The air conditioning on the fourth floor of SEG Plaza in Huaqiangbei couldn't disperse the sweat on my back. Various models of Antminer machines were displayed in the glass counter. Boss A-Kun's Buddhist beads were spinning rapidly between his fingers, and the certificate on the wall behind him, stating "Core Distributor of Bitmain," still had its brand-new plastic seal.
"A student wants to buy an S5?" He glanced at my school uniform pants, "This machine consumes electricity more ferociously than it consumes coins, does your family run a substation?" I was counting the serial numbers of the twenty mining machines in the counter; these machines were supposed to be packed and sold to a mining site in Inner Mongolia three months later, but now they were gleaming with a matte black metallic sheen.
The Meizu phone in my pocket suddenly vibrated, and the notification that the $BTC price had fallen below 300 dollars made A-Kun's brow twitch. I knew this was the last deep squat before the halving market in 2016; the electronic clock on the wall showed June 12—exactly thirty days until Bitcoin production would be halved.
"Using the industrial electricity price from Longgang Electronics, it's 0.42 yuan per kilowatt-hour." I tossed a canvas bag containing 100,000 cash onto the counter, and A-Kun's beads paused at the position of my tiger's mouth. This money was earned by mining $ETH using 400 graphics cards over the past three months, and the burnt smell of the circuit boards in the tin shed still clung to the collar of my school uniform.
That night, when my father signed the guarantee letter in the factory's distribution room, the moonlight stretched the shadow of the transformer box long. The three characters "Lin Jianguo" on his work uniform were soaked white with sweat, "The factory said we can borrow electricity for a maximum of three months, but next month this factory... is going to be demolished." He kicked away the gravel at his feet, and the searchlights of the demolition team swept over the warehouse piled with mining machines; those buzzing machines were devouring the last legacy of traditional manufacturing.
On the seventh day of the mining site operation, while squatting under the transformer and eating rice rolls, I felt an unusual vibration. Twelve Antminer machines suddenly went black, and blue smoke billowed from the distribution box. When my father rushed in with a fire extinguisher, I was still wrapping the burnt copper wire with insulating tape—these second-hand mining machines' modified circuit boards couldn't withstand eighteen hours of full-load operation.
"Are you trying to get yourself killed!" He smashed my mining machine with a wrench for the first time, and sparks flew in the darkness, "Do you know there was a fire at a mining site in Bao'an yesterday?" I wiped the carbon dust off my face; in the cold light of the monitor, the Bitcoin network's hash rate was visibly dropping.
That night, I pried open the roller shutter door of the Longhua hardware store. While climbing over the wall with three rolls of industrial cable, a piece of barbed wire snagged on my pants, leaving a ten-centimeter-long gash on my right leg. Under the moonlight, my father silently helped me bandage it; the iodine stung the wound, and at that moment, the Bitcoin network had just mined the 420,000th block, with the halving countdown hitting 29 days.
"Go to Pingshan." I said amidst the beeping sounds of the mining machines restarting. When my father looked up at me, the dust from the mining machines was still embedded in the wrinkles on his forehead, "The newly built data center over there has surplus electricity, and the director of the management committee is your uncle's comrade-in-arms."
On the day of the move, it was pouring rain, and five trucks from Huolala rolled over the ruins of the electronics factory. I stood in the rain holding a box of hard drives, watching the workers take down the gilded sign of "Longgang Electronics Co., Ltd." My father suddenly bent down to pick up a half brick and smashed it hard against the glass window of the transformer box, scattering shards and startling the wild cat that had nested among the mining machines.
The air conditioning at the Pingshan data center was freezing, making my fingers numb. I watched the staff install mining racks through the glass curtain wall; they wouldn't know that thirty modified Antminer machines had mixed in with these cabinets. When my uncle's comrade-in-arms signed the acceptance document, the price of $BTC quietly climbed over the 400-dollar mark.
"Industrial electricity is 0.38 yuan per kilowatt-hour, but there's a condition." The director's thermos cup was steeping goji berries, "Help us process twenty tons of electronic waste every week." I looked towards the backyard piled with discarded servers; those circuit boards containing rare metals glimmered eerily in the rain—three months later, Shenzhen would enact the strictest mining site rectification order in the country.
Late at night, my father was counting the number of mining machines in the temporary board house. His reading glasses reflected the balance of his ETH wallet, and the zeros before the decimal point had vanished. When the Bitcoin network completed the confirmation of the 420,001st block, I pressed the main switch of the mining machines, and the hash rate distribution map of the entire South China region rippled.
A-Kun's phone rang at three in the morning: "Boss Lin, Inner Mongolia needs five hundred S7 units, current stock price is three thousand more per unit, are you in?" I listened to the roaring of the mining machines in the background, knowing that Bitmain was clearing out its inventory. The moon outside was shining on the electronic waste mountain in the suburbs of Pingshan, where the future was buried that traditional miners couldn't understand.
This article is purely fictional, intended for entertainment, and does not constitute investment advice.
Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental (●'◡'●)
