An elaborate bitcoin mining operation near Seattle is earning its owner an estimated $8 million (£4.81m) a month.

While most amateur or part-time bitcoin miners are attempting to mine fractions of a single coin using supped-up desktop PCs, Dave Carlson is running his bitcoin mining operation out of two whole warehouses in an undisclosed location in Washington state.

Carlson invited local news station Komo News to have a look around the mammoth operation which Carlson claims is "the largest mine in North America and most of the rest of the world."

The rows and rows of processors combine to create the processing power of one petahash, or one thousand trillion calculations per second. For some context, this amount of processing power was only crossed on the entire bitcoin network just six months ago.

Mining rigs

Each of the two warehouses contains racks of thousands of specially designed bitcoin mining rigs which are produced with the sole purpose of efficiently solving the highly complex mathematical equations which need to be cracked to mine a bitcoin.

"It is not any different to any gold rush in history and we are absolutely running as fast as we can to grow," Carlson said.

At the current price of bitcoin (around $640) Carlson's operation would need to be mining 12,500 bitcoins every month to make the estimated $8 million target.

Of course this is not $8 million of pure profit with the energy consumed in running the thousands of mining rigs 24 hours a day, seven days a week considerable.

According to Carlson, the operation is using 1.4 megawatts of electricity, which is enough power a town according to the report's presenter, though it is only possible due to the relatively cheap and stable electricity supply in the Washington-state area.

The capital cost to initially buy all these rigs would also have been significant, with a single Neptune mining rig costing $13,000.