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Speculate on what will become of all the mining farms when the Crypto craze finally comes to an end.
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Speculate on what will become of all the mining farms when the Crypto craze finally comes to an end.

randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

I'm not convinced in the long term future of Crypto, so this question is obviously assuming that Cyrpto mining will eventually come to an end.

There are a lot of mining farms around, and new ones popping up all the time. Obviously if crypto becomes worthless, than the ASICs that mine them become nearly completely worthless and the GPUs on rigs will suffer massive depreciation.

But what of all the infrastructure that supports these miners? What becomes of these spaces, kitted out with massive amounts of power and ventilation/cooling?

Some can/will become normal data centers, but that will not always be viable.

Regardless of whether or not crypto sticks around, blockchain seems to something that will live on. Will these new blockchains still require some sort of 'mining' / 'proof of work'?

What else can become of these facilities?

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Comments

  • deankdeank Member, Troll
    edited June 2018

    The end is always around a corner.

    One end arrives, and another end will be seen ahead.

    Believe in the end and join LET apocalypse cult today. Dial 1-666-666-6667 today to book your worse seat in the Hell.

  • Shot2Shot2 Member

    All of this will end up at a landfill site, polluting water while rusting away because who cares, no profit to be made anymore.

    That's how it works with H. sapiens

    Thanked by 2TriJetScud mksh
  • mkshmksh Member

    @randvegeta said:
    What else can become of these facilities?

    Illegal grow ops?

    Thanked by 1pike
  • @mksh said:

    @randvegeta said:
    What else can become of these facilities?

    Illegal grow ops?

    Canada's legalizing marijuana soon, so these mining facilities can be easily converted to marijuana farms or grow ops if they can't get their license.

  • mkshmksh Member

    @TriJetScud said:

    @mksh said:

    @randvegeta said:
    What else can become of these facilities?

    Illegal grow ops?

    Canada's legalizing marijuana soon, so these mining facilities can be easily converted to marijuana farms or grow ops if they can't get their license.

    True. Depending on the location this might not even be all that silly. I fear a lot of those farms are in way more backwards countries though.

  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider
    edited June 2018

    Some of them may be sold off for cheap, and spawn budget operations a la Datashack. Many of them will likely just be dismantled, scrapped for parts, and demolished or left to rot.

    The reality is that most 'mining farms' don't meet the safety and reliability standards that are expected for a professional datacenter. There's not a whole lot you can reuse mining farms for, specifically.

    EDIT: Weed grow ops is also possibly a good one, although the buildings won't necessarily be designed to withstand the humidity of one.

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited June 2018

    My guess is that at least the bigger farms will be sold to and/or used by academia and industry. Some might serve some large gaming endeavours, mainly the GPU based ones.

    While I am absolutely sure that the whole crypto currency wave does have major political factors and reasons I don't know nearly enough about those and will hence not talk about those with one exception: to be accepted as and to really fullfill the role of a real currency crypto currencies needed to be accepted by major states.

    Another problem I see is that they actually have almost the same problems and flaws the old-style currencies had/have like fraud, speculation, etc but in part far worse. So I do not see the real advantage to society.

    The major issues I see however are of a technical nature. Many of the algorithms behind crypto currencies are far from verifiably secure and increasingly many attacks have been developped. Plus at least most implementation are poor and so are the oh so secure protocols.

    But of course a couple of thousand GPUs are attractive for diverse purposes like e.g. academia so I guess the major losses of the farmers won't be in hardware.

  • YuraYura Member
    edited June 2018

    I will finally buy a graphics card. Dirt cheap!

    Mwuahahhahah

  • mkshmksh Member

    @jsg said:
    fullfill the role of a real currency crypto currencies needed to be accepted by major states.

    Wouldn't say so. Crypto currencies are as real as real currencies (often more real since they often at least backed by something even if that's just electricity it's not simply thin air). Currencies usually just gain value by the fact you can trade them for (buy) something and that's true for crypto. Also the currency of a tiny country doesn't become less of a currency just because no major state accepts them.

    Another problem I see is that they actually have almost the same problems and flaws the old-style currencies had/have like fraud, speculation, etc but in part far worse.

