A Chinese miner takes you into bitcoin.

This is my work environment. I'm a bitcoin miner.

It's a power nest mine, photo source: the website of the bitcoin continent.

one

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brinkof second bailout for Banks"

-- on January 3, 2009, "nakamoto" wrote down the words he wrote when he "dug out" the bitcoin creation block, which was the front page title of the same day.

After graduating from a specialized school for computer maintenance, I followed the O2O trend to repair computers in different homes. By the end of 2016, the company had burned out the money and I lost my job.

I was in a bit of a pickle, but when a friend introduced me to the miner, I almost thought I was wrong.

My hometown has a small number of people to work in the mine, but as a father in the eyes of the college students who have come out of the mountains, I don't feel that I need to sell my physical strength for survival.

But friends soon explained that the miner, who was not a miner, was actually working on a computer, only in the remote area of ordos in Inner Mongolia.

I can't take root in a big city, and the new job pays more than Beijing.

The bitcoin mine in ordos, source of pictures: Wall Street.

The first time I walked into what my colleagues called a "mine", in fact the location of the warehouse, I was taken three steps back by the loud roar.

My job is to patrol the entire warehouse every day and test every machine with my laptop. If the problem is found, follow the steps described in the operation manual - reboot - reconnect the circuit board - unload the machine to the technical department.

It sounds like a simple task. Working time is three shifts, a rotation once a month, and this also is not a problem, after all, in the place of ordos, even if let me do my work according to the normal time to rest, no can do.

However, after the first day of work, the first thing I did after I rushed out of the warehouse was to buy a pair of headphones on taobao, and then after a few months 'salary, I changed a pair of noise.

The noise in the warehouse is so loud that it's like lying on the side of a machine when you go home and sleep without headphones.

Two

Time is money."

A sign posted on the wall of the mine.

At first, I didn't know why this place was called a mine.

On one break, I saw my colleague in a circle of mystery, talking to a screen. I looked up, and it was a zigzag line, with a few English letters on it -- Bitcoin.

My colleagues told me that the letters were translated into Chinese and called bitcoins, and this machine room was used to dig up bitcoin, so it was called a mine of mines.

But a virtual thing, why would you use this word? I'm still scratching my head.

The colleague can not explain clearly, let me ask the group leader. Wearing black-rimmed glasses, it looks like the head of a tech geek has explained to a lot of people, and he patiently told me the rationale behind this:

"It's much more like a gold rush in the United States and Australia than mine.

Mining is a rewarding experience, but not in the river. In addition to pure physical labor, it also requires a lot of patience and good luck.

That's how it feels.

To be more precise, our quarry is a "hunger games", held every ten minutes, with miners all over the world participating, and the prize for the game is bitcoin.

The reason why you see the current mine is so big is that it is getting harder to get the prize.

There are many reasons behind it, more and more such as miners, like our mines here, now there are eighty China light, and most of the new mine in Iceland and Russia such desolate place.

But at the same time, there are fewer and fewer prizes for a single game. This is what "nakamoto" imposed when it created bitcoin. Before 2012, each game could produce 50 awards. It will be halved every four years, which means that in 2017 there will be only 12.5 rewards for each game. And there is a clear end to the game, which ends when the number of bitcoins reaches 21 million. It's supposed to be around 2050.

That doesn't count, and every game is getting harder. How do you say? Because this game is essentially guess Numbers (editor's note: specifically, dig the currency is the essence of double-counting random the hash value of the string, and check whether the result string to satisfy the head enough zero, but the group says it is guess number also not wrong). In order to control the speed of distribution, the number of correct answers is becoming more and more complex. The miners may have guessed the Numbers ten times before, but now they may not have guessed a thousand times.

"Time is money" on the wall of our mine, because time is here, it's really money -- the earlier you try, the more likely you are to get a new bitcoin.

The group leader stopped suddenly to look at me.

I was still trying to digest what he had just said, and suddenly he thought I was wasting my time.

When I got back to my post, I realized that there was one more important question I didn't ask -- what about the prize? Why do we play such a game?

Three

"I am very angry, graduation, change a card, result all out of goods, the rest is dead expensive dead expensive 1080ti what!"

-- in July 2017, the anonymous comments of a video card store on Tmall.

I found the answer myself soon after, because my colleague taught me the price of bitcoin.

