Here, we see a few pictures of what an ASIC mining farm in China.
As you can see, the look is very industrial.
This is because the farm focuses on reducing unnecessary costs, which increases profit for the miners.
The racks are for systematic allocation of hardware, and the giant fans are for cooling.
Notice the water cooling used in the bottom right image.
Anyone familiar with hardware maintenance will recognize that water cooling is much more expensive than air cooling, meaning that whoever is cooling their devices with water cooling is willing to take a bigger cost for better maintenance of their hardware.
Perhaps in the long run, better maintenance means that there’s less need to replace hardware.
Either way, the goal of each of these mining farms is to maximize their profit.
This is why places that are cold — hence providing natural cooling — or that provide cheap electricity are more advantageous to set up a long term mining operation.
Here is an example of an ASIC.
The machine on the left is an Antminer S9, with 14 trillion hashes per second.
It’s one of the most powerful ASICs on the market currently.
The company that produces these, BITMAIN, claims that it has provided approximately 70% of the world’s mining power in hardware.
On the right we can see racks and racks of Antminer S9’s in a datacenter.
This particular photo was taken from an online listing that rented out Antminer S9’s by the month.
But of course, even with the most impressive technology, it still takes far too long to find a block.
Is there any way that we can reduce the amount of time it takes for us to get profit from our hardware?