Screens Know Your Cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and the blockchain laid bare If Bitcoin was Darth Vader, then the blockchain would be Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.Bitcoin may be in the spotlight, but the blockchain is the one actually calling the shots.And that, I'm afraid, is as far as I can go with that particular pop-culture reference.There are currently more than 700 cryptocurrencies available for trading online.Some, like Bitcoin, are legit and used worldwide for buying and selling normal shit.Others, like PoonCoin, are only of value to those looking to pay for the sex workers of the future.But cryptocurrencies are no longer just accepted by shady merchants.(You know the kind: They tend to smell bad and work in head shops off I-35.)Even the Bank of England, arguably the snootiest institution on the planet, has come out of the blockchain closet.All digital currencies are underpinned by a sort of "digital ledger," commonly known as the blockchain – the subject of many talks and panel discussions on the 2017 SXSW Interactive schedule.

While people are still suspicious of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies – mainly because of their association with the illicit online trading of everything from firearms to drugs – the blockchain has become a new poster child for the global financial establishment.Considered by some to be the most secure information storage facility ever invented, blockchain technology is now being used by public and private organizations to store sensitive information like financial records, private medical information, legal documents, and contracts.litecoin mining volume"The blockchain is one of the most important inventions of the 21st century," says Peter Kirby, CEO of Austin-based blockchain peddlers, Factom, Inc.bitcoin usd google trends"Fundamentally, it lets multiple parties agree on a single version of the truth – and then write it in a way that can't be changed.bitcoin transaction ticker

Blockchains add transparency and accountability to any record-keeping system.And honestly, a bank is just a giant stack of records.A digital currency is just a giant stack of records.A government is just a giant stack of records."While information storage may not seem like the sexiest of topics, Bitcoin and the blockchain are both surprisingly interesting in terms of what the tech has the potential to offer future generations.bitcoin bow faucetOur advice is to get down to the Introduction to Bitcoin and the Blockchain workshop.kurs bitcoin 2012Once you know your "asymmetric key encryption" from your "Bitcoin mining rate" head to Blockchain: This Changes Everything!bitcoin crash imminentfor the bigger picture.Introduction to Bitcoin and the BlockchainSunday, March 12, 11am, Westin Downtown Moody Room Blockchain: This Changes Everything!

(Or Does It?)Tuesday, March 14, 3:30pm, JW Marriott Salon 6 /sxsw.For scheduling on the go, here's a SXSW Film Pocket Guide, which includes the handy Film Grid./newsletters/ for news, reviews, and previews delivered to your inbox every day of the Fest.And for the latest Tweets, follow @ChronSXSW.Bitcoin Feds Take Wind Out of Dread Pirate Roberts' Sails Richard Whittaker, Oct.11, 2013 Johnny Holden Austin as Tech Hub: Myth or Reality?28, 2016 KEYWORDS Bitcoin, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, SXSW 2017, SXSW Interactive 2017 TODAY'S EVENTS WEPA Cumbia Roots Festival MUSIC | FILM | ARTS | COMMUNITYBitcoin mining infrastructure has very quickly (over the course of only the past couple of years) grown into a substantial market niche for data center providers.It is a tricky business, however, and not every provider can make the math of providing a fairly bare-bones space-and-power product to Bitcoin mining companies work.CenturyLink Technology Solutions has become the latest provider to take a crack at this market.

The company recently signed with Austin-based CoinTerra, a major player in the Bitcoin-mining-infrastructure ecosystem, as a tenant starting with four of its data centers.According to CoinTerra, about 15 percent of the global Bitcoin network runs on its hardware.The company’s CEO Ravi Iyengar said this estimate was based on the number of mining servers it has shipped to customers or deployed in its own data centers and the total mining performance of the network.CoinTerra’s main revenue stream is the Bitcoin value mined by its own servers, but the company also provides mining as a service to others and sells mining hardware.It currently has about eight data center locations, all in North America, including the four it has leased from CenturyLink.Other than CenturyLink and C7 Data Centers, Iyengar was reluctant to disclose the names of CoinTerra’s other data center providers for security purposes.It is safer to disclose the names of companies like the ones he did disclose, since they operate in multiple locations, and it is impossible to deduce which locations the mining servers live in.

