u/RNG investigates bitcoin town
EDIT: Album available here
Note: I'm writing this post as I go through my day, taking note of anything interesting. I try to do this with my diary, however for once I'll actually share my thoughts with strangers.
This was inspired by u/arqalite's post on the topic.
I'm not a journalist. I didn't even take a class on journalism in college. I'm also not a writer, but at least my text is human generated. I have an audiobook I need to catch up on and a day to spare, so I'm going to bitcoin town.
I'm not a crypto guy, but I'm not going because I think Bitcoin is bad (even though it is). I'm going because I'm curious: how loud is this bitcoin mine really? When I read the initial post I wondered about the nocebo effect, Havana Syndrome, sociogenic illness, etc. Most of the reports are anecdotes of locals, and the null hypothesis doesn't make for a sharable news article.
I'm using this app "Sound Meter" to see how loud it is in my small suburban house. It peaks at 40dB. If you, like me, don't think in decibels, Google says that's as loud as a refrigerator hum. I'm skeptical about the accuracy of a phone app, but it's what I have.
Outside my house there are some birds loudly chirping. I would have missed their song if I wasn't writing this. I decide that I should take a measurement. The app reads 55dB. Google says it's the loudness of a residential street. Spot on.
I'm entering Granbury, TX and a massive American flag hanging from a crane greets me along with a pro-Trump billboard. There's a large lake running through the town. Seems like every house has a dock. Lot's of folks on boats and jet skis are visible.
Downtown is an old court building with a clock tower. The streets are lined with mom-and-pop shops for furniture, clothing, and trinkets. To my surprise, there are a lot of shoppers here with arms full of bags. They seem cheerful. They are all white.
The GPS takes me outside the city limits. I stop at a gas station a half-mile from the mine. I ask a couple of people about the mine while I grab a water. They've never heard of a bitcoin mine, and didn't know there was one around here.
As I approach the destination, the bitcoin mine looms over the horizon. The sheer size of the facility cannot be overstated. This facility looks like it should be pursuing some massive scientific endeavor. I wouldn't guess in a million years that all of this infrastructure exists to mine bitcoin. My car reads 98°F (what I expected based on forecast.) I imagine cooling systems will be as loud as one can expect on a day like today. And yes, it is loud.
Across the way, I see signs saying "Bitcoin sux" and "Bitcoin Noisehood". I take a lot of photos. I pull out "Sound Meter" and take measurements. It consistently reads 81-83dB, peaking at 88dB. Google says 85dB is the limit of safe hearing, and is comparable to the sound of a snowblower. This seems perfectly accurate to me. I'd be pissed if I lived across from this place.
I'll be in Granbury for the next hour or so, if anyone has a specific question about the mine I'll see if I can answer it. I took a lot of photos if there is interest.
This is genuinely the most interesting post I’ve seen on Tildes in a long time! Thanks for going the extra mile(s) for the story, RNG.
Oh my god, I didn't expect me posting that article would prompt someone from Tildes to actually go there, but that's amazing, thank you so much!
I think as other people said, take as many pictures and sound recordings as you can, ask people about it (but be careful! Safety first.). I'd love to read (and listen) to everything you collect.
One note not in the post: I did a sound reading from the community on the other side of the wall they built. I'm getting consistent 73dB readings and you can audibly hear the whine coming from the mine.
It's interesting that some folks don't know about the mine. I'd love to know if you stopped into the local watering hole and asked about it what some other locals might say. I'm not surprised that the neighbors hate it, but I'd love to know what folks think who aren't as affected by it. The article made it seem like there was consensus in the community, is there?
I'm on it.
I finally found a place. Multiple locations near the mine were "residents only." These areas are very wealthy compared to the small working class area near the mine. I'm in a small Irish bar that has a picture of Trump on the wall.
Multiple folks here point me to the Granbury FB group which apparently can't stop talking about the mine and the noise it generates. Every person I've talked to here has heard about it and is either indifferent or opposed to the mine.
Talked to an older couple. I told them I was out of town.
"Not from California I hope!", can't make this stuff up. They'd never heard of bitcoin and had no idea what I was talking about.
The city has a population of 12k, and the number of people affected I'd wager is in the double-digits. The people who had heard about the mine heard about it through Facebook, not by being personally affected.
Wow, thanks for the footwork!!! I guess that is what I would have expected. It's interesting how news spreads within communities.
If it's an iPhone, it's reasonably accurate, if it's an Android, it's a bit of a crapshoot. But from your description it sounds like it's not too far off and the ratios still likely fit - +6 dB equals twice the acoustic pressure and roughly +10 dB means subjective doubling of volume.
