There Is A Bitcoin Mining Operation In Georgia That Is Using 10% Of The Electricity For The Entire Country
(Source)–The 33,000-acre facility holds a capacity of 300 MW in total. The process of mining cryptocurrencies requires a huge load of computational power, and with great power comes a great demand for electricity. With more and more miners joining in the power demand is often too high to be met.
The same is the case with Georgia, which is now the world’s third-largest nation to mine cryptocurrencies after China and Venezuela.
As per a BBC daily podcast, reports state that the scale of mining within the country has reached such an extent that the nation is facing a power outage. The crypto mining farms in Georgia have such huge load that it is “sucking the power grid dry.” In fact, these mining enterprises comprise 10% of the entire country’s electricity consumption.
The problem reportedly persists in the Svaneti region where electricity is free due to harsh living conditions. Free electricity has drawn quite a lot of enterprises and the area has developed into a Bitcoin mining economy that is also “patronised by high-ranking officials” according to locals quoted by Kommersant daily.
I was just stumbling along through the internet, looking for something to blog like I do every single day and I got hit in the face with this headline. The type of headline that makes me realize that I don’t know anything about ANYTHING. The type of headline that makes me feel like a fucking moron. First of all…had to read the article twice before I figured out we were talking about Georgia the country and not Georgia the state. Not quite as shocking of a headline when it’s Georgia the country because how much electricity could they even have to begin with…but still. Before jumping into the internet full-time I worked for a manufacturing company. Having power was huge. We spent $150,000 annually on electricity and needed 4,000amps service. And that was for a small plastics company. Those numbers sound BIG to me, but again I don’t know anything. Georgia having 10% of ALL electricity go to things like this
Just endless rows and rows and stack and stacks of…servers? computers? A.I.? I don’t even know what it is. And I don’t understand what they’re doing. HOW DO YOU MINE FOR SOMETHING THAT ISN’T REAL? Bitcoin is an idea, an abstraction, and it’s just floating out there in the internet, all around where I work everyday, and people are digging for it with algorythms? What the fuck does that even mean? I don’t even know if I am spelling algorythms correctly.
It just got me to thinking about all the other things I don’t understand. All the other things in the world that when I think about them my brain hurts.
1) Radio Waves
How do you just send music and people talking through the air at all times and you can’t hear it…but it’s in the air? And then you turn on an antenna and comes out of speakers? HOW? You could explain it me a hundred times and I still think it’s witch craft.
2) WiFi
Similar to radio. When Barstool Chicago first started renting this office in Ukranian Village we didn’t have WiFi. We plugged our computers with wires into the wall. I think it was ethernet. Whatever. We had internet and it connected directly to our computers, because that makes sense in my head. Then one day Carl walked in and said “my friend works for a company and he is setting us up with wifi” and I thought. “pssh surrrrrrre, Carl. Our landlord said this building doesn’t have wifi. This will never work…idiot”. Sure enough the guy brought like this little device and now we have wifi, just for us, in our shared office space. A little plastic thing is capturing the ENTIRE INTERNET AND SENDING IT TO SPACE? HOW? My entire job relies on this little fucking piece of plastic doing magic.
3) Air Planes
Those things are fucking ENORMOUS and made of metal. They probably weigh a billion pounds. How in the FUCK does something that heavy stay in the air forever as long as they have fuel(except for that Malaysia flight)? That seems impossible
4) The Speed Of Light
I love outer space stuff. Big alien guy. Follow space.com on twitter. That stuff always grabs me. You know when they show pictures from the hubble telescope of distant galaxies like this
They’ll say that this picture was from 100,000 years ago or whatever because that was how long it took the light to travel. So whatever I am looking at might not even be there. NO BITCH, I am looking at it right now and you took the picture like yesterday. How the fuck am I supposed to believe you took a picture yesterday of something from 100,000 years ago and the thing that I am looking at right now in this blog might not even exist anymore when I am looking at it in real time FUCK !
5) Math
This one is pretty self explanatory. People do math every day. Numbers aren’t even real, they’re an abstraction, but people just figured them out somehow and now math powers the entire world and everything we do all the time. Imagine being like “if we set up this giant factory of computers that sucks up 10% of the country’s electricity we can use math to find money that doesn’t exist anywhere but on the internet and become rich”. That is a thing. Fuck me.