March 11th, 2020 | Life of a Miner Diary Series
It’s a shame that bitcoin miners, especially Chinese miners, get a lot of knack for just being leachers of cheap electricity. Moving around in trucks loaded with state-of-the-art ASIC machines to wherever there is quick profit to be made and then packing things up with no regard to the community nor to the environment. In some cases, this may be the truth. It’s the economics around mining that get construed by the media as way for one to pump and dump. Get in and get out. But those in the mining community knows that mining is the quintessential foundation of supporting a PoW blockchain in keeping it decentralized by verifying block after block after block…
Without getting too much in the weeds, mining, and the exponential cut throat competition it has morphed into is the cornerstone reason why the Bitcoin protocol has not been tampered with for over a decade. But it’s unfortunate that stories like this and that come out painting this area of the world in a darker image snowballing the already tampered image stemming from the current US-China Trade War that has been panning out the past two years.
Now there are definitely people who support the mining community out here in China and there are many instances of non-Chinese having told stories of cooperative success with local Chinese miners. And sometimes all it takes for one to understand the so-called “blackbox” of what’s going on here with mining is for one to do their own due diligence and see what is really going on out here.
Let’s face it, there are the good and bad that comes along with any business. But we at Valarhash hope to shed more light on the former and bring you positive stories such as the time when one of our mining farm communities became the helping hand that the rural village it resided in needed.
The helping hands at 哈洛伍基点校
Unfortunately, this week’s Life of a Miner Diary Series will not be told from Feiyang, our beloved mining goddess, but will be told by one of her close colleague and friend, 陈安兴先生, (for those who want to know how to pronounce this: Chén’ānxìng xiānshēng), or for simplicity, Mr. Anson Chen.
Here is Anson in all his gloriousness:
Anson has been working in the mining industry in China for quite a few years already and was a pivotal member of Valarhash’s CEO, Fiona Lu, during the build out of our initial farms. He shares that working out in rural Sichuan is not the most entertaining but perhaps has been the most fruitful experience he could have asked for.
As mentioned before in our previous blogs, Valarhash has deep presence in the Ganzi and Liangshan area of western Sichuan where the mountainous regions give deep valley rivers the force in powering the dozens of hydroelectricity build outs that are scattered throughout the area. In 2016, when a large influx of miners came running into the province in leveraging the abundance of hydropower, about 14.1 billion kWh of surplus energy was identified as over generated, many of these miners basically set up their lifestyle and living arrangements within the rural area where the farms were situated in. Not knowing when they would leave the area if ever, many miners such as Anson became acquainted with the surrounding villages. To their already familiar knowledge, many of these villages are dirt poor.
The Gini coefficient, a gauge ranging between zero and one that measures income equality, increased slightly to 0.465 last year, from 0.462 in 2015, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). A reading of zero would mean everyone’s income was equal, while a reading of one would indicate that all the income was going to one person. As China is still classified as a developing country, this is well visualized for anyone that comes out to rural China and see the drastic way of life is. A study from Peking University last year found that the poorest 25 per cent of mainland households owned just 1 per cent of the country’s aggregate wealth, while the richest 1 per cent owned a third of the wealth. Now to give credit, China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last two decades, but there are still cases of extreme poverty lingering in areas that are remote and difficult to access.
The area in focus for this story is a tiny village called 则普乡 (zé pǔ xiāng), Zepu, an 8 hour drive south from Chengdu located in Zhāojué County of the Liangshan Prefecture. The majority of people there are part of the 彝族, the Yi minority, which is one of the dozens of Chinese minorities. Sichuan’s Liangshan is the country ’s largest gathering area for Yi people, and it is also one of the country ’s contiguous areas of deep poverty.
When Anson and his team came into town in the beginning to construct their mining farm, they actually employed some of the villagers to help unpack and stack the mining rigs on the shelves for about 100 RMB/day, which is about $15/day. This is when Anson had the precious moments of getting to interact and form bonds with these villagers. The initial interaction didn’t really have too much significance as Anson didn’t think too much into it. But it was until when Anson started to venture out into the village more and coming across the local school that housed about a bit over 100 children was when his view became more apparent of where he is.
From time to time Anson and his team would donate school supplies knowing that it was the least they could do. As a father himself, it was only natural for Anson to take upon these small deeds.
Anson and his team continued these random acts of kindness for about a year as they continued to run those whirring machines in the back hills of the village. The year of 2017 was, to everyone’s knowledge, was a catapult time for the Bitcoin network as both price and hashrate shot through the roof. Business and revenue streams were looking strong as all miners were cashing in on this boom period.
Going into the community and mingling with the locals was still common from time to time, but as described by Anson himself, his epiphany didn’t dawn until he came to the school one day during the children’s lunch hour and noticed the polarizing difference of what constitutes as lunchtime for the local children in Zepu and his childhood’s.
就是一锅青菜加了几块豆腐，炖了一大锅，每个娃娃一勺。 感觉那个真的不是给人吃的。This translates to: a pot of greens with a few pieces of tofu, stew a large pot, one spoon per doll. After eating their lunch I came to grips that this was really not suitable for humans. — Anson
Anson then decided to take it upon his own to initiate a overhaul of the outdated makeshift school facility and replace it with something more modern. Through the administration loops and help from the Sichuan University Support Group in tandem with the Education Bureau of Zhāojué County, a task force was started in planning, funding, and construction of the project which by the end of it, took 60% longer than expected. The construction process was difficult because the school was situated on a hill and the only road was a one-meter wide dirt road leading to the school entrance. So they actually had to build out the road first before allowing construction machinery to come rolling in. Unlike in the major cities in China that the media loves to show, the speed of getting things done in the rural area is the total opposite. All in all, it actually took two years for the entire school construction with the end result sweeter than the journey. “Actually the most difficult struggle was not in the construction phase, but was communicating with the locals pertaining details of the project. “The locals speak a different dialect and their mandarin was not that great either so it was a matter of patience and a lot of hand gestures to really grasp what they were saying at times”, says Anson.
Below are the pictures of the final product finished in October of 2019:
On the morning of October 18th 2019, our miners along with a host of teams that were part of the process, was invited to attend the inauguration ceremony of the school now named 安兴希望小学, Anxing Hope Primary School, using Anson’s Chinese name, 安兴 Ān xìng, as the beginning part of the name. During the donation ceremony of the celebration, Mr. Wang Zhihua, on behalf of the local party branch, donated more than 1,200 books to the newly-built Anxing Hope Primary School, helping the school stock up its loving library. The leaders of the county education bureau, Ji Kelati, and Anxing Hope Primary School principal, Sha Ma Wule, expressed their sincere thanks to Mr. Anson Chen and the other parties.
Due to the school’s new outfitted appearance and infrastructure, the school now has over 300 children from neighboring villages that have decided to bring their children to a better program. Overall, the project costed a whopping amount that was both funded by our farms, the Sichuan University Support Group, and the local education bureau.
During the opening ceremony, Anson couldn’t help but to shed a few tears encapsulating the long relentless efforts of what he has helped in building. “There is more to what we do out here than mining Bitcoin and it was only natural for us to be part of the community in any way we can.”, says Anson. “I hope people outside of the mining community can see these efforts and volunteer initiatives that all miners should partake in.”
Other Resources:
- This story of Anson Chen’s initiative can be found near the bottom of this article, which can be translated for those non-Chinese speakers: http://lj.scu.edu.cn/info/1012/4668.htm