80+ dB is a lot, and if the sound has a lot of low-frequencies - the article made it seem like this may be the case - windows won't reduce it by much. You may want to make a recording, that could be interesting as well. I don't know the potential health effects aside from gradual hearing loss, but having to endure that non-stop really is like torture.
For some perspective, here in Czechia the noise limit at night within residential rooms is 30 dB for noise without significant tone component and just 25 dB for noise with a significant tone component. This does apply to industrial noise pollution, the only significant exception to that limit is traffic noise. I do believe there are many places where the noise goes over that limit, but never by 40+ dB (measured inside), that just would not ever fly, that's impossible.
I did take a recording of the site, maybe I can share that with you?
Hey u/V17 added video here
Made just a simple spectrum analysis.
Due to the method of obtaining the noise it's hard to say whether the peaks at 17 Hz and 116 Hz are real - and take any observation of the sound in general with a grain of salt, we do not know the frequency response of your phone's mic and the video recording application does some sound processing itself. The peaks specifically may just be phone handling noise or wind noise. If they are real, the 17 Hz peak is likely too quiet to matter (this borderline infrasound can have very weird and unpleasant effect on humans, but it has to be really loud, much louder than this).
But the 116 Hz peak is bad and looks like it may be real since there's a smaller harmonic peak at approximately double the frequency. That's very audible, travels through walls and possibly ground and is difficult to block with stuff like large acoustic (outdoor) walls, the type that's sometimes put around noisy roads.
But even if it's not real, the spectrum clearly shows that the sound is relatively bass-heavy. The non-bass content in the broad hill from 500 Hz up can be attenuated by good windows and walls (possibly not much by cheap wooden houses, don't know much about US construction, around here almost everything is made with bricks) and also by common earplugs. May be annoying, but doable.
The large hill between 40 Hz and 400 Hz is the issue. That part of the spectrum is difficult to block both by obstacles, because they need to be proportional to the sound's wavelength in size (the wavelength at 50 Hz is almost 7 meters), and by absorption (acoustic treatment on/in house walls), because you just need a ton of mass or hitech solutions, so it's expensive. A portion of it is likely going to travel through ground nearby. Most earplugs also block these bass/midbass frequencies almost 10x less than high frequencies, so that won't help you sleep well either.
You've just described the vast majority of US houses. Vinyl siding, some bat insulation, wood frame, asphalt roof is pretty much the standard.
I know, but the insulation can have a pretty decent effect and I have no idea how well it works in those houses specifically. It depends on more factors and I know very little about that.
Thank you very much for taking the time to do this. I wish I had better equipment, but this whole trip was spur of the moment.
The homes in that community are primarily modular homes and tiny homes, most being 30+ years old best I can tell. I wish I had got a recording from the neighborhood, but I cut my time short there in respect for the residents.
Just FYI, most microphones do not record below 20 Hz. I tried digging for more information on the 3 microphones included in a pixel 6 and couldn't find a single document with specs on the microphone itself. I'd trust anything ~90 Hz+ as that's around where human fundamental frequencies start.
In my experience this is not exactly true, though I know very little about MEMS microphones, which I assume are used in all decent phones now. Even with cheap electrets for a few cents you usually get response < 20 Hz, it's just attenuated (but with 17 Hz it can be just a few dB), imo the question is more how steeply the ADC on the MEMS chip filters it out.
Personally I believe anything over 50 Hz is safe, especially with something more expensive like a Pixel.
Holy CRAP that's loud.
It's a Pixel 6. No idea how accurate it is, but my earlier readings seemed to match my expectations. It hasn't felt wildly off yet.
+3 dB is double. But you are right +10 dB seems to be subjectively twice as loud even though it is 10x as much
sound pressurepower on a linear scalesource: https://www.redcrab-software.com/en/Calculator/Electrics/Decibel-Factor
edit: +6 dB the sound pressure is double and +20 db the sound pressure is ten times greater. I was confusing dBm and dB SPL https://audiojudgement.com/how-to-calculate-decibels/ page 3 and 4 is also helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20041109095430/http://www.indiana.edu/%7eemusic/etext/acoustics/chapter1_amplitude3.shtml
unrelated but still interesting:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/366774/twice-the-audio-source-3-6-or-10-db-spl
You're confusing power and acoustic pressure. Power doubles every 3 dB, but that's not very relevant here, acoustic pressure doubles every 6 dB.
@RNG this is an awesome post! I've dreamed of doing a little hobby journalism before.
For anyone that likes this kind of journalism, I highly recommend Peter Santenello on YouTube. He finds friendly people in all corners of the US and just joins them for a ride through their town. This is the kind of content that should be on the news when we hear about what people are doing in far away parts of the country. Normal, humanizing content.
