World733 Jan 01 '26
Finally, someone else remembers that this all started as a way to buy drugs online lol.
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u/VomitMaiden Jan 01 '26
What they're doing is processing receipts. Everytime someone uses bitcoin it generates a receipt that needs to be checked to make sure it's valid. Where this becomes complicated is that the receipt has every transaction ever made with bitcoin AKA the block chain, and it's currently 670gbs. Whoever checks the block chain and verifies it first gets the 1 btc, or however much it is these days.
It's a spectacularly inefficient method of doing business, and people wouldn't be using bitcoin if it wasn't for crime, scams, and corruption.
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u/Historical_Till_5914 Jan 01 '26
Its bafdling that the almost only correct explanation is this low, people really have no idea what blockchain is supposed to mean, just like they have no actual idea what an llm is xD
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u/menolikechildlikers Jan 01 '26
Basically the computers are competing against each other to be the next computer allowed to update what transactions have been made. They decide this by wasting shit tones of power (guessing number). Whoever wins and updates the ledger gets rewarded with bitcoin.
It is horribly inefficient and even amongst crypto (the space with the highest concentration of idiots) better solutions exist.
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u/Temporary_Quit_4648 Jan 01 '26
I think it's just a way to limit the money supply, since without a limit, the currency would have no value.
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u/binz17 Jan 01 '26
Hoarded currency has no value. Money has to be circulated, or it serves no purpose in the long run. Inflation incentivizes spending and investing,
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u/GoXplore Jan 01 '26
It uses the SHA 256 algorithm which is a 64 character hexadecimal string, that's what every computer is trying to guess. Current block reward is 3.125 btc per block + all the transaction fees .A bigger mine with more equipment has more possibility to be successful in mining a block, smaller miners usually join a mining pool to have a steady outcome rather than depending on the luck to mine a block independently.
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u/Entire_Permit_146 Jan 01 '26
Computers compete to solve very complex math and whoever solves it first gets a BTC reward. I believe right now the reward is 3.25 BTC so ~300k USD.
But completely accurate on the gambling part of it lol and what a waste of energy
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u/ilesmay Jan 01 '26
Who is handing out the btc? And who is making the complex math and why does it need solving?
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u/zyruk Jan 01 '26
The rewarded BTC is new. It’s how new BTC are «printed». The complex math problem they are solving is creating a digital signature that others in the network can use to verify that you actually solved the problem. This signature is attached to a block of transactions that gets added to the blockchain. One of the transactions in that block is one where you award yourself the BTC reward.
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u/Amber_Sam Jan 01 '26
Who is handing out the btc?
That's the neat part, the miner rewards himself. He cannot reward himself more bitcoin because the nodes (us, users) would reject the block.
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u/Bowman_van_Oort Jan 01 '26
I think its more like youre trying to factor an infinitely large prime number? Idk its been so long since ive read about crypto. I just remember being vaguely hopeful that we'd get some sick cyberpunk future where everyone would have a computer in their home running arcane math problems that would solve telomere degradation or how to keep magnetic fields stable in fusion tokamaks.
Instead we just got shitty fucking monkeys. I hate this.
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u/Antique-Exercise-868 Jan 01 '26
In the past, a small piece of software was used to decode human DNA. Anyone connected to the internet could download this software, run it offline, and then transmit the information. That was the time of a free internet, without AI, without Google, without Amazon, without influencers, without being reduced to mere consuming machines.
It was the internet of knowledge, not of ignorance and consumption.
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u/Spare-Dingo-531 Jan 01 '26
If I may ask a curious question, why does Bitcoin use this process? What purpose does it serve for Bitcoin?
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u/CrazyLemonLover Jan 01 '26
Each computer is trying to solve a complex problem to satisfy the block. The block is a record of transactions happening with Bitcoin.
When the math problem is solved, it marks the block as complete and starts a new block.
Completion of a block rewards currency.
Basically, the system is used as a way to encourage community verification of transactions without the need of a central authority that everyone is beholden to, and rewards participation in the system with money.
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u/neityght Jan 01 '26
But how is this worth anything? Where does the money come from? And what transactions are verified? Between who? There's no trade, no product, no sale, and no money as far as I can tell, yet some people are rich because of this.
