Chinese Coin (Red Blood)

Chinese Coin mining has recently made the People's Republic of China the world’s largest Bitcoin producer. Mining requires effort and it slowly makes new currency available at a rate resembling the speed at which resources like gold, diamonds, silver, and zinc are mined from the ground. One reason for this growth is the build-out of hydropower in western China. The first mining farms were in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia where coal was cheap and plentiful, but cheap coal can't compete with free water and now the farms are migrating fartherwestwards.

Only one of these Bitcoin mines operates above 10,000 AntMiner units. By comparison, about 100 million new red blood cells are formed in a human body every minute. Bitcoin mining is an arms race in which it comes down to who can produce the most energy-efficient chips fastest and cheapest as well as deploy them the quickest; very similar to red blood cell production in the human body.

Shot in a Chinese Bitcoin generating factory, »Chinese Coin (Red Blood)« by artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM (lizvlx and Hans Bernhard) enters a space generally unseen and about which very little is known, and explores both the unpredictability and the subversive power of crypto-currencies.

Video and sound: Mike Huntemann