It would be great if the gigantic Bitcoin energy demand leads to renewable energy breakthroughs.
Incentives are aligned, imo
Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#12What’s the bandwidth from a probe close to the sun with a Bitcoin miner on it? Beam back the coin, we can wait. Or, mine it near the sun and then bring it back. Could take 20 years, but the returns should be better than the SPY.
We’d need a spaceship I guess with the largest solar panels ever. Park it near the sun, mine Bitcoin, come back to earth.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#13Every time I'm like "BTC is roasting the planet" people come out of the woodwork to remind me about renewable energy. Funny I don't see any of them here....
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#14A simple move that would ban selling fossil power plants for cryptocurrencies mining purpose BUT allowing to do so for the carbon-neutral energy would be a win-win for both sides and will help the transition from carbon-heavy energy.
I'm wondering if 'carbon-neutral' energy production is really environmentally neutral, especially when channeled to cryptocurrency mining. Take wind turbines: they've found that harvesting wind actually increases the temperature in an area. Do enough of this, coupled with channeling the energy into heat-producing machines, are we sure this isn't gong to contribute to global warming at scale? Not to mention the harm t…
> Take wind turbines: they've found that harvesting wind actually increases the temperature in an area. Do enough of this, coupled with channeling the energy into heat-producing machines, are we sure this isn't gong to contribute to global warming at scale?
That's some anti-renewable energy FUD I hadn't seen before... Yes, we're sure that won't cause global warming. Wind turbine operation doesn't produce greenhouse gases or meaningful change the Earth's albedo.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#15A simple move that would ban selling fossil power plants for cryptocurrencies mining purpose BUT allowing to do so for the carbon-neutral energy would be a win-win for both sides and will help the transition from carbon-heavy energy.
I'm wondering if 'carbon-neutral' energy production is really environmentally neutral, especially when channeled to cryptocurrency mining. Take wind turbines: they've found that harvesting wind actually increases the temperature in an area. Do enough of this, coupled with channeling the energy into heat-producing machines, are we sure this isn't gong to contribute to global warming at scale? Not to mention the harm t…
Also, the propellers get used quickly and are not recyclable AFAIK.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#16What’s the bandwidth from a probe close to the sun with a Bitcoin miner on it? Beam back the coin, we can wait. Or, mine it near the sun and then bring it back. Could take 20 years, but the returns should be better than the SPY. We’d need a spaceship I guess with the largest solar panels ever. Park it near the sun, mine Bitcoin, come back to earth.
GPUs get faster over time.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#17It would be great if the gigantic Bitcoin energy demand leads to renewable energy breakthroughs.
... do we really need another energy demand to drive R&D? We're already working with an energy budget equivalent to 1/3 the decay that powers the Earth's fiery core. Is it really fair to credit any new breakthroughs to the last ~12 GW of demand, instead of the first ~18 TW?
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#18Great. There is only so many plants to go around. The fast growing energy consumption from crypto may be that real push that we need to move to renewables as no other type of energy production can be built up that much more and that fast. Nothing moves things faster than war and/or straight economic interest. Once crypto energy consumption grows an order or two of magnitude more, it would produce a real interest in space and fusion. Push for progress is coming from an unexpected side :)
In the meantime i think we'll see something like large barges/platforms with wind turbines floating somewhere in windy international waters - cuts the costs of permits, etc. May be some startups around it ...
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#19This is an area people should remain vigilante about. Although most bitcoin mining uses renewable energy[1][2] or reduces pollution from flaring sites by actually using the to-be-flared gas onsite, without vigilance that won't remain the case, especially if state actors begin competing. [1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/faculty-research/centres/alternati... a Cambridge study which corroborates and reached the same conclu…
The argument, that most Bitcoin mining uses renewabke energy isn't valid, because the renewable energy used for BitCoin mining could have been used for other things.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#20What’s the bandwidth from a probe close to the sun with a Bitcoin miner on it? Beam back the coin, we can wait. Or, mine it near the sun and then bring it back. Could take 20 years, but the returns should be better than the SPY. We’d need a spaceship I guess with the largest solar panels ever. Park it near the sun, mine Bitcoin, come back to earth.
Mining is a race. If you have X seconds latency because you are millions of miles away, you’ll loose $Y over the long run. You can figure out the function which ties X and Y together.