People often ask me “What's actually the
difficulty when building a large cryptocurrency farm?” Usually these people have already built a
computer. They know the different parts that go in. And the strange thing about it is, it’s
really difficult to answer because they’re completely right. Plugging in all the cables in the right way
and putting all the components together is not very difficult. The difficulty is earlier in that. The difficulty is how to handle the logistics
and the preparation for building a farm of this scale. Hi, I’m Philip Salter, I’m handling mining operations for Genesis Mining here in Iceland. When you’re building a cryptocurrency mining rig for your home, you order all the hardware from some online store, you wait
for it to be delivered to your doorstep, you unbox all the boxes, plug everything together
and then that’s it, you've got one. Now when you’re trying to do this in a very
large scale to build thousands of these machines, that’s when things
get complicated. The reason is that the usual way of just ordering
stuff from online stores breaks apart at a certain scale.
So if you’re trying to order ten graphics
cards they’ll probably be fine, if you try to order, you know, fifty some might start
saying no and if you’re starting ordering thousands of them, they won’t even believe
you. They won’t even reply to your email. So you have to find a different way to source
material. Obviously we’re at a large scale so we’re
going straight to the manufacturers of the different hardware components. We have a lot of custom hardware.
We have lots of stuff that just did not work
out for us in the way that it’s sold in online stores or any store and we had to make
design our own and have it made. That’s of course another dimension of
making things more complicated because not just you have to talk to a manufacturer and,
you know, get a shipping date and organise shipping and all this kind of stuff. You have to think about this early enough
to design your product, to talk with the manufacturer to make sure he actually understood correctly
what you want. To have him produce it, to then deal with some
kind of problems with usually happen and then deal with the logistics. So the whole timeframe for the project is
getting larger and larger, the amount of communication needed for the project is getting bigger and
bigger. And people don’t see it coming because it’s
just problems that you’re not faced with if you're just looking at it from the technical
side. These are just real world problems that you
get with large scale and it's something you have to be on top of from the very beginning otherwise your entire project will be delayed
by a lot.
Luckily we have lots of experience here with
these kinds of small annoying problems and I’d like to say that at this point we’ve
kind of seen it all. At least the things that can really go bad
have already gone wrong once. So we are extra careful and are… just basically
think about these problems in advance and try to solve them before they even happen. For example we order a couple percent more
of everything than we actually need because of course some of them will be faulty, some
of them will be broken, some of them will be missing, some of them will be lost or something.
The most scary part of a build out is when
you’re almost done, right, you’ve done all the major steps, everything seems fine
and nothing has gone wrong. Because at that point you know, something
is going to go wrong. You just don’t know what and when. And the later it is in the buildout the less
time you have to fix it. So I’d rather have something go wrong in
the very beginning, there’s a big problem and you fix it and it takes you a week, but
then everything goes smooth.