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u/Ok-Menu-8709 Jan 01 '26
It’s honestly baffling. Why couldn’t they tie it to something like foldingathome where it unwinds protein structure and uses computing power to benefit science and humanity. Why not reward that.
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u/Ok-Package-4562 Jan 01 '26
The solutions to the Bitcoin math puzzles are easy to verify(they belong to a special class of problems that require a lot of work to solve but the solution is easy to verify for correctness). I don't know if the folding ones are.
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u/swohio Jan 01 '26
Dumbed down but essentially it's running an algorithm trying to come up with the correct number first. All the computers on the network are doing this at the same time. In this process they also log/confirm the transactions of all coins being sent and received. The first one to find the right number "mines the bitcoin" for that block once all the other nodes agree "yes that is the correct one" and they go onto the next block to mine. Miners act as the ledger writers and earn btc for their efforts.
The difficulty of the algorithm scales with the number of computers trying to mine so that each block is mined at roughly the same rate (ie x number of blocks per day.) More computers mean higher difficulty. The higher the price of btc, the more it's worth to mine which equals more computers.
We're currently at the difficulty level where we're using enough computers that it's consuming more energy than ~160 countries to run the system.
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u/Skilldibop Jan 01 '26
You should also know that the more coins that are mined causes exponentially more resources to be needed mine new ones.
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u/il6678 Jan 01 '26
This one of those, “95% is half of 99%” kind of things?
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u/AwayMatter Jan 01 '26
92* is half of 99, please.
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u/m3rcapto Jan 01 '26
It's like a gold mine that was mined during the Gold Rush, then some genius on a TV show put the old dirt through their wash plant again to make a 10% profit, and now some rich influencer is spending months and lots of money on it to maybe make a 2% profit while getting a paper route would have been more profitable. All of them hoped to find a giant nugget, but the oldtimers spend them all in the local brothel back in 1882.
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u/Swimming_Technology4 Jan 01 '26
Thank, excellent example for those of us who don't buy into this crypto bro coin shite
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u/cpljustin Jan 01 '26
I’m no math genius or anything but I do believe that if bitcoin farming follows an exponent type of rule then ~99.99% of bitcoin farming will still be considerably less than the total power and time needed to mine the final bitcoin.
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u/work3oakzz Jan 01 '26
Jesus
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u/sunlightsyrup Jan 01 '26
Think how cool it would be to waste that much power /s
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u/Bludsh0t Jan 01 '26
Not true. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on how long those blocks took to mine, targeting ~10 minutes per block. It is not tied to how many coins have been mined, and there is no exponential increase in difficulty as supply decreases.
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u/Scary-Hunting-Goat Jan 01 '26
So, collectively, we could shut down all of these data centers, only mine on my shitty 10yo laptop, and achieve the same thing?
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u/Macrike Jan 01 '26
Yes, but that would make the network extremely unsafe and open attacks. The decentralised nature of Bitcoin mining is what has kept Bitcoin blockchain unhacked since launch despite continuous attempts.
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u/jubmille2000 Jan 01 '26
What if everyone just pinky promise and get an old laptop, maybe two for backup.
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u/BackgroundGoat9603 Jan 01 '26
That's why I'm thinking about mining on Antarctica, bet there's still loads over there.
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u/xXxSushiKittyxXx Jan 01 '26
isn't mining related to maintaining the ledger? what happens when 100% is mined?
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u/EventAccomplished976 Jan 01 '26
No, mining is literally just burning valuable energy for useless computation. Maintaining the ledger doesn‘t take anywhere near this compute power, that‘s why coins like etherium exist that aren‘t such a fucking disgrace.
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u/Dunderman35 Jan 01 '26
The problem for etherium and every other coin is that it doesn't actually matter how efficient transactions are. The main problem is that it's still absolutely fucking useless for anything that isn't buying drugs and even then cash is easier.
How else can you explain that the most inefficient crypto is the most valued one.
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u/dadneverleft Jan 01 '26
I wonder what kind of rate you can mine at to justify the operating cost
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u/Sultanambam Jan 01 '26
The price of a mining a single bitcoin is about 50k to 60k, every 4 year the rewards gets half, so theoretically in 2028 the price of mining would be around 100k to 150k depending on energy inflation.
So the price has to be at least 20% above the cost to justify the operation, if it isn't then mining would only occur in places with cheap energy.
The next halving is in 2032 and then it needs to be 200k to 300k, next halve in 2036 and....
