191–200 of 419 posts
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Even in France a heat pump will give you at least twice the heat for the gram of CO2.
Heat pumps need energy to operate. Hence at low temperatures the best combo is electricity+heat-pump. So cryptomining+heat-pump is exactly the same, minus the e-waste.
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Heat pumps are not viable in a lot of cases, in an urban setting, it's probably the vast majority. So for the many cases were the alternative for heating would be burning fossil fuels, using electricity, ideally produced via renewable energy/nuclear, could be a superior alternative.
Wait, why heat pumps are not viable in an urban setting?
“Person inefficiently wastes gratuitous amounts of energy perpetuating imaginary currency, tries to pass it off as if it’s all ok because their house gets warmer as a side effect”
My mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at ~900$ I don't think this is at all true. Even if the price of the crypto remained stable, the mining difficulty will keep on increasing as more miners join. So after a time, his mining rigs will consume more money in electricity than they generate in coins.
Well, no, at a certain point (and indeed during normal market conditions, which right now isn't) there's an equilibrium. As global hashrate goes up, as you not, profitability goes down, which makes miners switch to other chains, or, eventually, power down their rigs. I think your initial statement is correct, but from the wrong direction; if the ETH price is at 900$, the incentive to mine is less, some of current has…
I am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for heating. Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole city while burning the garbages. But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess, even if there might be better ways to use compute power.
"Cryptocurrency" is more than twice as long in letters and syllables. I think we've reached the point where "crypto" is disambiguated in most contexts from "cryptography", or did the author have a different reason for calling that abbreviation "lame and wrong"?
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Fascinating! Is this true? Do you have a link? Thanks!
There have also been plans to do this in Finland, but most of what I can find is either marketing material or news articles discussing plans [1, 2] rather than actual achievements, so I'm not sure what actually became of it. There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3] Swedish telco Telia also has…
https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-center...
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But then why is there no serious competitor?
Imagine a world where Facebook didn’t buy WhatsApp and Instagram. So I think the better hypothetical is “imagine a world where Facebook didn’t leverage its existing dominance to preempt competitors”.
Still, if enough people would be fed up with FB, their dominance would fade away. Well, afaik Telegram (and Signal) gained lots marketshare lateley, so lets see
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The questions are twofold: does Facebook do more good than bad? Could the good be accomplished without much of the bad? The answers to both questions are arguably bad for Facebook.
But then why is there no serious competitor?
There are plenty. There is no mirror corporation doing exactly the same thing under a different name. But there is no mirror to Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other large tech corp. These are corporations backed by ironclad IP laws meaning nobody can every play on exactly the same field. For something like facebook, the competitor is all things not facebook. Every time you share a new story via SMS, you are competing with facebook. Every time you send a message via email rather than via facebook you are competing with facebook. And ever time you visit a store's own website rather than their facebook page, you deny facebook a tiny bit of the world. That is the serious competitor.