Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

nysfocus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 578 posts

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#451

Post by propertymagnate »

shawnz wrote: post #441
propertymagnate wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To rephrase that, Bitcoin uses more energy that all of MGM's properties in Las Vegas.

Yes, which seems reasonable to me. It would be more interesting if a global monetary system could use less than a bunch of casinos. (And maybe that will even happen with the adoption of proof-of-stake)

I don't have any of the calculations, but I would argue that we probably have one and it is the fiat global monetary system.

If bitcoin was a proof of stake and was the global monetary system I would have to re-think my opinions - at the moment it just seems like a cross between the worst aspects of Wall Street, the cookie clicker game, and the AI Paperclip Maximiser problem.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#452

Post by ccortes »

jariel wrote: post #387
ccortes wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A stock is valued based on the performance of it's actual profit generation. I'm not sure that's the case any more. I mean we've seen billion dollar companies that just can't reach profitability.

The stock is valued of the basis the net present value of future earnings. The obvious difficulty there is determining the future earnings (and discount rate). But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation. Amazon is worth a lot because it's a giant machine with $350B in revenues - so investors can quibble over their earnings and 'how much that is worth' in future earnings - but it's b…

> But that doesn't mean they don't exist - it's a rational premise of valuation.

Some times they do and some times they don't. That means it's not a fundamental property for stock valuation.

What was the rational premise of valuation behind Gamestop? There was one, but it had little or nothing to do with Gamestop's future earinings.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#453

Post by roguson »

There are no signs that cryptocurrency mining will stop. As long as it is profitable, more and more miners will enter the mining industry. Each miner requires an extensive amount of electricity to successfully mine cryptocurrencies. I can say that mining cryptocurrencies are now profitable than ever. Thanks to the Bull Market, a lot of new players are going to enter this sphere.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#454

Post by bob1029 »

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…

Speculation in the value of cryptocurrency has forced the market into a regime of operation where neither the constraints of power & compute nor supply of semiconductors apply right now. The hierarchy of value constraints goes something like:

Speculation > silicon constrained mining > power & capital constrained mining

I believe the silicon constraints would instantly relax as soon as speculation falls into line based on how much hardware everyone has been stacking up on lately.

At the end of they day, the cost of energy & your ability to keep the machines operational will be the final constraint. This is the one that the long investors should anticipate. I.e. "How do I mitigate power cost in a power-cost-constrained market".

Right now at current market prices, owning an entire power plant to run your operation is folly. In a few more years when a delta of 2c/KWh is make-or-break on profitability, it makes perfect sense.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#455

Post by savingisbadnow »

thehappypm wrote: post #418
birracerveza wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminalizing cryptocurrency was already exaggerated out of sanity bounds.

I think cryptocurrency should be banned. It's provided zero actual value, it's only uses are crime and as a speculative asset. Oh, and as a vehicle for poor Venezuelans to avoid inflation, can't forget about that fantasy.

You forgot about Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Lebanon, Asia?, etc

The people living there deserve to lose half their money every 2-5 years

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#456

Post by savingisbadnow »

lottin wrote: post #250
shawnz wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And appropriately it represents a small minority of energy use (~0.6%)

Exactly, hoarding bitcoin —not using it— is the problem. It leads to high prices and consequent high environmental impact.

You mean saving, which is actually a use contrary to what years of keynesian propaganda have made you think

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#457

Post by iso1631 »

dmurray wrote: post #439
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…

> Seriously, what are the current best arguments against levying such a disincentive? The best argument against it is: it's very hard to enforce it on everybody internationally, and if one country adopts it unilaterally, then production just moves to another country (making everyone worse off - same amount of pollution, but the production is presumably less economically efficient). The second best argument against it…

> The best argument against it is: it's very hard to enforce it on everybody internationally, and if one country adopts it unilaterally, then production just moves to another country

So tax imports (including the carbon cost of shipping)

It would likely require agreement between the US and EU to shift enough of the global consumer market to actually care, but with Poland and Texas that doesn't seem likely.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#458

Post by bradstewart »

Webox wrote: post #443
roenxi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…

I don't get your argument. Bitcoin is very very volatile and just because it went up the last x years, doesn't make it stable or trustworthy. My money in my bank is very safe and it doesn't cost me anything. The inflation itself is a systematic thing and should affect bitcoin equaly. When corona came, i was looking at the stock market and was surprised how many people left it. It doesn't make much sense to distrist t…

I'm assuming you're in the US/Europe/somewhere with a stable currency. Places like Argentina that have had serious devaluation of currency do not see money in their bank accounts as "safe".

Bitcoin can provide a way for e.g. Argentinians to get their money into other currencies when the government is actively preventing that through "standard" mechanisms. It's safe (er, safer) from that perspective.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#459

Post by ddeyar »

drexlspivey wrote: post #385
ddeyar wrote: post #230

I don't know. Eth is switching to PoS. Tezos, cardano and many others are PoS. Is there any plan for bitcoin to switch to PoS? When there are a lot of more environmental friendly crypto alternatives, what should stop governments to ban bitcoin mining?

How do you distribute the initial coins with PoS? Like who gets the first coin? The person who gets the first one will also get all the subsequent ones since he controls all the supply until he sells? How would that even work?

The tezos foundation for example made a crowdfunding some years ago. People who donated in the project received an amount written in the genesis block. The foundation started the mainnet in a beta phase with some initial validators. Holders started to participate in the PoS process until it was decentralized.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#460

Post by jessaustin »

reynard_le_faux wrote: post #442
Siira wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, alternatives that work for rich, powerful people.

These people buying power stations aren't rich? One of the issues with crypto currency is that we're replacing one elite with another. As John Oliver says Cryptocurrency is everything you don't understand about finance combined with everything you don't understand about computers. That new, even eliter, elite is probably no more moral or ethical than the old. It's not like cryptocurrency is more accessible. Maybe it…

Bitcoin is like any other infinitely divisible asset. You can buy as much or as little as you want.
Post reply on HN