    Well, you can't really blame any currency for fraud. It's a social problem. As for speculation: I wouldn't know how to fix that short of removing trade or defining and outlawing it somehow.

    So I do not see the real advantage to society.

    Depends on your viewpoint i guess. I am not even much into crypto but ability of being hard to control has some interesting properties and hat one thinks of this is pretty much a political question.

  • HxxxHxxx Member

    I dont see crypto going out anytime soon. Some might argue that is the future.

  • williewillie Member
    edited June 2018

    mksh said: Crypto currencies are as real as real currencies

    There's an economics concept (probably not universally accepted) that a "real" currency is something you can pay your taxes with. E.g. if you live in the UK, the GBP is a real currency with inherent value, since no matter what the rest of the world does, you can still pay your tax debts with them. BTC under that theory is more like a precious metal: of course you can exchange it for currency, but it doesn't count as currency itself, unless you can pay taxes with it directly. So its value could conceivably go all the way to zero.

  • redvi4redvi4 Member

    maybe AI farms. or render of video farm

    Thanked by 1Ole_Juul
  • mkshmksh Member

    @willie said:

    mksh said: Crypto currencies are as real as real currencies

    There's an economics concept (probably not universally accepted) that a "real" currency is something you can pay your taxes with. E.g. if you live in the UK, the GBP is a real currency with inherent value, since no matter what the rest of the world does, you can still pay your tax debts with them. BTC under that theory is more like a precious metal: of course you can exchange it for currency, but it doesn't count as currency itself, unless you can pay taxes with it directly. So its value could conceivably go all the way to zero.

    Well, if that's the official definition i don't think i can't really argue with it but it has it sure has it's shortcomings. First it has this interesting bias. Might be just me but the thing i care for most in a currency is if it buys me food (which admittedly isn't really all that easy to acquire with crypto). Next if i move to the UK euros and dollars suddenly stop being currencies? That's ridiculous. Besides Bitcoin is nothing like a metal. Even precious metals have some actual use beyond being a trading item. What can you do with Bitcoins beyond trading them?

    Have to agree on the last point though. Being state issued and not influenced by exchange rates is an exceptional property. Besides maybe i should just keep quiet anyways as being accepted as actual currency would just mean more regulation.

  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited June 2018

    @mksh said:

    @jsg said:
    fullfill the role of a real currency crypto currencies needed to be accepted by major states.

    Wouldn't say so. Crypto currencies are as real as real currencies (often more real since they often at least backed by something even if that's just electricity it's not simply thin air).

    Again, I try to stay away from discussing the political side because it's not my field of expertise. That said, no, crypto currencies are NOT backed up by something because in the context of a currency "backed by" means to have the RIGHT to demand exchange against something of (more or less tangible) value with a (more or less) fixed exchange rate.
    But I get your point as most "normal" currencies aren't backed by much more than politicians and bankers talk too. But here I stop; I just don't know enough about that area.

    So I do not see the real advantage to society.


    Depends on your viewpoint i guess. I am not even much into crypto but ability of being hard to control has some interesting properties and hat one thinks of this is pretty much a political question.

    My point of view is shaped mainly by two factors: (a) the crypto behind most crypto currencies is questionable at best and often just poor [1], (b) Besides frankly small chicken like thousands of 8 GPU "farms" one needs VERY SERIOUS investment to become even a mid size player. Translation: Actually there isn't much that really has changed and what little has changed carries a hefty price tag as in "[some major crypto currency] hacked or broken, millions of people loosing billions of their money".

    [1] Maybe interesting for some: As coincidence has it I'm currently working (in my job) on "hardening" (read: transform into something actually safe in terms of code) an AEAD finalist reference implementation. And once more I see a problem that I've seen quite often: for the crypto guys (typically mathematicians) the ref. implementation typically is the ugly part of their work they don't like but hell it must be done and so they do it - usually in quite poor quality. At the other end there are the developers who use those very ref. implementations like some sacred manna from the heavens which is understandable because >> 95% of developers don't exactly love math plus there is the saying that mere mortals should never ever touch crypto (which is probably sensible advice).

