Bitcoin Mining - What do they use?

Hey everyone and welcome to Box Mining. Today I'm going to talk about Bitcoin mining and I've got some cool toys here to show you guys. I'm going to take you through what is binding, what these machines are doing, and of course a lot of people may ask me, can you use your CPU to mine, can you use your GPU to mine, I'm going to answer all those questions today in this episode. So let's take a look at what this thing is right here because this is the state of the art. This is what everyone is using to mine Bitcoin right now. It's called the Antminer S9. It's made by a company called Bitmain and it's probably one of the most expensive miners around. So let's show you something cool and switch one of these things on. Alright, do you guys hear that? That is how loud one of these things are. They have basically a power supply with a giant fan on it. It's whirling at basically mass capacity and you can feel basically the wind coming out of this unit. Basically air is being pumped in from the top here and out on the back. The reason why there's so much air being blown through here is because this thing is darn hot. It's taking in basically 1000 or more watts of electricity. This is how much electricity a usual space heater actually takes in. So one of these things is taking out so much electricity, it's generating that as heat and that's why you need the fans to blow air in and out of the system. So let me turn this off first and explain to you what's happening. So on one of these things are ASICs. So what are they? They're basically specially designed processors to do one thing very well. So that means that this kind of unit, they're no longer able to be like a normal computer or even a graphics card. They can no longer have other functions other than to mine Bitcoin. And that's what this thing is. So it's very specific to a specific algorithm. So this algorithm is called SHA-256 and that's the only thing it does. And what it does is that it does this one thing super well. And what it's doing is that inside this is actually a lot of these little chips and they're all doing this calculation. This one SHA-256 calculation and they're doing it basically giga-high times. Basically tens of thousands of times per second. So what's happening inside here is that they're all running and all the power is flowing inside and all they're all generating heat. And this is why normally there's no longer CPU mining for Bitcoin or GPU mining. You can't use your normal computer to mine for Bitcoin anymore because these things do it so well. What else is on one of these units? Well, you can notice that this connects to an Ethernet point because it needs to connect to the Internet. So what happens is that this receives information from the Internet, and what does this mean overall? What does this all matter? Well, mining is like accounting for the Bitcoin network. So that's kind of a much better phrase to describe what the actual process of what it's doing. What miners do is that they process transactions. Whenever you send a Bitcoin transaction, you'll initially see that it's unconfirmed. It's basically nothing. It's just announced to the network, but it's not really stored. It's not just a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit. What miners do is that they process transactions. Whenever you send a Bitcoin transaction, you'll initially see that it's unconfirmed. It's basically nothing. It's just announced to the network, but it's not really stored. It's not given to every other person. What miners do is that they put that information and put it into a block. And this block means, and once it's added, means that it cannot be reversed. That transaction has now been recorded, stored on the blockchain, and now it cannot be reversed and changed. So miners perform this very important feature of putting this unconfirmed transactions and putting that onto the blockchain. One thing, of course, is that why there's so many of these miners, why there needs to be so many is that mining is very competitive. What they do is that the more miners there are, the more they compete with each other. And that, in a way, makes this network stronger. It means that there's no one party that can come in with a new unit and try to attack the network. You basically need more than 51% of all these units out there to even try to attack Bitcoin. And that's why Bitcoin has the most hash rate protecting it. So one more thing about mining, it's extremely dirty. So if you look at this heat exhaust vent here, it's covered by basically really ugly dust. I mean, my hands are basically black just from touching this. The reason why is that a lot of mines, especially because of the airflow, all the dust gets trapped into one of these things. And honestly, with a lot of real miners, they don't really care about these instruments. These things expire after a year or so. They just look ugly and dirty and they throw them away because there's new technology replacing this. So what's the take home from this? Is that miners, real mining is lots of power, very loud, lots of dirt. That's the real world of mining. A lot of times we get removed from that and think, oh yeah, we can mine on our home or on our PCs. But you just have to realize it's super loud, super annoying. And sometimes if your electricity is not cheap, it's super expensive as well. One thing I do see now is this rise of these fake mobile miners. They feel like your phone can even start mining Bitcoin or Monero or something. Yes, there are some forms of mining can do so. But just remember, it takes so much power and most likely it's going to burn out your phone battery in two or three hours, more or less. So it's probably not something you want to do on yourself or on your mobile phone. Thank you so much for watching this episode and learning a little bit more about this mining here. I've also visited a few mines, for example, the Genesis mining there. They use not these machines, but they use GPU mining. So it looks a little bit different, but you kind of get the idea of just how big the scale is and just how much money, power and equipment is involved in mining. Leave a comment below of your mining experience and I would love to hear what you have been through as well. Remember to subscribe to this channel for more videos like this and also click that little notification bell to be notified of new videos when they get released. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.