Cogeneration for crypto...

[nzwasp]

So I was having a few beers with a mate of mine who was telling me that the company he works for is currently designing a plant on the praries for crypto mining powered by a cogen plant. And I was thinking would a datacenter essentially running a cogen plant and some reliable cooling beable to make more money or as much money as a SAGD plant or some other small scale oil producing facility, if you factored in the cost to build it, I would think building and operating a crypto mining operation would be far cheaper than building a SAGD plant in the first place.

Doesnt have to be bitcoin mining either, could be any crypto.

[Buster]

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So I was having a few beers with a mate of mine who was telling me that the company he works for is currently designing a plant on the praries for crypto mining powered by a cogen plant. And I was thinking would a datacenter essentially running a cogen plant and some reliable cooling beable to make more money or as much money as a SAGD plant or some other small scale oil producing facility, if you factored in the cost to build it, I would think building and operating a crypto mining operation would be far cheaper than building a SAGD plant in the first place.

Doesnt have to be bitcoin mining either, could be any crypto.

Some people looked into this for me a few months/year ago, and couldn't get the numbers to work. You can buy power capacity for really cheap in some part of the world. This is essentially a power arbitrage scheme, and this isn't the cheapest source of power.

[nzwasp]

like this company https://www.icolancer.com/news/canad...-crypto-mining ? althought it doesnt say what their power source would be. The guy i talked to said it the company was targetting manitoba and ontario as power is cheaper there. I actually thought hydro was more expensive although he specifically did say they were using cogen.

[Buster]

A trader I know that works in the market told me that there are actually jurisdictions where you can get paid or there is zero cost to utilizing power in off-peak times if you negotiate the right terms on the off-take agreement. We abandoned the idea...maybe you can make it work.

[Sugarphreak]

...

[ZenOps]

China has the three gorges dam. That's a lot of "free" off peak power, mind you - they are efficient enough to use the off peak for things like steel production.

[phreezee]

Don't know if they are powered by cogen, but was he talking about the one in Medicine Hat?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...ut-8-1.4584257

Also one in Drumheller:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...ller-1.4508043

[killramos]

https://www.google.ca/amp/business.f...-the-stock/amp

Sounds almost as stupid as what these guys are doing.

I always figured it was more of a shady securities deal so that algorithmic trading would give them a pop in stock price by associated them with crypto. Like all those companies who changed their names to allude to crypto currency mining that has nothing to do with their business that the SEC was pissed off about last year.

[Skrilla]

The one in the hat will run off the Unit 16 power system, supposedly using it to capacity and they have to build a matching Unit 17 to accommodate the loss in the original unit.

[pheoxs]

No chance its worth it. The difficulty of most coins are rising so fast that power isn't your problem, it's hardware. Any calculator you use now for profitability shows you can buy a bunch of mining hardware and make bank but fast forward 6 months and your profit is cut in half. Within a year your making very little.

BTC difficulty rose 33% over the past 2 months (and 200% over 6 months) which means all your mining rigs make 33% less profit and it just continues. Other chains such as ETH are having ASICs released which will dominate the market and make GPU mining less profitable which will push a lot of the ETH GPU miners to other coins and drive down the profits there too.

The only way your making money is if you have an in with Bitmain and can get their next ASICs early on or for the current gen below cost but that's basically impossible at the moment.

Example math:
Antminer S9 Costs you 3k$ and gives 14TH/s and lets say free electricity. Assuming the 15% month over month difficulty rise continues (and it will)
1st month - 250$ profit
2nd month - 212$
3rd - 180
4th - 153
5th - 130
6th - 111
7th - 94
8th - 80
9th - 68
10th - 58
11th - 49
12th - 41

For a total profit of 1426$ ... nowhere near your original investment and continuing to drop month over month.

[FunWheelDrive]

^^^

This is not true, yes mining difficulty can go up, and will go up as more users join to get in on mining. However just like in December when network traffic peaked they LOWERED the mining difficulty as more people switched to upcoming coins. The mining difficulty constantly adjusts to network volume and processing power. The busier the network the more you make. Period. The last two months have been almost a record low level of network volume. However now the volume is already starting to increase.

[pheoxs]

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^^^

This is not true, yes mining difficulty can go up, and will go up as more users join to get in on mining. However just like in December when network traffic peaked they LOWERED the mining difficulty as more people switched to upcoming coins. The mining difficulty constantly adjusts to network volume and processing power. The busier the network the more you make. Period. The last two months have been almost a record low level of network volume. However now the volume is already starting to increase.

The small downward blips were because BCH had forked and had their EDA causing huge swings in difficulties but since they adjusted their algorithm to be more steady its been nothing but uphill. Even in the current 'record low level of network volume' the difficulty just climbs.

[nzwasp]

That place in the hat has already mined 750 BTC or around 8.2 million canadian roughly. Althought I wonder what the power that medicine hat supplied them and there other costs were.

I dont think the place that my buddy was designing is even in construction yet.

[nzwasp]

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https://www.google.ca/amp/business.f...-the-stock/amp

Sounds almost as stupid as what these guys are doing.

I always figured it was more of a shady securities deal so that algorithmic trading would give them a pop in stock price by associated them with crypto. Like all those companies who changed their names to allude to crypto currency mining that has nothing to do with their business that the SEC was pissed off about last year.

From that article: Assuming that 215 kilowatt hours of electricity are needed to produce one Bitcoin

I feel like this statement is very very incorrect?

[killramos]

Like I said I’m pretty sure it’s a publicity stunt so not surprised the assumptions are wrong.

Me and a buddy were joking about how stupid it is to announce to the world that you have thousands of dollars of computer equipment running in an isolated location in the Bush not too far from GP

[Kobe]

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No chance its worth it. The difficulty of most coins are rising so fast that power isn't your problem, it's hardware. Any calculator you use now for profitability shows you can buy a bunch of mining hardware and make bank but fast forward 6 months and your profit is cut in half. Within a year your making very little.

BTC difficulty rose 33% over the past 2 months (and 200% over 6 months) which means all your mining rigs make 33% less profit and it just continues. Other chains such as ETH are having ASICs released which will dominate the market and make GPU mining less profitable which will push a lot of the ETH GPU miners to other coins and drive down the profits there too.

The only way your making money is if you have an in with Bitmain and can get their next ASICs early on or for the current gen below cost but that's basically impossible at the moment.

Example math:
Antminer S9 Costs you 3k$ and gives 14TH/s and lets say free electricity. Assuming the 15% month over month difficulty rise continues (and it will)
1st month - 250$ profit
2nd month - 212$
3rd - 180
4th - 153
5th - 130
6th - 111
7th - 94
8th - 80
9th - 68
10th - 58
11th - 49
12th - 41

For a total profit of 1426$ ... nowhere near your original investment and continuing to drop month over month.

You forgot to put in price of coin as well, if you are holding than I feel it's a solid investment..

May 7th, 2015 - $2.83
May 7th, 2016 - $9.32
May 7th, 2017 - $97.87
May 5th, 2018 - $809.66 (Had to use todays date)

Proof: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies...8&end=20180505

Now ETH has also hit $1,431USD as well



From your numbers it seems you are decreasing rate @ 15% per month?

I'm 2 tried for Mathz and Of course a 1000% increase will not happen every year but that isn't exactly a break even point vs difficultly.








Now ETH also peaked @ $1,431USD previously.

Friend got an antminer and is mining a bit, and have some friend in Winnipeg who set up a big mining rig.