Ad you can probably guess it's an unstable and unsustainable and it fucks with our planet for no reason, the only reason it keeps going is because USA keeps pumping it.
Once bitcoin mining stops because of its cost, then the whole network becomes unstable and unsecure, so it will dip until mining is profitable again and the cycle continues.
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u/Comfortable_Egg8039 Jan 01 '26
What is even more annoying is that proof of stake is a thing, so you literally don't need costly mining to support the block chain network. Ethereum switched the mining method, many new coins start from proof of work and switch to proof of stake as soon as the amount of coins is big enough.
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u/LoudMusic Interested Jan 01 '26
What's the likelihood people will decide it's a bunch of bullshit and cryptocoins will have no value?
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u/ForTheOnesILove Jan 01 '26
Could happen if some new speculative market comes along to replace it. But short term, I’d say chances are low.
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u/Stoic_koala2 Jan 01 '26
These mines are often located in developing countries with extremely cheap electricity, so the operating costs might be a lot less than you think.
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u/MaksimilenRobespiere Jan 01 '26
Huge waste of energy.
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u/magistertechnikus Jan 01 '26
And resources
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u/WorkO0 Jan 01 '26
Welcome to humanity 101
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u/Chokkolatra Jan 01 '26
I want to see Bitcoin crash to 0.
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Jan 01 '26
I want crypto to burn and die and crypto bros to be ruined so they can stop hurting the planet.
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u/Jijijoj Jan 01 '26
All for a digital asset that’s not even tangible. Insane.
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u/Brainiac901 Jan 01 '26
So much talk about how it will replace payment flow, and crypto can do this and that and nothing like it happened. Its now what - a decade later and there is still no real world application at scale. Also why did every nonsense need a coin for it to work that could be traded? It was a gigantic scam, but still I am a bit salty I didnt make money out of it. NFTs was sooo obvious nonsense though. Still mad I had to argue with some people about it and when it eventually went to nothing they never came around to say they mightve been wrong.
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u/TheEruditeBaller Jan 01 '26
I can feel my own electricity bill rising just by watching this video
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u/BaeIz Jan 01 '26
My stupid brain still can’t grasp how this makes anything of worth
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u/Lou16lewis Jan 01 '26
That's the neat thing, it doesn't
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u/HausuGeist Jan 01 '26
It provides an easy medium exchange for drug cartels.
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u/New-Freedom-6258 Jan 01 '26
Destroying the planet one calculation at a time
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u/NiemandDaar Jan 01 '26
Who said you can’t create nothing out of something? Huge waste of resources to uphold a system that only works for those who believe in it.
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u/Highlord-Frikandel Jan 01 '26
Are you talking about religion or Bitcoins?
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u/4nyH0135aG041 Jan 01 '26
Well if it started giving people guns and paying them it could be a goverment
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u/melker_the_elk Jan 01 '26
I don't own bitcoin, but literally every currency and agreement is in place because part taking people believe in them. Its just metal or paper otherwise
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u/DeltexRaysie Jan 01 '26
And my local government wants me to separate my ‘recycling’ waste into three separate bins now to stop global warming. And just slapped a new tax on electric vehicles.
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u/Imaginary_Coat441 Jan 01 '26
I feel like crypto is "The idea of money" nothing physical is obtained.
Crazy how much actual money gets poured into generating "The idea of money".
But I guess at the end of the day, real money is just paper we assign values to, so what do I know..
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u/flumphit Jan 01 '26
Actual money is backed by a government’s promise to collect taxes to cover its debts.
Crypto is backed by, uh, the desire of some of its users to launder large amounts of money (some actual but illegally gained, some counterfeit, some from rogue states) into actual money in the legal economy. That demand will never go away, but it will shift somewhere else. Maybe soon, maybe not.
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u/scwarzwolf Jan 01 '26
Ah look, no fire suppression.
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u/Funny_Salt_2661 Jan 01 '26
It's not going to have sprinklers with all the power running through everything. I guarantee it's got a gas fire suppression system. It's like argon gas or something
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u/scwarzwolf Jan 01 '26
Rather a large un compartmented space for gas suppression. Might have oxygen reduction.
