Scaling the Mine: Modular Hardware, Enterprise Software

Cheap power is rarely where the contractors are. That was the problem Philip Salter set out to solve at Mining Disrupt, held online on July 22 and 23, 2020.

Salter was head of operations at Genesis Mining, which had been mining at industrial scale since 2013. Bitcoin traded at $9,530 then. Today it is $83,079. He talked about what breaks when a mining operation grows from one data center to several.

First, buildings. A small miner retrofits an existing building, works around its quirks and turns fans on and off by hand as the weather changes. Putting up a purpose-built building instead means custom engineering, foundations, construction crews, long planning and, as he put it, land and building permits that are a mess. At scale, he said, "the best way to go forward with this is to have modularized solutions." Perfect one module, have a partner manufacture it with quality control, and ship it to the site with minimal on-site labor. That matters more the further a site is from towns, near hydro dams or in deserts, where contractors are scarce. Genesis built its own: "our air cooled data center container and it's a 40-foot shipping container," holding 780 kilowatts of miners. It mixes hot exhaust back into the intake so machines never breathe minus 40 degree air.

Second, software. Many monitoring tools, he said, "have a vendor lock-in," working with only one pool, firmware or hardware brand. A large farm is never uniform, so operators need one tool that covers everything, and they need management, meaning configuration and automation, not just a screen of data. Many of those tools, he added, come from startups with a good idea rather than from large miners who know the do's and don'ts of running a farm. And the bigger the operation, the more it needs remote access, so nobody has to walk the floor to learn its status. They also need history. Auditors and investors will ask why performance dropped five percent in some month years ago, and you had better have the data. With that history, a finance team can export transactions, pool performance and the cost of last week's downtime instead of calculating them by hand. Genesis was rebuilding its Genesis Hive software under the name Hexa.

Third, people. Experts cannot be at two sites at once, and hiring a full new team for each location doubles the overhead. His answer: keep on-site crews at every farm for fans, power supplies and electrical work, and keep one central core team of cooling, IT, networking and engineering experts that supports them all. That, he said, is "the solution for the issue that you know experts are not always available in every single farm."

The conversation continues at Intelligence Disrupt 2027, March 22 to 24 in Irving, Texas.