    BUT: What I just described is the very gap of hell out of which creep programs with an unsafe software implementation. And indeed reality shows us again and again that the crypto (math) is usually safe but the implementations (software) are not.

    And rest assured that that holds true for virtually all crypto currencies too. I don't think it's a good idea to base very large amounts of what formertimes was money on something that is understood by very few and almost never engineered properly.

  • mkshmksh Member
    edited June 2018

    @jsg said:
    My point of view is shaped mainly by two factors: (a) the crypto behind most crypto currencies is questionable at best and often just poor [1], (b) Besides frankly small chicken like thousands of 8 GPU "farms" one needs VERY SERIOUS investment to become even a mid size player.

    Well, it depends. With some of the major cryptos even a ton of GFX cards won't get you very far as ASICs are even more effective. Then you have cryptos that try to cripple GFX cards and/or ASICs. Those might be profitable for some time but will be sooner or later controlled by botnets. You are right though. There is no easy way for the average guy anymore to just print (any seizable amount of) money outside of very new cryptos that pretty much get released every single day but calling those highly speculative would be a severe understatement.

    Still mining is not the main purpose of cryptos. It's often needed to keep the network running and therefore is rewarded but cryptos aren't supposed to be the little guys bill press. They are trading items.

    Translation: Actually there isn't much that really has changed and what little has changed carries a hefty price tag as in "[some major crypto currency] hacked or broken, millions of people loosing billions of their money".

    Well, to be fair it's usually exchange sites and the like that get hacked. Haven't heard of a single case were any relevant crypto itself was broken but then i am not all that informed so it might have happend.

    [1] Maybe interesting for some: As coincidence has it I'm currently working (in my job) on "hardening" (read: transform into something actually safe in terms of code) an AEAD finalist reference implementation. And once more I see a problem that I've seen quite often: for the crypto guys (typically mathematicians) the ref. implementation typically is the ugly part of their work they don't like but hell it must be done and so they do it - usually in quite poor quality. At the other end there are the developers who use those very ref. implementations like some sacred manna from the heavens which is understandable because >> 95% of developers don't exactly love math plus there is the saying that mere mortals should never ever touch crypto (which is probably sensible advice).

    True words. Let's say i know a little bit about programming but my math skills are downright horrible which is not unlikely related to the fact that i dislike maths.

    BUT: What I just described is the very gap of hell out of which creep programs with an unsafe software implementation. And indeed reality shows us again and again that the crypto (math) is usually safe but the implementations (software) are not.

    And rest assured that that holds true for virtually all crypto currencies too. I don't think it's a good idea to base very large amounts of what formertimes was money on something that is understood by very few and almost never engineered properly.

    I am not disagreeing here. Not at all. I view all cryptos including the major ones as highly experimental software and i think it's safe to assume that at least some of them are developed by people that don't have the slightest idea about what they are doing. But from there it's a question of calculating risk.

    I know that i won't get further than partly understanding the matter, the protocols are complex, the code is (even if i can read it) usually not exactly small and the maths are beyond me. That's a risk in itself on top of the risk that investing in any given crypto might pose. Will i still do it? It's up to me. Is it my fault if i lose my investment? Very much.

    What i am trying to say here is: I like options. Some might be stupid, some might be dangerous and some downright suicidal. If someone decides to go all in on something which he knows he doesn't fully comprehend and loses it's because he did so not because he was given to opportunity to do so. It's the downside of freedom. You often have noone to blame but yourself.

  • williewillie Member
    edited June 2018

    mksh said: Well, if that's the official definition

    I don't think it's an "official" definition in terms of there being a law saying anything like that. It's a definition used by some (not all) economists use as a basis of the theorizing that they do. It leads to a bunch of policy prescriptions that go against a lot of the stuff we hear on TV. Maybe they're right, maybe not.

    mksh said: Next if i move to the UK euros and dollars suddenly stop being currencies?

    Yeah I'm not sure how that would fit in. Dollars and euros are presumably not legal tender in the UK, i.e. you have to exchange them to GBP before you can settle debts with them. They're still currency in the sense that they're backed by their ability to settle existing tax bills in the countries that use them. GBP vs Euro was specifically an issue when the UK joined the EU.

