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Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

bbc.com

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Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#251

Post by zrobotics »

gnode wrote: post #237
justincormack wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't "store value" without trust. Value is not a thing, it is an implicit contract to exchange things over time, and requires trust that everyone will continue to adhere to the contract, ie that debts will be paid.

You're right, I was wrong to say without trust. I think it would have been more apt to say trust in their integrity. Demand can of course change, but your gold won't be physically redefined by other parties. I think an interesting difference between cryptocurrencies and precious metals, is that to some extent they can be redefined by consensus of the network, or split consensus (e.g. Etherium and Etherium Classic). S…

I think the bigger trust problem here is trusting that BTC will continue to have value. You have to trust that a market will continue to exist, there are plenty of cryptocurrencies that are worthless. There is no actual reason bitcoin has any value aside from market consensus, and the same could have been said about tulip bulbs at one point.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#252

Post by decebalus1 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #248

I'm sure the environmental impact of this one unit will be negligible, but if the worlds largest tech companies start deploying thousands of these - imaginable, since it's a pretty good idea from an engineering perspective - I could see that causing some real problems.

> I could see that causing some real problems

Can you be more specific? What type of problems and why? Temperature-related, waste related, hazardous substances? And why would this become a problem at-scale?

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#253

Post by rtkwe »

michaelscott wrote: post #246
rtkwe wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But once extracted their energy costs are negligible (especially with gold being stored and the rights traded instead of the physical asset a lot of the time). In the case of BTC you can't really separate out the cost of mining a block from validating the transaction because until it's in a block a transaction doesn't really exist (this will get much better with lightning though). But without the constant burn of min…

Until it IS in a block. Then, like the storage cost of gold or any "real" material, the energy expenditure for maintenance is negligible. In fact, considering the storage requirements of something like bullion I'd argue the maintenance costs are considerably lower.

Yes any given transaction is valid once it is in a block but without continuous mining it's still worthless because it cannot be spent without a new block being mined. And since mining has to be pretty continuous or the whole thing becomes unusable because of loooong processing times the maintenance of the whole network kind of becomes maintenance of the transactions.

Even lightning would only last for a while without new blocks being mined because adding funds to your 'lightning channel' requires a transaction to be placed on the blockchain to open a channel.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#254

Post by dwyerm »

WalterBright wrote: post #71

I don't understand why not locating it in a city in a cold climate and using the waste heat to heat the city buildings? There is precedent. In Seattle there's the old "steam plant" which piped steam to many local buildings to heat them in winter.

You're talking about District Heating[1], and that's been around for decades in hundreds of cities. It's the source of the steaming manhole covers that are a fixture of noir imagery.

Denver's got the oldest continually operating system in the world, and within the last decade or so, they added a cooling loop, as well. Instead of a boiler and a cooling tower, you can subscribe to a steam loop and a chiller loop.

The problem is once again of gradient. It makes thermodynamic sense to pipe steam around, because of the large gradient between steam and ambient. But servers don't make steam. At best they make warm water only a couple of dozen degrees over ambient... and warm water doesn't have enough energy to heat buildings very effectively.

That said, and as someone already mentioned, people are doing it anyway. Seattle's internet exchange pipes its water across the street to the Amazon towers[2].

BTW, Seattle's Georgetown steam plant might not be making steam any more, but the one down by the market is still operating as Emwave Seattle[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

[2] https://blog.aboutamazon.com/sustainability/the-super-effici...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Steam_Company

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#255

Post by burkaman »

coffeeacc wrote: post #240
cc-d wrote: post #193

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculatio…

Task for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.

https://curecoin.net/

https://foldingcoin.net/

https://gridcoin.us/

http://primecoin.io/

Probably many more

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#256

Post by [deleted] »

coffeeacc wrote: post #240
cc-d wrote: post #193

> There has been growing concern that the rapid expansion of the data centre industry could mean an explosion in energy use. But Emma Fryer, who represents the sector at Tech UK, says that fear has been exaggerated. If we're concerned about the technology industry vastly increasing energy consumption, lets look at the entire medium sized country's worth of energy bitcoin is consuming for absolutely useless calculatio…

Task for some more suited than me: turn transactions into protein representations, and every mining operation becomes a folding operation.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#258

Post by gascan »

becomingknown wrote: post #182
Moter8 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Greenpeace at least doesn't think that it's a bad idea: "Experimental underwater data centres could be more sustainable if connected to offshore wind power, but Microsoft must focus more on investing in new renewable energy now. [...]" https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35472189

That's kind of a clever idea to promote renewable energy.

Coupling an undersea datacenter with an offshore windfarm just sounds all-around clever.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#259

Post by aalleavitch »

jakobegger wrote: post #100
aalleavitch wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the heat becomes enough, couldn’t we recycle it?

No, because you can not convert heat alone into energy. You need a heat difference (something hot and something cold). And the efficiency of the conversion depends on the temperature difference.

Right, but if you’re putting it in a place that is naturally cold, you’re going to have a temperature differential you can then work with to recycle the heat, wouldn’t you? Obviously you’re going to be losing heat still, but you could reclaim some of that energy.

Re: Microsoft has sunk a data centre in the sea to investigate energy efficiency

#260

Post by gnode »

zrobotics wrote: post #251
gnode wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I was wrong to say without trust. I think it would have been more apt to say trust in their integrity. Demand can of course change, but your gold won't be physically redefined by other parties. I think an interesting difference between cryptocurrencies and precious metals, is that to some extent they can be redefined by consensus of the network, or split consensus (e.g. Etherium and Etherium Classic). S…

I think the bigger trust problem here is trusting that BTC will continue to have value. You have to trust that a market will continue to exist, there are plenty of cryptocurrencies that are worthless. There is no actual reason bitcoin has any value aside from market consensus, and the same could have been said about tulip bulbs at one point.

You have the same issues with gold also. Although it's very unlikely gold would lose most of its value, the price of gold throughout history has fluctuated greatly:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Gold_pri...

Even for assets with industrial applications, there's a risk that it may be replaced with something else, or made cheap (e.g. synthetic diamond; aluminium was a precious metal before electrolytic production; asteroid mining?).

I agree with your comparison of Bitcoin to tulip bulbs. Just because Bitcoin is used as a store of value doesn't mean it's wise.

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