At that time, in early 2017, a bitcoin was worth about $1,000, or more than 6,000 yuan. Obviously, there is no reason not to participate in a game of 700,000 bonuses every 10 minutes.

And I soon learned the trick of the game -- there's no trick.

The so-called mining algorithm, which is the method of guessing Numbers, is actually fixed and simple, and there is no place for improvement.

So there is only one way to win the game, which is to find the hardware that can execute the most algorithm in the unit time. In addition, 1+1=2, who owns the most hardware, who is the most likely to win the game.

From my colleagues, I also know that the mining history of the whole bitcoin is the iterative history of mining hardware.

In the time of the creation, everyone used the CPU of the ordinary computer to dig the mine, which was a good time for individuals to dig mines.

By 2010, AMD's GPU chip was found there is a specific computing components, can accelerate digital key steps, so multiple GPU assembled into "GPU mill" quickly out of the ordinary PC mill, which is why in recent years, the graphics card and other computer hardware is different, often don't drop the price rise, but also the old out of stock.

By the end of 2011, the FPGA (field programmable logic gate array) mining machine was born, because it eliminated unnecessary image computing hardware units in GPU, so the efficiency was greatly improved.

That was when the first mine, Eligius, appeared. But the mine was still in its infancy, and the miners were still mainly talking about the world's silent miners.

And the mine that I maintain every day is the fourth generation, the ASIC chip. Compared with FPGA, ASIC chip has sacrificed flexibility and made it to guess the number of mining, so the efficiency has made a qualitative leap again.

If do a simple comparison, CPU mining speed is 1, then the GPU is probably 10, the FPGA mill speed, although only 8, but the consumption of electricity is 40 times less than the GPU, and ASIC mining speed is 2000, power consumption is linked to the GPU.

That makes it easy to understand why the ASIC chip quickly pushed the other three mines out of the market.

In addition, at this stage, the mine has become the main mining force. Because a mainstream ASIC chip miner, such as the ant miner S9, sells for more than 10,000 yuan. At the same time, there are at least a hundred S9 days running around the clock.

The top three mines quickly became China's arena. In the past few years, China's strong supply chain and manufacturing capacity in the IT field have been fully developed.

For example, the company quickly became a leader in the world's mining industry by designing an ASIC chip for bitcoin mining. Over the past two years, his mine has sold more than 100, 000 units, each with hundreds of ASIC chips, such as an ant miner S9, which USES 189 ASIC chips. (editor's note: according to media reports, in December 2017, the 10nm wafer order sent to TSMC has surpassed the Chinese chipmaker huawei hsi.)

I had seen a job advertisement in Beijing before when I was in Beijing. Graduation from tsinghua university, the technology director of sharing, has become a rising star in China's chip design industry.

It is said that in the first half of 2017, the company's net profit has exceeded 1 billion RMB, so the profit level should be even more astonishing in the second half of the year when bitcoin continues to shoot up.

Four

"Bitcoin will rise to $100,000 in 10 years."

-- Saxo Bank, a successful prediction of the price trend of bitcoin in 2017, analyzed the latest forecasts from teacher peterson.

Time passed quickly and I had been working in this mine for half a year.

Just rejoice in the winter and spring, no longer in the winter of the northeast of the winter shivering, the group leader informed us that the mine is moving.

The old staff around them were very calm, and turned around and began to pack, leaving us a bunch of new people confused and didn't know what had happened.

Later, we learned that migratory birds are the practice of the mine, and in winter in the Inner Mongolia region of xinjiang, the summer will go to sichuan.

But it's not easy to move tens of thousands of machines, let alone across most of China, why?

It was not until I saw the new home in sichuan that I woke up.

The new workplace is at the edge of a hydropower station, and the river is running through the Windows.

For the mine, the proceeds = the cost of the bitcoins for the production - the cost of the mine - the cost of electricity - maintenance and labor costs - the mine depreciation.

To my surprise, the bulk of the expenditure was not the mine that I thought was expensive, and certainly not our cheap labor costs, but electricity.

In fact, as early as ordos, I felt that the entire mine was like an electric black hole.

The team leader once mentioned that our mine would burn 40 megawatts of electricity in an hour, the equivalent of 12,000 homes. Although the local government has given a lot of discounts, it still pays hundreds of millions of yuan in electricity bills every year.

And this is still a power surplus, once known as "ghost town".