    They wanted to keep using the GBP instead of switching to the Euro, because that gave their govts more policy flexibility (they could decide things that made the GBP fluctuate against the Euro, with less immediate domestic effect than if they had joined the Euro, eliminating the possibility of fluctuation).

    That last bit came up in the news reporting about Brexit: if the UK drops out of the EU and tries to rejoin sometime later, the boffins (think that's the right Britishism) claim they will have to ditch the GBP in order to do so. Who knows, though.

  • deankdeank Member, Troll

    I am just waiting for the day Mr. Trump releases Trumpoin.

  • mkshmksh Member

    @deank said:
    I am just waiting for the day Mr. Trump releases Trumpoin.

    Believe it or not at some point there seems to have been a SilvioBerlusCoin. https://deadcoins.com/ has some real gems.

    Thanked by 1coreflux
  • jsgjsg Member, Resident Benchmarker
    edited June 2018

    How bloody not funny: As if they wanted to provide proof for my statement above:

    I just found a critical buffer overflow in one of the AEAD finalists that might soon be found in millions of computers.

    Short story: AEAD is basically symmetric crypto with included checksum, so something like AES with built-in SHA256 (plus not encrypted but checksummed associated data but that's not important here). Obviously the checksum needs some room too and is typically appended after the encrypted message. In this case it's 16 bytes long. The faulty routine mixed up just 1 letter in a variable name and such in one error handling situation wrote into the buffer for the DECRYPTED message but with a length that's 16 bytes too large.

    No chance to find that error unless someone knowing well what he's doing is working through the whole code (luckily just well below 100K source) and also uses verifier tools (in this case some LLVM/clang based static verifier).

    Now think what happens in massively longer crypto currency sources most of which are not even minimally verified and frankly written by people far less capable than the AEAD teams!

    Crypto currency? Thanks no, keep it.

    P.S. In case anyone is interested, here's the code fragment:

          if( 0 != memcmp_const(Final, Tag, sizeof(Tag)) ) {
             #ifdef CHKDC
                array_ptr<uint8_t> mtmp : count(*m_len) = message;
                memset((char *) mtmp, 0, *m_len);
             #else
    /**** Attention !!! buffer overflow BUG !!! ****************
          Original version was      
                memset( message, 0, c_len);
          But c_len >= *m_len + 16
          Corrected version: */
                memset( message, 0, *m_len);
             #endif
                return -1;
          }// if memcmp error
    

    (the CHKDC clause is my verifier code, don't care. The beef is after "** Attention")

  • irmirm Member
    edited June 2018

    @joepie91 said:
    EDIT: Weed grow ops is also possibly a good one, although the buildings won't necessarily be designed to withstand the humidity of one.

    Weed plants in veg thrive at higher humidity (60-70%) while flower rooms are ideally kept at
    ~35-50% but pretty much any serious grow op attempts to limit waste as much as possible and one of the things they should be doing if they're not doing so already is to run massive dehumidifiers to dial in the humidity for their rooms so they can collect excess water which will then be reused for the plants.

    Some grows operate at ridiculous efficiency with their reclamation systems filtering nutrient water for reusal and the water their dehumidifiers collect daily.

    Wouldn't be difficult at all to accomplish this for anyone looking to convert a space to a grow.

  • @joepie91 said:
    EDIT: Weed grow ops is also possibly a good one, although the buildings won't necessarily be designed to withstand the humidity of one.

    If Flex Tape can keep a boat together, I’m sure that it can keep the building up in one piece!

    Thanked by 1Aidan
  • Here is a case from Germany, not exactly sure how true all details are, but it's all plausible: Somebody build a bio-gas generator next to a farm, this is a plant that literally make shit into money. The re-sell of the energy didn't really worked out as planned so they had to think of other ideas to use it. They came up with growing shitake mushrooms in Germany. It was quite a success. Not sure how they do now.

    I read about another farm in Germany that build a shrimp farm (shrimps need warm water, and to heat (or cool) water costs lots of energy).

    There are quite a lot of things you can do with cheap energy.

