South Korea's "mining" craze continues to heat up, causing excessive electricity load in some areas

Recently, the popularity of digital cryptocurrencies has set off a "mining" craze. Not long ago, the prices of many high-end graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA continued to rise, but they were still snapped up by a large group of "miners" and even bought out. Recently, this craze seems to have affected the normal operation of some electronic markets in South Korea.

According to local sources, some of the rented shops in Yongsan Electronics Market in South Korea are used for Bitcoin mining, and ASIC and GPU mining machines fill the entire space. Some stores have more than 100 ASIC mining machines running at the same time overnight, causing the temperature in the area to rise sharply, energy consumption to rise rapidly, and in some places, air conditioners can no longer operate normally. For this reason, many owners have filed complaints with Yongsan Electronics Market, expressing their concerns about potential fire risks.

After learning about the situation, Yongsan Electronics Market immediately issued a notice to stop the mining business of related shops: The operation of Bitcoin mining equipment has led to significant power consumption in the center. If the power load reaches the limit and the power cost increases significantly, the owners of the center, computer stores and electronic retailers will be fully responsible.

In fact, the excessive power consumption and safety risks caused by the mining craze have already appeared years ago. In 2013, when many Korean cryptocurrency enthusiasts were mining Litecoin, their computers overheated, melted, and smoked due to long-term operation. Therefore, as Bitcoin, which is more difficult to mine than Litecoin, it is normal for excessive power consumption and regional temperature rise during the mining process.

As the computing power of the entire Bitcoin network increases, in order to maintain the block time of the blockchain within ten minutes, the difficulty of hash calculation must also be increased accordingly; Bitcoin that could be mined using ordinary PCs in the past may not be mined even if multiple professional mining machines are running at the same time. Imagine that 5,000 mining machines in a mining pool in the mountainous area of ​​Sichuan Province are running around the clock, and dozens of large industrial fans are blowing air and cooling day and night to maintain the mining volume of more than ten Bitcoins per day. On the other hand, how can Longshan Electronic City, located in a comprehensive commercial street, bear it?

However, this is nothing compared to the high returns. After all, the price of a single Bitcoin has exceeded US$3,000. In addition, with South Korea's attitude towards Bitcoin slowing down - in October last year, South Korea became the second Asian country after Japan to publicly support the development of digital currency, and last month the South Korean government decided to formally legalize international transfer transactions of Bitcoin; the price of Bitcoin still has considerable room for growth, and its mining craze will remain high.