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Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#231

Post by kasey_junk »

throwawayboise wrote: post #198
kasey_junk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can routinely get ~2 c kWh in Chicago: https://hourlypricing.comed.com/

That's amazing. When I lived in Chicago in the 1990s the rates were some of the highest in the country, ~$0.11 or so at that time. Hourly rates/smart meters were not yet available to consumers (commercial customers could get different plans, IIRC).

My actual billed amount ranges between 10-12 c per kWh. The hourly rates are highly variable and my usage needs are pretty constant. But if you had a high variable load keeping your rate below 5 c per kWh doesn’t seem that hard in Chicago.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#232

Post by bialpio »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #226
bialpio wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be way more profitable if they figured out some way to re-sell what electricity they stole...

Who buys stolen electricity? Bitcoin miners and weed growers ... at best! Selling this to homes would be even more illegal because of the negligence. Someone could get killed fucking around with that much power.

"$20 to fully charge your EV", "$5 to charge your phone" ? Installing fake solar panels & a net meter & selling the stolen energy back to the utility company? Just live off of stolen electricity to cut your monthly expenses by $100 a month, while also having to steal significantly less so that it could've gone unnoticed? IDK, but the whole thing makes me think of stealing a painting only to sell the frame to a recycling center. Yes, you're still ahead, but maybe there was a better way to profit from the crime?

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#233

Post by bialpio »

arsome wrote: post #146
bluGill wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just electrical rate, also what you do with the waste heat. I know at least one person who is heating his garage. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than an electric heater for the same task. A heat pump would probably be more cost effective in the long run, but I didn't tell him that.

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…

> I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat

Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up with energy efficiency of 60% for natural gas powered plants, while I don't think you'll be able to buy a gas furnace that has efficiency smaller than 80% these days...

IIUC, the only way you can mine without worrying about energy usage is if you have electric space heaters in your home - then it doesn't matter if you turn on the PC or the heater. Or if you own solar panels and you are producing more than you are not able to use (or sell).

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#234

Post by bialpio »

bialpio wrote: post #233
arsome wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm basically just swapping some of my natural gas heat out for a few hundred watts of electric heat Except now you have to compare efficiency of your natural gas system vs efficiency of the power plant + electric heater. Chances are that energy efficiency of the power plant + an electric space heater (which is what you're turning your PC into) is smaller than the efficiency of your furnace. Quick googling comes up…

To summarize the part about efficiencies, by heating up your place with electricity instead of gas, the power plant needs to burn ~50% more gas (& so 50% more emissions) than you'd have to if you were to use your furnace. Intuitively, other fossil-fuel power plants will also cause larger emissions than you would locally (as they all start with burning stuff for heat & only then convert that to electricity with some losses, while you could stop there), but I haven't run the numbers. Thermodynamics is a b*tch.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#236

Post by amarant »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #173
amarant wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Canadian winters, but heat pumps certainly perform well in Swedish winters, which I don't imagine are much milder than Canadian ones. If you can get a water-water heat pump you'll be fine for sure (requires drilling a rather deep hole in your backyard tho, so the initial investment is a bit bigger)

While geothermal systems do use heat pumps, the term "heat pump" in general conversation almost always refers to air-source heat pumps (air to air), not geothermal. In the US/Canada, drilling additional wells is prohibitively expensive for most people, which is why geothermal systems haven't taken off. Heat pumps don't perform very well, or at all, when it's -30° or -40°, so a secondary heat source is needed. Usually…

Oh, in Swedish they're both called heat pumps, i didn't realize there was such a distinction in the English language between the two systems.

In my mind they're just different kinds of heat pumps.

And yeah, drilling is pretty expensive, but once the system is installed, heating is ridiculously cheap. When my parents installed geothermal, ROI was estimated to about 5 years for their house iirc.

But then it may well be that drilling is cheaper here by virtue of being more common, idk.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#237

Post by elseless »

Nextgrid wrote: post #188
Empf wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much energy is used percentage wise for mining?

Technically a "perfect" miner would use zero energy (beyond microamps for driving the signal wires in the network cables), the heat comes from imperfect components that "waste" energy by turning it into heat. So the mining itself doesn't use any energy, it's just that instead of dumping power into a dumb coil of wire, you dump it into a smarter coil of wires and various components that produce some output (that happe…

The Landauer principle states that any computation involving information erasure (e.g., taking the hash of blocks) must correspond to some nonzero increase in entropy, which would be expressed here as heat.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#238

Post by stallmanite »

Hamuko wrote: post #5
hughrr wrote: post #3

So the police are getting RTX cards this Christmas and we still aren't :(

Those are ASICs. Mining Bitcoin on an RTX is untenable.

Just point them at a multipool and you can set it up to auto-switch to whatever "shitcoin" is currently most profitable and auto convert everything to BTC (or your output coin of choice). As someone who lived through the original GPU->FPGA->ASIC arms race it's surprising to me but you can make decent amounts of BTC with just a high end CPU let alone GPU rigs or old sha256 ASICs.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#239

Post by Traster »

arsome wrote: post #224
robocat wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This seems like a silly way to look at production though - you could say every kWh in the system is a "marginal kWh" if you think about it like this. Turning on your oven, charging your car, etc would be similar in effect. If you really wanted to get involved you'd have to look at power imports and exports as well. While it's true that fossil fuels do provide an important role in variable management of the grid still…

I think you’re ignoring the concept of it being marginal, it’s marginal because they’re on the margin of choosing to mine or to turn up the heating. Those other activities aren’t marginal you need to cook, you need to drive, etc.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#240

Post by avianlyric »

boringg wrote: post #166
avianlyric wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can measure power movements at a macro scale. So you can see how much energy is being produced by power stations, and how that’s being fed into distribution networks, plus you can sum all the power usage going through end user meters.

All that together give you enough data to pretty accurately estimate stolen power. But not enough data to figure out with any precision where it being stolen. You might know that certain parts of a city are worse that others, but you couldn’t identify the house or even road where it’s happening.

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