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

    dergelbe said: There are quite a lot of things you can do with cheap energy.

    Well cheap energy is one thing, but that's not really part of the question.

    A byproduct of mining (and data centers in general) is heat. This heat can be collected and used for applications where you would normally need to pay for heating. So if you can channel the heat, it's useful for 'growing' things, or for heating actual swimming pools and lots of other things. Since the heat is being generated any way, it's normally relatively cheap to collect this heat.

    But in the absense of miners/servers to actually generate that heat, I don't see how the infrastructure of the mining farm / data center will benefit those heat intensive applications. It's not so much the energy used to power the DC is cheap as it is the byproduct of heat is cheap compared to actually powering heaters.

    Moving on...

    During the dotcom boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a massive amount of infrastructure built out, and after the bubble burst, what was left behind basically became internet infrastructure. Despite the massive losses to some (many?) investors, there is no doubt that the leftover infrastructure had great value.

    I've been trying to figure out what benefits may come about from the leftovers of this crypto bubble. GPUs may have some broad applications perhaps, and for some time, maybe all this GPU power will be used to help animators and 3D modellers with renderings. Or be used in AI research? I have no idea. Just a thought.

    You know it's kind of funny that people are suggesting that these mining farms may become good grow rooms for weed. I would imagine for the same amount of power and space, a weed should already be more profitable than mining, no?

    Thanked by 1coreflux
  • A few uses I can think of:

    • shelters for climate refugees

    • warehouses for all the excess goods produced and which can't be sold due to Trump's trade wars

    @jsg the bitcoin core team for one is very capable. they've found bugs in openssl for instance.

  • mkshmksh Member

    @jsg said:
    Crypto currency? Thanks no, keep it.

    Well, shouldn't that rather be:

    Anything written in C? Thanks no, keep it.

    It's just the good old C dilemma. Great language but awfully easy to shoot yourself in the foot with. While i agree math guys might produce exceptionally shoddy code in my opinion anyone who proclaims he can write any siezable amount of C code and be reasonably sure to not introduce any kind of critical bug should get a head check. As for avoiding C, well, that would basically translate to avoiding computers in general.

  • The whole crypto(currency) craze in 2011-2012 triggered some internal heuristic filter in my brain for 'iamverysmart' and made me stay far away.

    Historically, any Real 'right' to have your token be accepted by others, directly or indirectly flows out of the barrel of a gun(reference : mao: the bloody one)

    Guess we'll see soon if society arrives at a fresh concensus on whether crypto is a weapon or not (like the 3LAs insist)

    Thanked by 1mksh
  • joepie91joepie91 Member, Patron Provider

    randvegeta said:

    I've been trying to figure out what benefits may come about from the leftovers of this crypto bubble. GPUs may have some broad applications perhaps, and for some time, maybe all this GPU power will be used to help animators and 3D modellers with renderings. Or be used in AI research? I have no idea. Just a thought.

    There's already quite a bit of GPU churn, in the quest for ever-better ROIs. I don't see the 'death of cryptocurrency' being a significant factor in increasing the rate of ex-mining cards ending up on the second-hand market, with or without a poorly-built datacenter attached.

  • BlaZeBlaZe Member, Host Rep

    Machine Learning?

    The GPUs can be utilized for machine learning.

  • sunnygsunnyg Member
    edited June 2018

    I hope Bitcoin/Ethereum prevail and go mainstream for payment processing. I just received £1800 payment on Paypal, and guess how much the seller fee was? £88... And I still run the risk of being disputed over the course of the next 6 months or charge-backed over the next 12 months. With Bitcoin, how much would the seller fee be? Zero... How much would the transaction fee be for the customer to send the BTC/ETH payment? £0.50 at best... Personally I could care less about the price of the actual coin, I was surprised back in 2013 that Bitcoin had 100x the value of a Dollar, now it is 7000x and it feels a little less ridiculous some how.

  • pikepike Veteran
    edited June 2018

    @mksh said:
    Illegal grow ops?

    Makes me remember cyberbunker case in holland. Dutch SWAT found a decent weed farm and a lab which was used to produce mdma. I wonder what they do now in their new german facility.

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