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Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.
Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
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Only if you want miners to have power and residents to be without it. Capitalism is not the cookie cutter solution to all problems.
Right but that's not the problem here? If there are power shortages then the power companies should increase supply.
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That makes everyone else in the country worse off.
If mining is a net positive for Kazakhstani miners, doesn't that make the country better off? That's a net export.
How does that work?
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Only if you want miners to have power and residents to be without it. Capitalism is not the cookie cutter solution to all problems.
Right but that's not the problem here? If there are power shortages then the power companies should increase supply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Role of government is to provide minimum standard of living for general population. A lot of people will freeze in Kaza, as basic necessities are a huge part of their monthly budget and price hike is too severe to handle. "Let market sort itself" only works if government thinks about it in advance, have fair elections, low corruption, etc. Cost of natural gas / coal / oil is going up significantly and is a huge p…
This is such a bizarre comment given the history of price controls and their horrendous outcomes.
They seem to mean price controls for a limited number of essential goods and services, to ensure access to them for the least fortunate groups. Energy definitely seems to be part of this even in the most market-oriented societies.
One can look at cheap fossil fuels, and the unwillingness of Western governments to make them more expensive by integrating their negative pollution externalities into their consumer cost, as a sort of ad-hoc price control. Lots of social protests over living standards were triggered by increases in energy costs - the Gilets Jaunes in France for example.
Electricity = keeps you warm, cooks your food, powers your devices. Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
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Maybe it would make more sense to you, but not to most people I think. Electricity has much better uses than cryptocurrency.
All big scale BTC mines buy at industrial prices. You cannot run a mine bigger than what your wiring can support in your apartment. None of them is using the subsidised residential rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if you want miners to have power and residents to be without it. Capitalism is not the cookie cutter solution to all problems.
Right but that's not the problem here? If there are power shortages then the power companies should increase supply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Electricity = keeps you warm Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
My heater doesn't become less effective each year, requiring replacement. While ASIC concretely implies this, GPU is not excluded if you want to remain competitive (read: generating profit)
4+ kWh electric showers are ubiquitous in my country. Literally a dumb piece of metal resistance immersed in water. Anything is better than the current situation. What if it was a processor instead?
What if a bunch of home servers could heat up stored water through their heat instead of just dissipating that energy uselessly into the air?
We'd be getting the heat we need and we'd be helping build a decentralized cash network. We were gonna spend energy heating up stuff anyway. Might as well get some cryptocurrency out of that heat.