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Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

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Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#241
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#242
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cooking, though, is an activity that puts demand on the grid for a short time. Mining BTC to heat your house is a constant and predictable load. There are plenty of houses in canada with electric furnaces - Last I checked Hydro Quebec would help subsidize the cost if you switched from gas to electric heat.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#243
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's not possible. Physically speaking

It definitely is.

Heat is the most retrograde form of energy - the form with the most entropy. You can put 100W into a resistor, and you’ll get out 100W of heat. You can put 100W into a lightbulb, and it will generate less than 100W of light and some heat (because it’s not perfectly efficient) but in a room with no windows that light will bounce around until it’s absorbed by the walls and turned into heat so the room will heat up the same as if you had a 100W heater. If you put 100W into a miner, it will mine bitcoins and shed 100W of heat.

Water always runs downhill, energy always follows entropy down into heat.

Edit: Maybe this example will make more sense - consider an old fashioned record player. If the turntable is magnetically levitated, and is in a vacuum chamber, you can spend a tiny amount of energy to spin the table up to 45 rpm, and then (with no needle on the record) it will spin at that speed basically forever, because it's in a frictionless environment (there's no real frictionless environment, of course - you'll need a tiny amount of energy to keep it going). If you have an old turntable from the 70s where all the cheap grease has hardened, then to keep it spinning, the motor will have to do some work. Let's say you're putting 5W in to keep it turning. That 5W is overcoming the friction from the air, and from the old grease, and from the belt drive that runs the turn table. That friction is generating 5W of heat. It has to be, because if it was generating less than 5W of heat then either we'd be using less than 5W to maintain a steady state, or the else the turntable would be accelerating until we were using 5W to maintain a steady state.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cooking, though, is an activity that puts demand on the grid for a short time. Mining BTC to heat your house is a constant and predictable load. There are plenty of houses in canada with electric furnaces - Last I checked Hydro Quebec would help subsidize the cost if you switched from gas to electric heat.

Even a constant and predictable load will cause some extra carbon dioxide output. How much depends on a variety of factors.

For example, during any period that the nuclear and hydro are running at capacity. If you reduced your constant power usage by 1kWh then during those peak periods, 1kWh less gas generation would be used by the network.

If your constant 1kWh of electricity would otherwise be exported to the US if you didn't use it, then it could be that 1kWh less coal generation would be used at some times.

Most people find it difficult to think about how their marginal increase in usage very often will cause extra CO2. Even writing this comment down has made me think about how CO2 production also depends on the future predictions of generators. It is complicated, but worth spending time to think about.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cooking, though, is an activity that puts demand on the grid for a short time. Mining BTC to heat your house is a constant and predictable load. There are plenty of houses in canada with electric furnaces - Last I checked Hydro Quebec would help subsidize the cost if you switched from gas to electric heat.

Even a constant and predictable load will cause some extra carbon dioxide output. How much depends on a variety of factors. For example, during any period that the nuclear and hydro are running at capacity. If you reduced your constant power usage by 1kWh then during those peak periods, 1kWh less gas generation would be used by the network. If your constant 1kWh of electricity would otherwise be exported to the US if…

I know - it is complicated. The commercial rate here in Ontario for large consumers is based on the delta between expected load and actual load. If the expected load is much higher than actual, it can actually go into negative pricing (if they have a big nuclear reactor they can’t or don’t want to spin down, they will literally pay you to use the electricity.) I had a friend at a big company here that had some large refrigeration units for medical related stuff, but they had quite a wide range of temperatures they were allowed to be. So my friend wrote a script that scrapes Ontario Hydro’s website to fetch the commercial rate, and when it was high he’d let the temperature climb a little, and when it was low he’d cool the units a little more. Ended up saving seven figures a year.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There both is and isn't. If someone says heat pump in a generic heating context they don't care. However most of the time the difference is significant, so geothermo is added as a qualifier where that is what is meant, and heat pump alone means air to air. You have to guess from context which it is though - and you won't always be right.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 l…

Probably, though I live in an area where 50% of our electricity comes from the wind, so if the wind is blowing electric heat is far less CO2, while if the wind isn't blowing electric heat is far more.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#249
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PoW isn’t useless, in fact, the energy cost of PoW is proportional to its demand.

Demand for a decentralised Ponzi scheme.

Explain to me how Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme. There is no buy-in, there is no exit strategy, no dividends, no recruiting, there is nothing that makes it look like a pyramid scheme of any kind.

Maybe you mean that the early holders of Bitcoin have gained more wealth than later adopters or something? I'm not sure what you mean, actually. But that is just how a market works.

Re: Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Probably, though I live in an area where 50% of our electricity comes from the wind, so if the wind is blowing electric heat is far less CO2, while if the wind isn't blowing electric heat is far more.

In that case the problem becomes what other poster mentioned: it's a zero-sum game so you increasing your energy consumption takes green energy from someone else. Maybe if you mined only when you knew that the energy would be curtailed otherwise? Not sure how to know that though...
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