Inside a Crypto-Mining Operation - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

we are altcoin miners so we don't mind bitcoin but we might just about every other coin besides bitcoin we have to go through to the next room the bunker we've got a lot of noise in there and a lot of airflow mine step here are primary mining rigs uh we've got a mixture of some nine card rigs and some 12 card rigs all of these are 1080 ti and video cards and they're all constantly changing which algorithm that they're mining depending on which one is most profitable at any given time and here is our original mining rig this is our test bench a bit flashier and that's just because those particular cars happen to be cheaper at the time of purchase on the mining rigs now instead of having a motherboard with two or three pcie lanes with 16 slots on uh you will have a card with maybe 12 different connectors for graphics cards um because graphics cards are quite large and don't all fit on right next to each other on the board you will move them away from each other using a riser card and an extension cable and you can see quite a lot of that going on in the back there looks a bit of a mess but it is functional and of course if you can get a bit further apart you can put a lot more air through and keep the heat down we've got a heat wave going on in the uk people may not know this but for us this is very hot at the moment yeah the heat wave hasn't helped a lot and the cooling solution that we did originally put in hasn't really covered our needs we've actually had to start ramping the power back while we're developing a new cooling solution uh it's going to be a very make-do cooling solution we're not going to buy an off-the-shelf one so we'll be buying carb radiator fans and then using a raspberry pi to control the speed of those depending on the temperature i know it's a bit of a contentious issue mining and energy but can you talk me through that because i understand it's slightly different with alt coins is that right um it depends on the coin and each coin has wider one algorithm or multiple algorithms and each of those algorithms requires a different amount of power to compute some of the algorithms are really heavy on gpu core some of them are very heavy on the memory usage the algorithms that we use all vary so we don't really have a specific efficiency on any one of them that we can set up at the moment um each of these cards are doing 250 watts of electricity in and converting majority of that to heat so we've got essentially a 15 kilowatt heater here in a quite a small room so we need to just keep that air moving as much as possible what's going on with the software you mentioned it switches between coins i mean how does that happen is that something you've off the shelf is that software you guys are bringing it's something you can make yourself but we've used an off-the-shelf one for that particular um job it hooks up to several different websites one of them is what to mine.com and that tells you using your efficiency of your card versus the difficulty of that particular coin at the moment what your returns are going to be and it can compare all of those very very quickly and select the right coin to mine at the time in terms of alt coins is there a kind of standard amount or is it waiting for the jackpot the one golden nugget how does it work it's exactly the same as bitcoin but the difficulty level is much lower so you don't have to use asic machines specifically for mining it um some of the altcoins have got an account rhythm built in and the idea there is to keep it as decentralized as possible so if it's just a6 then only those people with an ac can a large investment in asics are going to be able to really contribute towards the system um and if it's just gpus then there's still an asic market there that you could expand into and keep it as decentralized as possible and there's it's to do with the ethos of the coin whether they've decided to go fully decentralized or slightly less decentralized if you had different graphics cards with different hardware see like in amd or nvidia then yes definitely they'll be doing different coins simultaneously but with all of these being exactly the same card essentially if it's most profitable for one it'll be most profitable for all of mine so here's your 1x risers those are 12 pcie connectors where you normally see them be this full size here the 16x connector which is what the graphics card plugs into yeah and then these are in the same slot but they're only running at one x speed so you don't need the full width of the you don't know the actual data transmission is relatively low it's done a high high amount of number crunching and then it returns with a very small value essentially yes or no i found something and that goes back to the pool and the pool confirms whether or not that's a valid solution i highly recommend a six card rig for anybody's home and any room you put a six card rig in during the winter you won't have to pay for heating on the output is hot air lots and lots of hots if you can find a use for that hot air it's no longer really being wasted so perhaps it could turn into a good use um during the winter and certainly during our office moves we couldn't run these rigs at the offices so i took one home my colleague took one home to keep it going over and my conservatory was warmed all through the winter i didn't have to turn my space heaters on to keep that nice and toasty so the rig paid for its own electricity it paid a military reward as far as bitcoin is concerned and it paid for heating so i could turn the heating off so i certainly recommend having one at home and as soon as it went the wife it's like wait is it where's that mining rig back it's too cold in here i need it back now people will be used to seeing a silver backplate where you screw it into the back of the pc it's got a mesh over it so it slows airflow and we've got nothing to screw that into in our mining rigs so we take it off just dropped a couple of degrees off the temperature every little helps when it comes to getting heat out here people on the other side of that camera can't understand the temperature we are planning on upgrading the cooling solution the summer that we're having this year wasn't on our cards so the extra 15 celsius that the ambient temperature is now is actually causing us problems and we've got a new set of car fans behind us that we'll be building into a new cooling system so this was our first build rig we've got a spare cabinet sitting around we thought it'd be pretty good for airflows that's primarily what they're designed for as you can see we've whacked a few baffles in cardboard and a bit of rock wool there that makes a big difference the amount of air that's being forced between the cards the air comes in the bottom and it's pulled up by this car radiator fan at the top and when this is running it's pretty much close to ambient temperature at all time even with that many gpus in presumably these car fans are relatively inexpensive compared to that's why they're being used because they're super cheap super cheap pretty high throw throughput easy to power uh anything that's in a car has got a very similar power supply to in a pc running only 12 volts should we go somewhere quieter yeah sure they are not the best cards for mining every coin by any stretch of the imagination but they are probably the best cards for my mining most of the coins the boards are actually mining mining motherboards but they would work absolutely fine as a gaming rig