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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#371

Post by le-mark »

px43 wrote: post #115

Just to point out the obvious, the headline is heavily editorialized and misleading. Current HN headline: "Bitcoin miners are buying power plants" Actual headline: "A New Threat to New York’s Clean Energy Goals: Bitcoin Mining" It's trying to imply that buying power plants is some hot new trend, but the article is about a single crazy dude in New York buying a single plant.

I have sources who have purchased hydro plants in South America and refineries with installed power production and use the excess capacity for mining. My feeling it’s more common than a single crazy dude.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#372

Post by ISL »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #351
cromwellian wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. My portfolio is safer in a diversified basket of stocks, bonds, real estate and other holdings than it is in bitcoin. > we can freely speculate Right, because that worked oh so well for Long Term Capital Management, or the 2008 Housing Crisis, or the Great Depression, or Dutch Tulips, or... This libertarian, nay, Austrian, fantasy that if only we would deregulate everything, these incredible damaging boom…

While I agree with you on Bitcoin safety (your portfolio is safer because the only thing keeping BTC up is speculation), I don't think you can say the Austrian school is fantasy. It hasn't been attempted and I think deregulation / decentralization of the economy has good chances of getting rid of boom/bust cycles. Without a central bank playing with credit you wouldn't have boom / bust cycles: what's more likely is t…

Boom/bust cycles preceded central banks.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#373

Post by Kbelicius »

Avamander wrote: post #306
paulgb wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you support a carbon import tariff for PoW cryptocurrencies mined outside of countries that implement a carbon tax? Because otherwise I can just imagine mining moving to countries without one, as is already happening with regards to other climate-based restrictions.

They can move, but that undermines confidence of the blockchain because then it's under the influence of fewer governments. Which makes me think that quite a few wont.

Isn't majority of bitcoin mining done in China? If so then we can safely conclude that the people don't care under whose influence it is.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#374

Post by UncleMeat »

SwimSwimHungry wrote: post #103
baron816 wrote: post #88

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.

Hard to do this when you can have other countries with much looser regulations allow Bitcoin miners run rampant. What probably should happen is to make converting from any cryptocurrency to major world currencies a crime. I have no delusions that this will halt activity in this sector entirely, but it will make it reasonably difficult to make any substantial money this way without raising some serious eyebrows.

It is also hard to manage humanity if the temperature increases by 5 degrees celsius.

Yes, this is hard policy to get right. So what? We have the entire world to figure this out and we are on a timer. Any first attempt will have flaws and loopholes and need to be improved over time. But this is just an excuse for people to avoid acting.

We need to do something. A carbon tax is the least extreme solution that has any chance of functioning.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#375

Post by berdario »

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.

The nonce used as input of the mining hash function IS random (or rather, arbitrary).

Comments like the above are a sad demonstration of the fact that, while Bitcoin was originally an interesting technical project... Discussion of it has now been completely taken over by shills that try to dismiss/refute/hide all of the problems with Bitcoin (or the cryptoasset du jour) to safeguard their bet

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#376

Post by saalweachter »

Slartie wrote: post #356
admax88q wrote: post #186

All this talk about Bitcoin causing global warming is starting to feel like a targetted misinformation campaign. Yes it's wasteful, and yes it's using a fair amount of energy at the moment. But all estimates show it's still a very small fraction of the problem. It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about bitcoins carbon footprint for its size.

It feels like we spend a disproportionate amount of energy running the bitcoin network for its benefits. That's the reason it comes up a lot in those debates. Sure, cars use more energy emitting more CO2 right now, but the benefit of all the cars worldwide is in an entirely different dimension compared to Bitcoin. Most people intuitively grasp that stuff having a huge benefit for a huge lot of people must be allowed…

The last time I looked into this it seemed like US junk mail might be roughly the same CO2-scale as Bitcoin.

Which isn't an argument against killing Bitcoin for its contributions to CO2 emissions, mind you, but it seems another similar low-hanging fruit of generating a huge amount of waste to benefit a small number of people economically, while being extraordinarily simple to "just stop doing it". (As opposed to, say, fixing all building insulation in the US, which is a larger problem, and should be done, but is non-trivial to fix.)

With the added benefit that a hundred million people actively hate the existence of junk mail, so I think "we need to ban junk mail because global warming" has legs.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#377

Post by Black101 »

px43 wrote: post #115

Just to point out the obvious, the headline is heavily editorialized and misleading. Current HN headline: "Bitcoin miners are buying power plants" Actual headline: "A New Threat to New York’s Clean Energy Goals: Bitcoin Mining" It's trying to imply that buying power plants is some hot new trend, but the article is about a single crazy dude in New York buying a single plant.

The mods only force you to use the article's headline when it fits closer to their ideologies.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#378

Post by drexlspivey »

tiku wrote: post #345
bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

The price of bitcoin will only rise if it's more pricey to mine. Miners will never (or almost never) sell their new bitcoins against a lower price than they invested.

No it won’t, miners that are mining at a loss would just stop mining which would make the difficulty to drop.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#379

Post by gverrilla »

jariel wrote: post #320
ayngg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. 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?" and I think it is…

No, this is really quite upside down. "People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it" We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors. Bitcoin creates no value. It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system…

your understanding of blockchain, nft and crypto is very superficial. do your research better

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#380

Post by pera »

abduhl wrote: post #152
jude- wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are you handwaving away my concerns? Calm down. > Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more? You're all over the comments trying to pin the blame for CO2 emissions on the the existence of PoW cryptocurrencies. But if you stop and think about the problem for more than 5 seconds, you'll realize that it's the CO2 emissions , not cryptocurrencies, that are the problem. They were a problem before…

You didn’t answer their question. Can you quantify what things pollute more?

Last time I checked standby power consumption only in the US was an order of magnitude higher than Bitcoin mining all around the world, but it's hard to estimate the emissions of the latter due to its decentralised nature.
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