With almost 25 thousand computers, the factory processes the mathematical problems that create bitcoins
Bitcoin factory: Bitmain gets cheaper electricity for its computers directly from the Chinese government (Giulia Marchi / The New York Times)
Dalad Banner, China - They work in factories, in the coal business and as farmers. Everyone was filled with hope when the coal boom promised to bring industries and jobs to this grassland land of Inner Mongolia. When the boom did not come, they went looking for work everywhere.
Today, several have found jobs in money-making companies - the digital type.
Here, in what is called by the Dalad Economic Development Zone sites, stands one of the largest bitcoins farms in the world. The eight buildings with blue metal roofs represent almost one-twentieth of the world's daily production of crypto-coins.
Based on today's price, the company issues $ 318,000 in digital currency every day.
Outside, the factory - owned by a company called Bitmain China - does not look very different from the other buildings in the industrial park.
Among its neighbors are chemical industries and aluminum smelters. Some of the buildings in the area were never finished. In general, the roads are quiet, except for one or another truck carrying charcoal.
Inside Bitmain, instead of heavy industrial machines, workers deal with rows and rows of computers - almost 25,000 in all - processing the mathematical problems that create bitcoins.
Workers carry laptops as they walk through the aisles looking for faults and checking the cable connections. They complete water tanks that prevent computers from melting or catching fire. Around them, hundreds of thousands of fans fill the building with a kind of white noise.
Whoever believes in bitcoins says it will be the currency of the future. Purely electronic, it can be sent across borders anonymously without the supervision of a central authority. This makes it attractive to a diverse, and sometimes incompatible, group of people who include technology enthusiasts, those struggling for civil liberties, hackers, and criminals.
Bitcoin is also generally produced in China. The country makes more than two-thirds of all bitcoins issued per day. Bitmain, founded by former investment analyst Jihan Wu, makes money mainly by selling equipment to make bitcoins as well as mining the currency itself.
China, however, has mixed feelings about bitcoin.
On the one hand, the government worries about the fact that bitcoin allows the Chinese to ignore the strict limits on how much money they can send abroad and also that it can be used to commit crimes. Therefore, Chinese authorities are trying to close the bitcoin bags, where the currency is bought and sold. Although it does not affect the manufacture of bitcoin directly, this could make it more expensive to buy and sell the digital currency in one of its most important markets, damaging the price.
On the other hand, digital currency may represent an opportunity for China to boost its new technology industry, a motivation behind its extensive encouragement to other high-end areas such as unmanned cars and artificial intelligence. The country continues to offer bitcoins producers, such as Bitmain, cheap electricity - since making the digital currency requires a huge amount of electricity - and other subsidies.
Dalad Banner may be far from the scene of Beijing internet startups and the electronic device production center of the south of the country. Still, several workers and locals see a digital opportunity for Dalad Banner and the rest of his part of Inner Mongolia, an area famous in China for half-built factories and cities so empty that they are sometimes called ghosts.
"Now the mine has about 50 employees," says Wang Wei, manager of Dalmain China's Bitmain China, using one of several metaphors for the work done here. "I think in the future it could be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of jobs, like the big factories."
A resident of the area, Wang, 36, who was a seller of coal, bought a bitcoin about six months ago. Since then, the price has more than doubled in value. "I made a lot of money," he says.
China also sees a new source of potential jobs, especially in underdeveloped places like Dalad Banner. The county of 370,000 people on the edge of the great Kubuqi Desert has reserves of coal and heavy industries that depend on it, such as steel. But it lags behind much of the country in the overall development of the economy. It is part of the urban area of Ordos, a town about 560 kilometers away from Beijing, famous for its empty buildings.
Dalad Banner is not the kind of place that at first glance seems made for working with high technology. In fact, it took some time for the inhabitants of the area to get used to the idea, even among the workers.
"I did not know anything about bitcoin before," said Li Shuangsheng, a 28-year-old resident of one of the eight factories.
He jumped from job to job - the chemical plant was very noisy and polluted, he says - before arriving recently at Dalmain Banner's Bitmain China factory, one of the few lucrative job opportunities in this sparsely populated region.
Li still does not own a bitcoin, but is happy with the job and has been studying the subject online when the time spent with the family allows.
"Now I'm starting to get an idea," he says.
Many in the factory have already gone through the ups and downs of the local economy.
Bai Xiaotu was fired from a state-owned furniture factory in 1997. He had been working in various types of smaller jobs until, in December, he landed a job as a janitor at Dalmain Banner's Bittern farm.
"Look around, there are abandoned factories on both sides of our farm. Many companies are still not very well, "said Bai, 53, his face battered by time.
But this industry is still new to most. Bai Dong, 31, son of Bai Xiaotu, had never heard of bitcoin when his father got the job. After researching the internet, he discovered that the price of bitcoin was rising rapidly, and that the farm was one of the largest in the world. "My feeling about the future of the industry is positive," he says.
But he remains confused as to what bitcoin mining is.
"We have coal mines. And now we have bitcoin mines. They are mines, but what is the relationship between them? "He asks.