This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As there seems to be interest in my coming bitcoin mining startup, I thought I’d lay out some of my basic assumptions here, and go over a few (simplified) numbers and the steps I anticipate going through in the next few months. If desired, I’m happy to answer more questions or get more specific, within reason.
Legal:
Here in Russia, the government recently legalized bitcoin mining, and is matching this with opening new crypto exchanges in Moscow and (possibly) St. Petersburg. There will be a new company code in the tax system specifically for miners, and there will be a registry of legal mining companies created in the coming months. For those not in Russia, this is meaningful for a couple of reasons. First, Russia moving in a pro-crypto way implies that there will at least be a few years of trying this liberalized regulatory state, decreasing the risk to an incipient startup of regulatory changes (albeit, not making them zero). Second, this is a trade with the miners to agree to pay relatively higher energy prices ($0.048/kWh) in exchange for legality. This is important because there are many ‘grey zone’ miners operating now; they leech subsidized power from civilian energy grids ($0.0176/kWh), driving up the prices for people and contributing to difficulties in the energy grid. There are also larger political considerations at play; increasing Russia’s connection to the crypto payments system allows them to (potentially) move away from the USD in terms of international trade, with the obvious advantages to both Russia and BRICS in general.
Engineering:
I will be beginning with the S21 Immersion Miner. Immersion mining is an interesting technology; the electronics are submerged in dielectric fluid, an insulating fluid that prevents electrical shorts but is far more efficient at heat transfer than air. Additionally, the miners can be sealed away from the air, preventing dust buildup and the gradual erosion of circuit boards, as well as decreasing the extremely loud sound inherent in bitcoin mining. I see this project as consisting of three parts: the tank, the heat exchanger, and the miners themselves.
The Tank:
This is the easiest part from my perspective, because I don’t need to make it. I will be organizing the miners two deep to make removal from the tank easy. They are individually fairly heavy, even when they aren’t full of oil, and I don’t want to deal with the potential for injury to either personnel or the miner itself when lifting it out of the tank. The tank will therefore be fairly narrow in the Z axis, very long in the X, and about half a meter in the Y. I’ll have it fabricated of thin steel plate to minimize weight and cost, and will have a series of holes drilled in and fittings for copper pipe installed in a U shape around each column of miners. On top, I will cut and fit large sheets of acrylic to cover the miners. This decreases the chance for dust to accumulate in the oil itself, at the cost of adding slightly to maintenance requirements (in terms of taking off the acrylic shell each time). The tank will extend approximately 10 cm above the top of the miners, and I will fill this space with nitrogen gas. Nitrogen will displace the air, decreasing the already admittedly low risk of the oil gradually absorbing water from the air via hygroscopic effects.
The Heat Exchanger:
This will be the fun part, from my perspective. All the electricity I use is turned into heat, which means I need to dissipate a lot of heat. I will install pumps in parallel, flowing heat transfer fluid through the tank to absorb heat and to the outside, where I will build a matching number of heat exchangers from copper pipe and variable drive fans. Both the fans and the pumps will be controlled via a programmable logic controller (PLC), automating their speed to match the heat transfer requirements. I note that the location where the facility will be, Irkutsk, is extremely cold. The average yearly temperature is 0C, with expected average monthly average temperatures in the negative teens over the winter. The record low temperature is -49C, which means that I need a heat exchanger that can be switched off or have very minimal flow to avoid overcooling the liquid. I have looked into special cold-weather bearings for the fans to avoid them seizing, and am planning to wait and see if they are necessary. At the moment, the plan for the external heat exchangers is essentially to run the copper pipe back and forth in an outside duct (a serpentine heat exchanger), and then place the fan at the outer end of the duct (‘sucking’, not ‘blowing’), so that the air actually hitting the fan will hopefully have been warmed beforehand. I will be monitoring pump speed, fan speed, heat transfer fluid flow speed, heat transfer fluid temperature, and tank oil temperature. I am currently learning PLC control logic to attempt to automate this process.
The Miners:
This is a bit of an unknown for me. I have never mined cryptocurrency before, and will have a lot to learn when setting them up. I would like to use BraiinsOS as their operating system, but Braiins does not currently support the S21 Immersion. This should change in the next few months, but in the meantime I will use the stock firmware.
Beyond this, I expect interesting challenges with hiring, security, and leasing industrial space with sufficient available power. The facility will begin as a smaller, proof-of-concept business, but if successful we will raise investment and scale.
I leave for Irkutsk in 9 days and want to hit the ground running. I’ll update next Tinker Tuesday with my progress finalizing things here before spending a winter in Siberia.
More options
Context Copy link