I love that you're doing this! Not that I think anything should happen to you, but do keep your wits about you.
I'd be curious to know how the noise meter drops off as you get further from the bitcoin mine. From the TIME article, I see there's literally a neighborhood next to the mine, which is crazy. My assumption is that that's where most of the complaints are coming from. Approx how far from the mine is it before the noise becomes not audible or even just "bearable?"
It's around 73dB in the neighborhood behind the mine. And I appreciate your concern!
I never would have expected to see something like this on Tildes. It's really cool!
I have a question as well. Are the cooling systems that dump heat to outside making a significant amount of warming in the surrounding area?
Carrying on the fine tradition of citizen journalism! I'd love to see the photos. How far does the noise travel? If people half a mile away don't even know it exists it seems like it's awful nearby, but could be sequestered in a way so as to not be so objectionable (on noise grounds, anyway)?
There's a massive wall between the mine and the nearby working class community. My measurements peak at 88dB outside the mine, and 73dB in the community.
Also, any recommendations for picture hosting?
Imgur should be fine, haven't hosted any photos in a while but it was my go-to a handful of years ago and it's still popular on Reddit.
Otherwise Google Drive/Proton Drive/alternatives are fine, and you can share a link to the folder containing everything - whichever option you think is easier.
Excellent, I'll get everything uploaded and I'll tag you when I get home!
Hey u/arqalite I added the album here
I appreciate the use of Proton Drive. Imgur decided a while back to block VPNs and has become a hassle to use. I was able to click the first file in your album to select it, then press the spacebar to enter a gallery viewer which was nice. Great pics. It's hard to get a sense of the volume in your video, but the photos of the facility itself are fascinating.
I've been a big fan of Proton's products for awhile now, so when someone mentioned Proton Drive it seemed like a no brainer.
I missed my window of opportunity to ask questions. But yeah I would be most interested to hear what folks who are affected say. [Edit like when you talked to that couple at the Irish pub. I could watch a 2 hr video of someone talking to every person in town. Thank you for being there]
It sounds like the noise poison is happening only to those closest to the source, to the utter apathy of those even a few houses down further along the road. What a perfect location for this awful evil: in a town where most folks aren't curious enough to know what bitcoins are, and seemingly have all their own lives figured out, and already don't care for regulation, enforcement, pollution and what's happening to the disadvantaged next door.
The entire town is very strange.
Entire portions of the town including bars and grocery stores are inside of what I can only call mega-gated neighborhoods. I accidentally tail-gated a car into one called Pecan Plantation and then realized I wasn't supposed to be there. It had it's own grocery store, bank, pharmacy, theater, shops, gas stations, community gardens, etc.
It feels very much like a segregated town. Another bar in my GPS took me to another gated community, but I didn't get in. I eventually just drove around till I found the aforementioned bar (open to everyone of course), which seemed to have a more working class clientele. I spoke to about a dozen folks over the course of an hour there, and those that had heard of the mine had only heard about it through the Granbury Facebook group. This group seems to have a local reputation for "being where folks go to gripe." Between those who knew about the mine and those who didn't, nobody I spoke to seemed to care all that much about the issue.
It'd be hard to imagine a more profound embodiment of inequality than this little town.
That's pretty wild, I've never heard of gated communities that provide amenities like shopping centers or bars.
I almost regret not taking advantage of my time there to document Pecan Plantation more, but I was pretty focused on finding a pub and getting on the road back home. Maybe a trip for another day.
Wow......yeah it would be quite something to sneak into one of these and be a fly on the wall. I wonder if it's just a gated version of other rich liberal towns like Palo Alto.
It's been said that the rich live in an alternative universe, but liteal gates around a "self sufficient town" where "the poor" don't get in is taking the metaphor a little far. On the other hand there must be a servant back entrance for staff, and for deliveries. So maybe the gate is only a silly facade to separate the fools from bits of their money.
@RNG can you use an app like this to measure the frequencies of the noise? I’m curious what the spectrum looks like near the plant.
Unfortunately I have an Android phone
Here's an option for Android if you wanted one.
(hope you don't mind me tagging you RuralNoiseGumshoe, btw)
I've left, but when I get home I can upload my recording and maybe that'll be useful.
Hey u/TemulentTeatotaler I added the video here
Could you point us to where it is in Google Maps?
I used Waze, but just look up Wolf Hollow Ct, Granbury, TX
Thanks!
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ohf28Qt6gc9mYWs79
Looks pretty rural?
I’d say more exurban, especially the side next to the mining equipment. There’s houses less than 300 feet from the nearest module.