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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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31–40 of 578 posts

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#32
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”?

What do you mean? All transactions are verified by miners, so all transactions are equally "dirty".

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#33
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 true though. You can throw up a 1kw system for under 1k now.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

latency and bandwidth are two different things... speed of light is a constant.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#38

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.

You have to sign blocks every 10 min. Since it takes 8 min for light from the sun, the mining station there would have 2 minutes to land a hash. You’d need to move most of the network to the sun station for this to be effective, I think.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#39

I keep reading that coal is uncompetitive even to operate because of renewables. So what’s the deal here? Is it the need for consistent base load electricity that caused them to choose coal?

No loss due to transmission by locating the equipment onsite. With that built in efficiency it probably skews the numbers in a way that utility consumers don't.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would like justification for the downvotes please. Thanks.
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