A: is there any cheaper place for electricity?

Yes, it is the summer season of sichuan.

Along the 301 national road to kangding, sichuan province, there are dozens of hydropower stations along the way. The surge of water has brought a steady stream of electricity to the hydroelectric plant, which in the summer is too late to transmit and the state grid has had to force some hydropower stations to do two.

But when bitcoin mines are springing up, the idle state of the plant no longer exists.

The new site of our mine is a neat row of blue plastic steel sheds, built in the mountains, with thousands of mines in each shed. The hydropower station, which generates 7x24 hours of electricity, supports the operation of the mining machine, which is often used to ensure the power supply of the mine.

Though summer mountains only more than 20 degrees, but whenever I open the door of the shed, a heat wave will still face - thousands of ore machine the heat energy produced is 24-hour operation, than the common room.

The greenhouse is equipped with air-cooling and water-cooling systems, and large fans are constantly blowing heat into the water wall. It is not so much the wall as the curtain of the wire, the cold water flowing down from the top down, the instant evaporation of the hot air, and the heat.

So what's the temperature in the room?

35 degrees.

Therefore, after sichuan, the damage frequency of the mine was greatly improved, and I found that the boards of several mining machines were burnt out of the yellow spot almost every day, and could not be repaired and replaced only.

But the group leader told us it was still worth it. Because of the wet season, hydropower electricity marginal costs close to zero, the mine directly in the contracting way to buy a power plant, only need 45 million RMB a month, far cheaper than in ordos.

What about the dry season? "I asked, curious.

The group leader sighed, because the electricity produced by the two seasonal hydropower stations could be five to ten times less, so the electricity price would be multiplied several times in the dry season. That is why, at the end of the summer and early autumn, the mines will be able to migrate to places like xinjiang and Inner Mongolia.

But I also observed that both the head of the hydroelectric plant and the local government were very welcome. Because we have no pollution, green environment, no industrial waste or sewage discharge, and cash spot, is a very ideal investment attraction.

At the same time, government officials can claim that they are introducing new economic industries, big data and the Internet industry -- and there's nothing wrong with that.

Five

Virtual currency 'mining' industry is a pseudo-financial innovation.

-- a notice on the orderly exit of the "mining enterprises" of the virtual currency in our region

My career ended in early 2018.

At the end of last year, the owner of the mine decided to move to xinjiang. It didn't occur to me that on January 4, just after the New Year's day, the xinjiang mutual fund issued a message asking local authorities to check local bitcoin mines.

Although no said to clamp down on directly, but the local government or nip in the bud is cancelled before citing investment promotion and capital introduction to our electricity prices are favorable, the national power grid standard price is 0.4 yuan, kilowatt-hour and give the preferential price of the mine is before kilowatt-hour 0.2 yuan, 0.3 yuan between.

A doubling of the price of electricity has reduced the profits of the mines, and the price of bitcoin has ended the trend of unilateral increases. Despite the money, the boss decided to close the deal and put an end to the increasingly risky business.

He said, more and more mines in northern Europe, Russia and neighbor north Korea, where the policy risk is smaller, lower electricity bills, and the local government for various purposes, more support to the development of mining industry.

In China, from the earliest ban on currency trading, the closure ICO and exchange, to touch bottom limit around the mine, strong pressure from regulatory, for these in a bull market to make flush with the "dig" constraints.

As for my colleagues around me, most of them made some money by buying and selling various digital currencies, and then they were scattered -- some went to other mines, and some simply threw themselves into the coinage to make professional investments.

I didn't get rich by going into the industry too late to buy money later. But the long work of the mine left me with tinnitus, and the doctor said that if you work in this environment for two years, your hearing will be permanently impaired.

But that's not the reason I left the mine.

In fact, I realized that even the miners were not working here.

I don't know the hash value, I don't understand merkel's roots, the block chain and the digital signature have only an ignorant concept. I have a connection with this so-called "gold of the Internet age" bitcoin, which is the only one that can be repaired.

In this astute vision of the "decentralization", "equality", "democracy is" the world has not come, standing in the mine closed to me, and control the work force, the bigger the gap is only in the expansion.

I am going to sign up for the postgraduate exam next year and re-enter the campus learning knowledge. I'm going to be a real geek, not a graying miner.

Just, all say the world one day coin circle year. When I graduate, I don't know what day it will be.