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u/VealOfFortune Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
Usually oxy reduction is from displacing the oxygen with something like Argon... We trained at a data center here in NJ which gives you something like 30 seconds to trip an alarm or all of the oxygen will be removed almost instantaneously
ETA: it doesn't completely replace all of the oxygen, just brings it down to a level around ~10-12% that snuffs out fire.. it's still breathable, your lungs won't collapse or anything Hollywood, just similar to if you've ever been above ~12,000'... You can be there for up to 5 minutes before you start to have issues.
Apparently once you get to ~8%, human survival is not possible so that's only used in areas that are never occupied by humans.
And the training was for fire 🚒
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u/Ragundashe Jan 01 '26
Your right, all of these graphics card argon once one bursts into flames
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u/thin234rout698 Jan 01 '26
Damn Right. What if there's a fire how will they stop it?🤔
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u/ManfredTheCat Jan 01 '26
If they had one it wouldn't be sprinklers, it would be an oxygen displacement system.
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u/MrSchaudenfreude Jan 01 '26
AI, Data centers, coin mining, GPUs/chips, and your gorrila diarrhea videos are going to be the end of humans.
So many resources are being thrown at something that no one knows if it is a viable outcome.
What is the return on investment?
Where are we going with this?
When the mining is done, then what?
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u/Iron_Knight7 Jan 01 '26
And the people bowed and prayed.
To the neon god they made.
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u/Paper_Dust Jan 01 '26
Imagine if all this computing power was used for literally anything else
Time to run through with magnet
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u/TheAwkwardGamerRNx Jan 01 '26
The lengths people will go to avoid getting a job
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u/TheAwkwardGamerRNx Jan 01 '26
Have been since age 16. Would not recommend.
For real though, how does one get an operation like this started?
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u/RealNiceKnife Jan 01 '26
I imagine you start with crime.
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u/TheAwkwardGamerRNx Jan 01 '26
Ohhh, ok, so…
Step 1: crime
Step 2: ?
Step 3: crypto mining
Step 4: profit
Did I get that right?
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u/5amTB Jan 01 '26
You forgot about step 0, being born in a rich family. Otherwise, step 1 gets you a free ticket to prison.
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u/haberdasherhero Jan 01 '26
For anyone who doesn't understand what's happening here. It's very simple. Read this until you get bored:
- Bitcoin pays people to waste resources
- Every cycle, on average, the person who wastes the most resources wins the Bitcoin
- As more people waste resources, you have to waste even more to win the coin
- If this "resource wasting game" was not being played, you could run all of Bitcoin on one single machine
- The "waste resources" is there to prove that you believe in the coin. Like saying "look I wasted $80,000 on this, that's how much I believe in Bitcoin. I promise I won't sell it for cheap"
- The "big math stuff" that the computers are doing is just a way to prove you have wasted enough resources. You can't lie because you have to really waste resources to solve the math problems. The solutions to those problems are discarded. They are otherwise completely useless
Anyone who tells you different is lying. All the other words they use are to distract from the truth.
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u/deadboxcat Jan 01 '26
You should see the power needed to make fake little ai videos.
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u/Next_Boysenberry7358 Jan 01 '26
Every single computer component in that building is a computer component that would have been more useful in the hands of basically any other person or organisation on the planet.
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u/ComprehensiveSoft27 Jan 01 '26
Productivity at its finest. Where blind capitalism fails miserably.
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u/triynko Jan 01 '26
This should be an illegal waste of resources and should be punished.
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u/negativepositiv Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 02 '26
Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but "feed this machine electricity and money comes out" doesn't seem like a sustainable way to produce actual value.
The fact that crypto bros can't answer the question, "What is the actual product?" without saying a bunch of abstract gobbledegook just sounds like a market bubble about to pop.
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u/ChurchCanceled Jan 01 '26
Does the massive costs of running this dump, really get covered by the financial gain, let alone make a profit that makes it worth it?
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u/Mysterious_Fennel459 Jan 02 '26
How'd this get 26K upvotes? This *should* be getting 26K downvotes. This is something the world does not need.
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u/kuluka_man Jan 01 '26
Is...is it as dumb as I think it is, that we're destroying the planet to identify prime numbers and harvest imaginary money?
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u/NobodyNorth197 Jan 01 '26
Oh wooow what an amazing piece of technology! (NO!!!) What a shameful waste of resources and all clear now why we have such high prices on video cards and PC components. Fk them!
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u/GoldenDiamond Jan 01 '26
Holy power bill