221–230 of 250 posts
Based on heat and people coming and going, police assumed it was a cannabis farm . Based on that incorrect conclusion, they raided the place. Flimsy evidence.
Lots of traffic to a flat, neighbours complaining. Police suspect a cocaine dealer and raid the place. However : the dealer was selling heroine. Flimsy evidence?
What’s your take?
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A CPU/ASIC can be seen as an electrical heater with extra steps. So why not heat up your plants with your CPU. The energy flow is: power plant -> CPU -> greenhouse -> the atmosphere
I remember seeing some talk about a company creating ASIC blocks to heat houses but grows afaik don't generally need more heat the lights and everything creates enough heat for the plants.
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Yeah, during the winter I mine on my video card because I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat and my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I'll definitely look more into heatpumps when it comes time to replace my furnace or ai…
> my electricity is primarily provided by nuclear and hydro. Kind of weird to think of mining as a way to reduce your carbon emissions but in some cases it certainly can be. I think you are likely mistaken, although it is a surprisingly common misconception. Most places in the world, if you are using an extra kWh of power, the system needs to generate up to an extra marginal kWh from coal or gas. Example 1: France ge…
While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still, this is also accomplished with hydroelectric quite heavily in my area and over time the rates of each production method will adjust accordingly so I think it's still a reasonable assessment to look at overall production.
Looking at the picture, they are using really old bitcoin ASIC miners from 2017. A profitability calculator I found says this Antminer S9 can get $948/year of income in exchange for $1,371 worth of electricity. That's a loss of $422/year. Obviously it's not profitable to use anymore, unless you are literally stealing electricity like these guys.
Would be way more profitable if they figured out some way to re-sell what electricity they stole...
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> It seems like an ideal way to use excess energy in grid-tied solar setups where the energy company is not incentivized to buy excess power. Or for non-grid tied solar when your batteries are full. The ideal way to use excess energy is to do almost anything else besides pointless proof-of-work computations (e.g some scientific distributed computing thing).
PoW isn’t useless, in fact, the energy cost of PoW is proportional to its demand.
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You’re making the assumption that the loss is large enough to warrant the hardware improvements. Getting high quality data about an electricity grid is extremely expensive and difficult. A big part of that in the U.K. is driven by the fact that most of our distribution networks are underground, which means that a lot of equipment is located below ground level. This gives you one big problem, the place where you want…
Counter - How do you know the level of loss if you don't have visibility into it?
Crackpot idea. The entire point of cryptocurrency mining is that you prove that you have burned X dollars worth of energy. Why not cut the middlemen and just let miners pay in dollars (stablecoins technically)? We can then donate the left over dollars to charities.
Because someone would have to verify that the money was donated, which would be impossible to do in an entirely distributed way. I agree that it would be a Pareto improvement if such coordination were actually possible, though.