My life at a remote Chinese Bitcoin mine

As a modern city dweller, living for three months in a place where I have to walk 10 kilometers to the nearest grocery store is unthinkable. However, for me, this face-to-face contact with nature and the opportunity to witness a little modern alchemy are irresistible.

When the opportunity came to me, I came without hesitation. After a four-hour flight and an eight-hour car ride, and after going through countless tunnels and crossing countless bridges, I finally arrived at the petahash Bitcoin mine built by HaoBTC on the mountain.

The scene wouldn't look out of place in a James Bond film, with the only connection to the outside world being a 150- meter road that served as a transport for weeks of potatoes to feed workers at a nearby power station before relief supplies arrived after a powerful earthquake last year.

Most of the locals are Tibetans, and the Yi people live in relatively primitive conditions, following their most common living principles. It is said that when the government spent a huge amount of money to build a dam and asked nearby villages to relocate, the villagers did not understand the concept of such a huge amount of money at all, so they refused it directly.

But now wealth is about to come in a way that most people can't expect.

Mining

The rapid growth of bitcoin mining in China has left many people bewildered. However, one important reason for the growth is the expansion of hydroelectric power plants in western China.

The first petahash mining farms were built in Shanxi Province and Inner Mongolia, where coal is cheap and abundant, but even cheap coal can’t compete with free water.

Now, the mining farms are all moving westward. Our local power station with a capacity of 25,000 kilowatts began generating electricity in 2013 , but last year, HaoBTC CEO Mr. Wu Gang said when he passed by here that the company might not be able to pay the wages of these employees.

The companies don’t get quotas to sell electricity to the state grid, which prefers state-owned power companies to grow over private ones, and county grids can only consume a tiny fraction of their plants’ output.

When Wu Gang proposed the outlandish idea of ​​using hydropower for bitcoin mining, people were skeptical at first. But once they got over the initial skepticism, they realized that a win-win strategic arrangement had taken shape.

Before the new power supply was discovered, Wugang already had two mining operations at a rate of 7 PH per second . Once the preparations for building a local hydroelectric power station were completed, Wugang's miners would move there to take advantage of the cheap hydroelectric power.

Two houses have been completed to house the miners, and two more are currently under construction.

There are more than 10,000 Antminer S3s in the mine , and next to them are huge ventilation equipment, which makes an annoying buzzing sound. I didn't shout because I was loud, but because it was so noisy that I had to raise the decibel level even when talking to people close to me - this is really an ideal environment to teach you to be frugal with words.

As for the temperature, it often reaches 35 ℃, but because of the wind, it doesn't feel too hot.

·staff

There are seven employees in the mine, most of whom are in their early twenties and have only been working for one or two years.

A monthly salary of 6,000 yuan ( 967 U.S. dollars) is not high for white-collar workers living in Beijing, but for these rural children who have no high education or special professional skills, it is a good job to make money.

Money is of course an important factor that allows employees to be more patient in this lonely and isolated environment, especially when they receive an additional 1,500 yuan in overtime pay for working on weekends.

Once the two houses under construction are completed, the miners will be able to have one month off for every two months of work, although some may miss the 1,500 yuan weekend allowance.

Most of the company's employees in Beijing are programmers, and their salaries are paid by BTC companies. But the workers here still prefer to obey the boss's orders - the idea of ​​paying workers in Bitcoin is much more difficult to accept than programmers.

·daily

The first week I did more hard work at the mine than I expected. I thought I would be able to adapt, but after unloading hundreds of mining equipment from the truck and moving them to the racks, the soreness in my arms the next day made me very frustrated. In contrast, my colleagues were full of energy and worked very efficiently.

My colleagues are from Hunan and Sichuan, and the accents of the two places are very similar, so there is no difficulty in communicating - for me, it is still difficult for me to understand when they communicate in dialect, but once they talk to me, they will try their best to speak Mandarin.

After various conversations about equipment, I quickly realized that they knew a lot about Bitcoin. But they didn’t know much about the latest news and theoretical data, but they knew a lot about the legendary people who named these theories and the amount of wealth invested in them early on.

Wu Gang is a legendary figure, not to mention a hero to them, especially to Wu Gang's fellow Hunanese.

The daily work in the mine is very simple. At 7:50 in the morning , we have a morning meeting, and anyone who is late will have a small salary deduction as punishment.

At the meeting, everyone has to report on his work yesterday and his plans for today. At the end of the meeting, we have to report all the existing problems and propose solutions. Afterwards, Manager Guo will assign tasks and give a morale-boosting speech.

Then we will be divided into two groups, each with a leader. The leader will have more responsibilities and will receive relatively higher salary accordingly.

The employee, Mr. Guo, is a gentle, soft-spoken Hunanese who ran a small camera repair shop in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, before getting into Bitcoin.

One day, his old classmate Wu Gang, whom he hadn't seen for many years, contacted him and asked if he was interested in the Bitcoin mine he was running. Despite having no experience and knowing nothing about Bitcoin, Mr. Guo accepted the challenge. In the past two and a half years, Mr. Guo has managed three Bitcoin mines and has become an expert in the "cryptocurrency".

Downtime

There are no entertainment activities worth mentioning in the mine. In their spare time, most people smoke, drink beer, watch TV, play with their mobile phones, and play poker to kill time.

Betel nut chewing is also a common pastime - they tell me it's a stimulant and mildly addictive. I tried it once and it tasted like mint gum.

Despite the pleasant surroundings, there is not much to do outside the mine. Some colleagues told me that they have been here for three months, but the farthest place they have ventured to is a small town 20 kilometers away. Their conclusion is: "There is nothing to see, and the local Tibetans sell their goods at very high prices."

Bitcoin believers

Although Bitcoin is notoriously volatile, there is perhaps one reason why we love it: unpredictability. For those who invest millions of dollars in mining farms, they must place a firm trust in the technology.

The first rule in Wu Gang's code of conduct is that anyone who joins the company must be a believer in Bitcoin. But this is a business after all, and how long the mine can survive depends on whether it is profitable.

Today, electricity usage is down, and the dedication and expertise of our team have made us more competitive. But we are not blind to the risks - one day, our revenue may not meet our expectations, and we may have to sell our equipment to mines that are still profitable. Until then, these machines will continue to rumble.