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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#81

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

meowface wrote: post #77
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When profits are being made, who cares what happens to future generations. Cryptocurrency is, for the most part, a contagion. We opened Pandora's box and the genie is out of the bottle. Short of some kind of cataclysmic black swan event, I'm not sure this insanity will end anytime soon. :(

This is one of the few energy consumers that has a pretty straightforward solution: switch to proof of stake. You can't magically switch all existing cars to be 100% electric, but you actually can kind of magically switch all cryptocurrencies to consume orders of magnitude less energy. The question is if Bitcoin will ever try to switch to it. Unfortunately, it seems like they probably won't anytime soon.

As much as I loathe cryptocurrency as a concept, a switch across the board to PoS would certainly be a welcome change to massively decrease this abhorrent waste in energy.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#82

Post by grozzle »

gruez wrote: post #52
maccam94 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still generates heat, which warms the planet.

Is heat generated by humans really a significant contributor to global warming compared to the warming effects of human generated greenhouse gases?

It isn't. Anthropogenic heat is about 1% as strong as the greenhouse effect, according to this article in Nature.

https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2017116

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#83

Post by rebuilder »

gruez wrote: post #52
maccam94 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still generates heat, which warms the planet.

Is heat generated by humans really a significant contributor to global warming compared to the warming effects of human generated greenhouse gases?

Not yet. Assuming continuous growth, it would be sooner than you might think:

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/

Of course that's more an illustration of why continuous growth is impossible than a prediction of what will happen.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#84

Post by maxerickson »

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.

You'd have to figure out the balance between distance from the sun impacting power generation and distance from Earth impacting the reward interval.

There should be an optimal distance for a given combination of solar panel + mining rig.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#85

Post by bostonsre »

o_p wrote: post #75

Well its the cost of a decentralized safe currency, at the end of the day its the users who pay for it, and I gladly pay for it. Keep using your fiat if you want.

Doesn't this example show that contributing to global warming makes everyone pay for that "decentralized safe currency" and not just the users of the currency?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#86

Post by o_p »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #79
o_p wrote: post #75

Well its the cost of a decentralized safe currency, at the end of the day its the users who pay for it, and I gladly pay for it. Keep using your fiat if you want.

Sorry my dude, but we are all paying for this in the ridiculous carbon emissions, whether we we are part of this experiment or not. Save the snark.

Its not BTC miners fault that energy is priced incorrectly. We shouldnt waste any energy into powering the armies of the world, lets just not fight, right? But here we are.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#87

Post by SwimSwimHungry »

caterama wrote: post #68

Who cares? Everyone is fixated on Bitcoin... there are tons of energy inefficient processes out there. The solution has nothing to do with Bitcoin... environmental impact needs to be priced into energy itself, whatever the application. This is a failure of the markets (and therefore ourselves). Bitcoin is a scapegoat.

Here's the problem with this sentiment. Bitcoin isn't replacing anything. Not pre-existing fiat currency, not banks, nothing. Bitcoin only adds to the problem at an alarming rate.

Bitcoin is certainly not a scapegoat. It's a massive problem and, largely, a symptom of human greed that must be put in check.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#88

Post by baron816 »

Easy solution: tax carbon emissions.

Who cares if you’re using energy to mine Bitcoin? Or if you’re using it to play video games? Or to run the AC all day?

If it you’re internalizing the cost of any emissions, then you’ll use those resources efficiently.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#89

Post by gruez »

rebuilder wrote: post #64
hparadiz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true though. You can throw up a 1kw system for under 1k now.

Maybe at the hobby level that thinking works. At scale, though, it does not unless you're building a renewable power plant where it simply can't connect to the grid. If you can get on the grid, then the power your plant produces and what you do with it are two separate things. Instead of e.g. mining crypto, you could sell the power generated. By using it instead of selling it, you're just pushing other users to use m…

>The calculus IMO is power consumption * grid-wide average CO2 emissions.

This is also too simplified, because it doesn't factor in transmission costs and interconnection capacity. Electricty doesn't move frictionlessly throughout the grid, and this can be seen because north american electricity prices vary wildly by region[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26829186

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#90

Post by caf »

The Greenidge team told potential investors last month that the plant had mined 1,186 bitcoins at an average net cost of about $2,869 for the 12 months ending in February. At this week’s Bitcoin price, that would translate into a profit margin of about $60,000 per mined coin.

Surely this cannot last. This kind of outsize profit ought to be bringing online enough new mining capacity to increase the block difficulty until that margin erodes away - is it the worldwide chip shortage preventing that from happening?

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