Take A Look Inside A Massive Chinese Bitcoin Mine That Generates Around $1.5 Million A Month

Bitcoin mining is a confusing business. It's difficult to understand it, let alone try and get involved in. But it's a fascinating world nonetheless. To mine Bitcoins companies need special servers and insanely powerful computers to process the vast amount of energy Bitcoin mining uses.

In this documentary VICE go inside a mine housed in an abandoned factory in Changcheng, China and meet with its general manager. In this one factory 3,000 miners generate 4,050 bitcoins a month, which works out to a monthly gross of around $1.5 million.

From VICE:

This is the infrastructure that keeps the digital currency's decentralized network up and running, and its operators are profiting big time.

If you’ve bought or sold or conducted any Bitcoin transaction recently, these are some of the folks you have to thank.

Despite its dystopian appearance, the group’s six mining farms encompass eight petahashes per second of computing power, whose brute force as of October accounted for 3 percent of the entire Bitcoin network.

Strangely, the mine’s workers actually live inside the facility itself, returning home just four or five days a month.

In the summer months, temperatures inside are in excess of 100 degrees, and a persistent, deafening buzz is always present due to the dozens of industrial fans required to maintain a steady temperature for the site’s 3,000 ASIC miners—custom-built computers specifically built for mining bitcoins.