And we had imagined we'd all die in a flood of something vaguely cool, like nanotech grey goo. But no, it's going to be something as stupid as a conflagration of SHA-256 hashes.
It was always paperclip maximizers.
Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
481–490 of 578 posts
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#482It’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…
Are not renewables (that is, wind and solar) the cheapest energy sources today? If I understand correctly, that would mean that bitcoin mining has to use them (in order to stay competitive), and bitcoin is effectively subsidizing renewables (because it pays money for renewable power generation, especially at times with low other demand - which makes expensive storage of electricity less of an issue).
The only thing necessary would be to cancel ASAP any public subsidies for fossil-powered generation of electricity (which is a measure that is overdue anyways).
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
A carbon tax won't halt activity but it could cause the price to drop. If Bitcoin drops to $300, it is no longer profitable to mine. I agree that making it illegal would help. Main street would be loathe to depend on wire transfers to Hong Kong to transfer in/out. However, given Coinbase just went public, there will (unfortunately) be way too much political pressure to kill the segment.
Why would the carbon tax drastically drop bitcoin price? If electricity price increases, the difficulty dicreases. As far as the difficulty stays high enough to keep the network secure the markets don't have a reason to care.
The problem with the difficulty decreasing is that it depends on how much and how fast. It depends on how much the tax is relative to the cost to mine. Also, it could also politically be positioned as a "bitcoin tax" instead of a climate change thing to make it bi-partisan. I personally think these are the things that causes Main Street to move on. If all of the commoners sell their BTC the price will drop.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#484What technological innovation would disrupt bitcoin at this point? It feels like crypto reached a terminal state in its first iteration.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you handwaving away my concerns? You do realize cryptocurrencies (and to be specific, PoW ones) aren't replacing any of these so called other things that pollute. Speaking of which, can you quantify what things pollute more? At any rate, I get the feeling we are going to be talking past each other and wasting time and energy (heh) on this conversation.
> 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're right, it is the CO2 emissions, but they're effectively unavoidable. We do not have enough renewable energy sources built right now to support even the current load. Additional load means dirty power plants stay online longer as we wait for enough green energy sources to come online.
Even if all the miners were running on entirely green energy, there's an opportunity cost. That green energy could be used to power homes and we could shut down coal power plants. I don't care that you bought 9,000 solar panels to power your mining farm, because that's 9,000 solar panels that could have been hooked up to the grid.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade. I find cryptocurrencies interesting and would like for them to exist, but we're in a terrible position to be pissing away electricity right now. In the scheme of ways to use electricity, Bitcoin is a pretty frivolous use too. The electricity consumption is just so outsized compared to the actual physical gain (and I'm not talking about money made from speculating).
If I were the ruler of the world, I'd give it a transaction tax that was proportional to the percentage of load generation that isn't renewable. If 40% of our energy is still dirty, then there's a 40% transaction tax. If we can get that down to 5%, then there's only a 5% tax. I don't see a reason to ban them, we just need to cut power consumption and thus CO2 emissions wherever we can.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#486Every 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....
This case seems like an aberration, though? I think the logic goes something like this: bitcoin miners have a huge incentive to find the cheapest power in the world; renewable energy sources are cheaper than fossil fuels and getting cheaper all the time; therefore miners will prefer renewable power.
At current prices why do they care if it's cheap? Coal seems to make sense for a bitcoin miner
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#487It’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…
AFAIK No, BTC algorithm ensures fixed mining difficulty (so amount of mining&minners doesn't matter (only for overtaking network)). Actually if too much BTC will be mined by limited amount of miners whole coin my lose value, e.g. if we require that barier to entry is having own power plant BTC might get destroyed by too greedy miners.
IMO BTC existence is possibly good as it raises demand for cheap energy (and currently green energy is cheapest it seems), it's also good as forcing function for fiat.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the criticism is exactly wrong, but it's more like Bitcoin mining is the reductio ad absurdum exposing the waste of resources that goes into gold mining (yes, there's some industrial uses, but that is a rounding error compared to the quantities that are dug up, purified, cast into bars, shipped around the world and buried back underground in vaults).
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…
Once the gold is extracted how much energy is spent to transport it, turn it into jewellery and store/protect it throughout its lifetime?
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#489Who 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.
> This is a failure of the markets... The failure is governments subsidize so much energy production they effectively take the market out of the equation. Remove government incentives for cheap power at all costs and then you'll see the action of the market.
That's not going to help nuclear power very much.
Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants
#490It’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…
AFAIK No, BTC algorithm ensures fixed mining difficulty (so amount of mining&minners doesn't matter (only for overtaking network)). Actually if too much BTC will be mined by limited amount of miners whole coin my lose value, e.g. if we require that barier to entry is having own power plant BTC might get destroyed by too greedy miners. IMO BTC existence is possibly good as it raises demand for cheap energy (and curren…
> BTC existence is possibly good as it raises demand for cheap energy
As opposed to the rest of the economy, which only demands expensive energy?
It would be pretty funny though, if the world's various governments decide BTC is an existential threat to their legitimacy and institute a carbon tax to destroy it.