A fire has completely destroyed equipment that was worth $10 million at a huge bitcoin mining farm that was being operated by Innosilicon, according to reports. The incident took place on Monday, according to bitcoin expert Marshall Long. Marshall Long also shared images of the fire on social media.
Innosilicon has yet not confirmed about the fire taking place, a number of bitcoin mining experts are already busy speculating about the effects that the fire has had on the market. A number of experts have even said that the loss to the bitcoin mining network might have been a factor towards the recent price increase of Bitcoin. The value of Bitcoin, for those of you who are not keeping a score, had gone up by $500 after the fire.
Dovey Wan, who is a founding partner at cryptocurrency firm Primitive Ventures, has said that the estimated total of the cost of damages from the fire is about $10 million. A number of studies have recently been focused on the harmful environmental effects of bitcoin mining. In fact, one study has also suggested that electricity consumption from Bitcoin mining will be greater than that of the US by 2020.
Another study that was published in the journal Joule, last year, estimated that Bitcoin networks all over the world were consuming around 2.55 gigawatts of electricity and would soon reach 7.67 gigawatts although a number of solutions have been proposed, including relying on the Bitcoin servers for offsetting heating emissions. Most of the mining farms for Bitcoin are based in China – a country that already has a poor environmental record.
Furthermore, the fire at the Innosilicon data center is not the first Bitcoin-related disaster to have happened in 2019 in China. Another large mining farm located in Poolin was washed away by floods in Sichuan province in August.