The other providers, he said, were single-location data center companies.Iyengar also declined to disclose the exact amount of power the company’s infrastructure uses or has contracted for with CenturyLink, saying only that it was north of 10 megawatts but that it would be north of 20 megawatts “very soon.” Mining capacity is a trade secret in the world of mining companies, and the total amount of power a company consumes could easily be used by a competitor to calculate, with reasonable accuracy, how many servers it is running, Iyengar explained.At least $600 million is expected to be spent on Bitcoin mining infrastructure in the second half of this year, according to a recent estimate.That is a huge opportunity for data center providers, but not an opportunity all of them are in the position to capture.Around-the-clock uptime is not as critical to mining operations as it is to most typical data center customers.A few seconds of downtime don’t really make a big difference, Iyengar said.

For mining companies like CoinTerra the most important attributes of a data center are extreme power densities and short deployment timelines.Since data center providers draw the bulk of their profit margins from providing redundant, reliable infrastructure, they cannot necessarily keep those margins and remain attractive to mining firms.C7 CEO Wes Swenson told us in an earlier interview that his company has designated space in its data center portfolio designed specifically for Bitcoin.It is high-density, low-reliability space, and the provider offers it with no service-level agreements.CenturyLink took a different approach with CoinTerra – its first Bitcoin customer.Drew Leonard, the provider’s vice president of colocation product management, said the company managed to sell CoinTerra a fairly standard product, including an SLA for cooling (a guarantee to maintain a certain ambient temperature).Iyengar said CenturyLink did have to modify the solution to a certain extent.“They all had to customize their solution to reduce the cost,” he said about his data center providers.

The traditional approach was too expensive for providers to be able offer the level of operational expense CoinTerra had asked for.Ultimately, CenturyLink won the contract because it was able to accommodate the power densities, the cooling efficiency and the extremely tight deployment deadlines CoinTerra required.“They’ve shown that they can move at Bitcoin speed, and that’s what we like about them,” Iyengar said.CenturyLink installs the equipment for the customer.One of the environments it stood up for CoinTerra in one week after it received the shipment of the TerraMiner boxes.Speed of deployment is crucial, since, as Leonard put it, every day a server sits somewhere in a loading dock is a day of lost revenue for the mining company.CoinTerra was a good match for CenturyLink because of the provider’s traditional focus on high power density in data center design.“The reason this type of customer is ideal is because they are very dense,” Leonard said.“They don’t require a lot of space.

We can put a lot of power in it.” Current-generation TerraMiners can take anywhere between 20 kW and 25 kW per rack, Iyengar said.“Mining machines consume more power than any of the traditional severs, by a big margin.” Besides power density, however, cooling the load efficiently is also a big deal for this kind of equipment.The better it is cooled, the more Bitcoin value it can generate.“The way you cool them basically allows the machines to perform better,” Iyengar said.“Cooling directly impacts the revenue.” Because cooling is so important to the business, CoinTerra is exploring non-orthodox options, such as immersion cooling.Some vendors, such as Green Revolution Cooling, offer cooling solutions that submerge server motherboards in dielectric cooling to take advantage of higher cooling efficiency of using liquid versus air as the medium.In the near future, CoinTerra may be using CenturyLink’s data centers to house such immersion-cooling systems.The next-generation of TerraMiner technology will feature a mix of air and immersion cooling, Iyengar said.

As it grows, CoinTerra is expanding its data center footprint aggressively.In addition to using service providers, its data center strategy also includes construction of its own dedicated facilities.The company is currently fitting out a data center in Canada that will provide more than 20 megawatts of power for bitcoin mining, Iyengar said.It is also exploring a build-out of similar scale in the U.S., potentially contracting with CenturyLink, he said, but that project is still in very early stages, and no decisions have been made.CoinTerra is the first customer in the Bitcoin ecosystem for CenturyLink, but public announcement of the deal indicates that the provider is interested in doing more business in this space.“We are seeing a definite up-swing in the trend and the opportunities with some of these companies,” Leonard said.It is too early to tell whether the niche represents a major growth opportunity for a provider like CenturyLink, however.“There’s an opportunity there,” he said.