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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#361

Post by jokethrowaway »

chakhs wrote: post #309

HN logic: Berlin rent cap => market always wins, let the market rule Mining bitcoin => let's regulate

I wouldn't say HN is generally libertarian leaning (calls for regulation of everything are quite common among well educated techies) - rent caps are probably such an authoritarian and foreign concept that even HN is rebelling to it.

As a libertarian (pro free market, pro private property for everything), I'm in favour of removing rent caps.

On pollution, that's a bit harder. The problem is that the environment is a resource shared by everyone and everyone should privately own a little part of it. Polluting is damaging everyone's stake in the environment and the individuals living in it should have a right to compensation.

I think the best model should be leaving it up to the communities to establish what the limits are in each community. Some can have no limits, some will have higher limits.

It will be a tradeoff between cheaper cost of living / profitability, after all.

Then we would see places with higher or lower limits according to what people wish and need.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#362

Post by yetihehe »

londons_explore wrote: post #118

What is the advantage to owning your own power plants over just buying power from the grid? Does the grid have substantial fees or taxes?

Yeah, you typically pay for transfer and upkeep of that grid. It's included in your electtricity bill, sometimes even as a separate item.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#363

Post by jokethrowaway »

seibelj wrote: post #199
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@maxerickson That ultimately will be the end game. I'd argue that most of the folks that bought into Bitcoin do not, in fact, share in the an-cap libertarian utopia of an economy entirely detached from the US Dollar. Folks are going to want their payday, even folks like Michael Saylor and Elon Musk. These guys aren't HODLing for charity. They want to exit before the rest of the peanut gallery does.

I philosophically believe, to my core, that one of the greatest evils ever perpetuated on humanity was allowing governments to print money whenever they wanted. With very few exceptions, every single fiat currency has experienced periods of high or extremely high inflation (including USD in the 70s). Giving those in power the ability to dilute everyone else’s wealth and direct new money to their favored people / proj…

While I completely agree with you philosophically, an unbacked, power hungry store of value like bitcoin is not a solution.

It's a political problem, let's rise and kick the government and central banking out!

David Friedman argues in The Machinery of Freedom to use a currency backed by a set of commodities (wood, iron, etc: a set of resources to stabilise the price).

I don't understand why that's not a solution - probably because it doesn't let governments and banks to profit off people easily.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#364

Post by webinvest »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #231
shawnz wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin certainly has a use case, just observe how it is being used today, every day. Not just to buy drugs online, but also for example to escape oppressive currency controls, defend against questionably ethical practices like civil forfeiture, etc. If you are saying that it doesn't have intrinsic value, then yes of course that is true, but I don't see how that makes it useless (unless you think cash is also useless…

Couldn't this be met with a proof of stake coin? I could at least tolerate a PoS cryptocurrency because it at minimum consumes orders of magnitude less energy than Bitcoin would.

It could. But so far, no PoS coin has ever survived a bear market. Look at Peercoin and Novacoin as examples.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#365

Post by saalweachter »

jariel wrote: post #322
bb88 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" FOMO, mining lotteries, and the guise of financial innovation are typical cover stories here. But all stocks and other publicly traded investments are basically making a bet that others will buy in after you do, raising the price highe…

"Most stock owners hope this very thing, t" Stocks imply ownership of assets. Sure, in terms of 'hoping that someone willy buy' is similar to BTC, but the valuation is completely different. A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation. BTC is just a made up number. It's what people think the crowd will buy it for. Granted, this mechanism itself can be useful in some scenarios, but BTC i…

I also like to point out in these contexts that a trillion dollars a year flow back from the profits of the companies of the S&P to the investors in the S&P 500, in the form of dividends and stock buybacks.

It's not just a zero-sum game, making money off fellow investors who bet the stock will go one way when it goes the other.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#366

Post by londons_explore »

yetihehe wrote: post #362
londons_explore wrote: post #118

What is the advantage to owning your own power plants over just buying power from the grid? Does the grid have substantial fees or taxes?

Yeah, you typically pay for transfer and upkeep of that grid. It's included in your electtricity bill, sometimes even as a separate item.

But isn't the cost of that Sure, it's a benefit of not using the grid, but it seems a pretty small one.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#367

Post by odiroot »

politician wrote: post #289
birracerveza wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime. I have a better idea, let's make everything that causes pollution a crime. Bought a plastic water bottle? Straight to jail. Refueled your car? Yep, jail. You used your heater? Believe it or not, jail. I'm sure we'll live in a pollution free utopia in no time. Thank you for your insightful contribution. This i…

Breathing? Right to jail.

Don't even think of eating beans. Methane is illegal too.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#368

Post by klibertp »

wolfretcrap wrote: post #305
SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'll just say right here I do believe your heart is in the right place and you want there to be an alternative to the government run and controlled fiat. That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge. Also, to your point about greenifying Bitcoin, I just believe the assumption that bitcoin will just move over 100% to green energy sources is naive at best, and con…

>That said, gold technically exists already to meet this in my humble opinion as a proper hedge. Moving gold from one country to another country on your is difficult. Storing gold properly without getting robbed is difficult. Try moving $5million dollar worth gold and you'll realize the advantage which bitcoin brings.

> Try moving $5million dollar worth gold

If I read the price correctly that would be something like 80kg. I can't be bothered to dig deeper, but that would be just a few gold bars, I suspect. Not very hard to handle, IMO...

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#369

Post by le-mark »

bb88 wrote: post #124
caf wrote: post #90

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 un…

That's at 19 megawatts burning natural gas. So that means they spend about 140MWh of energy for one BTC. I calculate that comes to around $20/MWh, which seems to be on the low side of energy production. Coal is $40 to $143 per MWh. Edited to add: That's roughly 60 tons of CO2 emissions per BTC mined. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 The other aspect here is let's say you're a speculator and you think…

This the correct calculation. The potential profit is much much higher than the current price levels. Until the mania ends, then it’s not.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#370

Post by UncleMeat »

CTDOCodebases wrote: post #293
arcticbull wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half is used for jewelry because gold is shiny pebbles. About 10% is used for electronics. Mining Bitcoin consumes 5X as much energy as gold, btw, per unit value extracted. It also requires mining gold to produce the circuit boards used for mining Bitcoin - given the popularity of the ENIG immersion gold plating process for PCB contacts. The secondary issue is that of course each Bitcoin transaction generates 1…

The miners don’t compute hashes of random data. They confirm transactions. If you don’t think that a technology that allows you to store value in a tamper free digital ledger is useful it’s hard to argue the usefulness of PoW crypto currencies to begin with.

What if we had 1000x the power being used to confirm transactions? 1,000,000x the power? At some point we aren't achieving anything.

The is made worse by the fact that there are alternatives to produce trustworthy ledgers that don't involve destroying the planet.

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