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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#21

Post by runawaybottle »

neolog wrote: post #16
runawaybottle wrote: post #12

What’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.

But it’s not free energy. I’m looking at it like fusion, the output needs to exceed the input (well I guess that’s how everyone is looking at it).

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#23

Post by gruez »

eevilspock wrote: post #9

This is simply perverse.

It's perverse, just like almost every other form of economic activity on this planet, eg. farming (fertilizer/herbicide run-off), mining (tailing ponds), factories (air/ground/water pollution). The underlying reason is simple: externalities aren't being priced in, which allows the owners of such operations to make money while everyone pays the price.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#26

Post by runawaybottle »

amenghra wrote: post #20
runawaybottle wrote: post #12

What’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.

If you drop beacon towers along the way to maintain bandwidth, why wouldn’t this work?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#27

Post by maxerickson »

de6u99er wrote: post #19
vmception wrote: post #2

This 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.

That's why they are talking about the flaring instead of hydroelectric, to sell the idea that it's using power that wouldn't be recovered otherwise.

Of course it is sort of likely that cheap hydroelectric is a much bigger component of the supply than gas power plants installed just to mine bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#28

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

graiz wrote: post #24

Is it possible for people to source or certify sustainable Bitcoin? Since there is a transaction chain, can you choose to buy or boycott “dirty coins”?

coin taint is a real thing but ultimately your wallet just looks at your inputs and writes outputs to other wallets.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#30

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

lwansbrough wrote: post #22
camgunz wrote: post #13

Every 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....

"It's renewable therefore I can waste as much of it as I want."

It's the ultimate in handwaveism.
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