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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#491

Post by jessaustin »

askesisdev wrote: post #106
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…

Yes, the chip shortage must be preventing the manufacture of enough ASICs. The same can be said for Ethereum. The shortage of GPUs is preventing the difficulty to raise fast enough. The profit margin has been like 5-10x the electricity cost for the last few months. If you bought a RTX 3080/3090 it would have paid itself and the electricity by now.

Could mining itself be a cause of this chip shortage?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#492

Post by jariel »

jerry1979 wrote: post #438
jariel wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Bitcoin creates no value. Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts. Out here in the regular world where w…

That's a good idea, but in practice, no value is created by BTC.

And of course, there are a ton of ways of having a 'source of truth'.

So BTC is not a good currency, and it's not a very good store of value either. But we knew that going into it, because it's obvious from the start. It's just a speculative instrument.

If you get paid in a regular currency, then you're good. If you don't want to hold it, than buy an ETF or real estate or whatever and you good.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#493

Post by machiaweliczny »

throwaway939321 wrote: post #398
ekianjo wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Then by all means lets ban video games which are an extreme waste of electricity polluting the atmosphere for no good reason. You see how this reasonning can go?

Video games don't produce any electricity. The idea is to disincentive electricity production .

Then people will switch to producing energy at home via sonar panel, disel engines etc. illegally, or some countries will just allow it and get rich (see corporate tax for similar mechanism)

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#494

Post by triceratops »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #311
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…

> I think we need a carbon tax I get the concerns for the carbon issue of Bitcoin but I don't see why the solution should be governments profiting more from it.

Governments don't have to profit from it. In fact to get the desired effect (less carbon) the tax should be revenue neutral. It should be used to fund UBI or give everyone a tax credit.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#495

Post by machiaweliczny »

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.

easy? How do you enforce it worldwide? If you impose it volutarily then how you don't lose competitive adventage?

It's only possible now because clean energy ia cheaper (but still cannot compete in emergency situations), so we should invest in fission and fusion research

EDIT: I'm in favor of carbon tax BTW, we can afford it now and will incentivise investment in green tech more

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#496

Post by arcticbull »

roenxi wrote: post #359
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…

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…

lol, non-inflating is bad.

People aren't owed a risk-free return on thier capital and inflation is an incentive to invest. You're looking for a merged risk-free long-term store of value and medium of exchange. There's no reason to couple those two. It's actually counter-producive as they have different objectives. Money's job is to remain stable enough for as long as you hold it and cheap to transact. A long-term store of value's job is to go up.

Money is your short-term medium of exchange and lossy store of value. Which you use to buy long-term store of value. This is how capital is productively allocated while also creating a stable financial system.

The ability to adjust the money supply is crucial to reacting to shocks, to a changing population, and a changing economy. Taking away the knobs from the Fed removes their ability to create a stable monetary system in which business and individuals can operate.

If you actually look back in time you'll see under the gold standard, an attempt at this, boom/bust cycles were worse and more exaggerated. And much harder to control. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

This whole trope about the fed "stealing" 99% of money's value over the last 100 years is voodoo fringe economics. These are the people who used to hang out with megaphones at the corder of 5th and Market. Of course it went down, they told you it would, and they told you to buy something else with it.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#497

Post by arcticbull »

bradstewart wrote: post #458
Webox wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A TransferWise Borderless account that allows you to store any of 80 currencies including the USD, in Argentina, is a much better system.

Not to mention, a $20 transaction fee in Argentina is devastating.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#498

Post by arcticbull »

BTCOG wrote: post #445
mountainriver wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoins wild fluctuations based on speculation would say it’s not a safe place to store value over time

Interesting that you should say the opposite of what JP Morgan is now saying. That the wild fluctuations are steadily going away as volatility has been calming down quite a lot.

JPM like Goldman are only interested in selling their clients what they want. It's what they do. And it's only to benefit themselves. These are the bankers Bitcoin was trying to overthrow lol doesn't that ring alarm bells? Remember?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#499

Post by arcticbull »

webinvest wrote: post #400
malka wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.

One such trusted party does exist. It’s a non-profit and it’s called the Stellar Development Foundation. It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap. It has years of history to look back at. It doesn’t have a inflation rate (0% inflation rate now + occasional coin-burns). It uses orders of magnitude less electricity than bitcoin because it use…

> It’s cryptocurrency, the Stellar Lumens (XLM) is trusted well enough to be in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by marketcap.

lol, Dogecoin is #6 and XLM is #14. Are you saying your currency is less trusted than one with a dog on it?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#500

Post by arcticbull »

gruez wrote: post #425
salawat wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I"ll hire a few guys with guns, plus auditors. Their ability to maintain no sense of humor beats out your wonky crypto scheme in both regards. Your issue is you don't like the rules that come with the auditors. Those rules have a purpose, and that purpose is tied with sovereign diplomatic interrelation of civic bodies the world over. Many of whom are expressing great concern over the very thing PoW hastens. So no, it…

>I"ll hire a few guys with guns A few guys with guns can be beaten by several other guys with guns. >plus auditors https://www.wsj.com/articles/wirecard-scandal-puts-spotlight...

How's that Tether transparency report looking :) ahh, here it is. [1]

[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.02.17_-_settlemen...

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