Building a Datacenter and Mining in My Basement

Here I stand with a momentous change to my life infront and not much that looks like my future behind me.  My aim is to transition my very existence completely into the Crypto world.  What does that mean?  

No, I’m not talking about becoming a byte inside a computer or an avatar inside a digital world.  I’m going to generate a proper living for me and my family solely from crypto.  I have spent a large portion of the last 6 months building a plan to execute in chunks and once completed I should have a business that shall sustain itself and income that shall provide for our needs.

Crypto is something that makes logical sense to me but it’s such a deep topic that even I need to segment my thinking.  I’m the kind of person who knows a little about everything and I really don’t learn a lot unless I do things.  I have tried everything crypto that I care to try at this point throughout this past year-long R&D period.  I’ve honed in on the areas where I see myself gaining great successes in the years to come.

My plans involve far too many crypto disciplines and it’s not possible to do all at once as I’m only one person and literally no one I know locally understands me when I talk about this stuff.  Probably my fault as I was always the guy in the corner of a party droning on about crypto – folks would droop their eyes and start looking around anxiously for some out.

What I’m building is a new way of living akin to several existing trades wrapped up in one.

Imagine a gold miner who digs up rocks, runs them through complex machines and pulls out the gold nuggets and then transfers them into paper gold to trade on the stock exchange.  Yeah, that’s what I’m doing, but digital gold, not physical gold and math equations not rock crushing.

I need to attack this one step at a time.  I have created this massive checklist in my brain with many levels of scaffolding tasks.  Once fully completed, it should add up to a legal living made (INCLUDING paying taxes) without punching a 9-5 time card.  My aim is to have my computers work for me and I can enjoy my life rather than worrying about things out of my control.  Won’t you join me on my journey?

Step One Mining

I realized I needed a datacenter. Not many folks have desired to establish a datacenter in their basement I presume.  I’m not one to shy away from impossible tasks and I need a safe, secure place to run my equipment.  Where better than below me as I have easy, quick access to keep these machines running all the time.  I set in place the task list and got rolling a few weeks back.

My basement happens to have 2 extra rooms as there was an addition to the house several decades before we moved in.   This is where I will keep my servers.  As with every basement in an older house there was what seemed like an endless supply of stuff that needed to be moved, sorted, recycled, and trashed.  Much of the random furniture I’m keeping for eventual storage.

Painting – painting and more painting.  I won’t bore you with this, but it took nearly 2 full weeks to caulk up the holes, get at least one coat on all walls I will be using, 2 coats on most walls, and 2 coats on the floor.  My daughter picked the wall color, light blue – I like it!  The floor is “garage floor grey” – easy.

Rather than get into the mess I made and all the clothes I ruined let me explain why I believe these rooms make for a perfect datacenter.

A datacenter is a conducive environment for specialized computers to run non-stop without fail.  Pair a cool, dust free environment with low humidity and a ton of electricity and this the best place to secure these machines, a center to store my data (datacenter) below where I sleep lol.

These rooms are isolated from the rest of the basement with a door frame that I can eventually hang a door.  Closing off this environment will isolate the dusty basement from the datacenter space.  Dust is one of the enemies of machines that run 24/7/365 like servers and miners.

It’s large enough to store a ton of equipment and yet small enough for me to paint and get ready myself.

This is a 2 family house and my office uses the whole upstairs, so expanding on the upstairs circuit breaker makes sense as my company will be paying the electricity upstairs.  This way all mining in the basement and my office use upstairs is a legitimate business expense and will serve as my cost basis for any mining revenue my business generates.  More on that later as I get to it.  The downstairs electricity bill can be solely for living use.  So, yeah, the second floor will cover the basement electricity usage as well, kinda funny I know.

The single most expensive thing for a mining farm is electricity and quite a LOT of that electricity is used to cool the equipment.  You see, the complex equations that the mining equipment cuts through like butter require a LOT of computing power to solve which feeds on massive electricity.

Many mining farms have extensive cooling systems just as many datacenters spend a fortune to keep the environment conducive to server equipment.  I don’t have a fortune to spend so I have thought of a new way to cool.

I believe in my basement cooling is built in.

Have you ever stuck your hand on a wall in your basement?  Have you noticed it’s cold no matter what time of year?  This is because underground is always the same temperature no matter the time of year since the sun doesn’t get to it.

I don’t know if anyone else is trying it, but I’m going to see what happens if I hang my miners on the walls.  It won’t be pretty, but I am hopeful my equipment runs better there.  I have bench tested the equipment in many other situations and have a clear idea of what I want for performance – I only hope this can deliver as there is no turning back once I’ve spent the money.

The plan is in motion and I can’t even tell you how many trips up and down the crickity basement stairs I took holding questionable materials – right into the new trash barrels that I bought as the first task on my list.

Step one is complete, I have 2 completely empty, un-wired, cement rooms with 3 partial windows for ventilation and I’m exhausted.  But the exercise is good for me – maybe eventually I’ll do the rest of the basement over like this, it kinda looks nice.