111–120 of 361 posts
I wonder if cryptominers in poorer countries speed up the buildout of more stable and robust electricity networks in the long run? I understand they sometimes stress it too much in the short run such as here and then the regulators have to take action but the interplay on a longer timescale would be interesting to see.
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Monero is a proof of work cryptocurrency. I like PoW, it is the most secure distributed consensus algorithm we have discovered. If Monero was as popular as Bitcoin, it would use something similar to the energy. None of it is a 'waste of energy'.
I agree with you. It's a waste of energy because that energy is being spent mining BTC, a useless coin that isn't anonymous, private, decentralized, fungible, it isn't even an actual currency. It should be spent mining Monero instead which actually does have all of those properties.
I don't remember who said that crypto is Lululemon, Amway, multi-level marketing for tech guys, but it's amazing the similarities.
In a discussion on Proof of work does not scale, cannot scale, will choke out production in the economy going forward because of its design, a person responds with say "you're right, that product is bad. Don't buy that one instead buy this one".
Does this other one solve any of those problems? Nope, but the person hawking it has purchased a lot of product and gets a cut if you buy into it.
It's amazing how disingenuous crypto conflict of interest has made any and all discussion about crypto.
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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.
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Resistive heaters use energy to create heat. Heat pumps use energy to move heat. For a resistive heater, its taking 1 energy unit from the wall and putting 1 energy unit into the air. A heat pump will use one unit of energy from the wall to take 3-5 units of energy from one side of the system and dump that 3-5 units of energy to the other side of the system.
I see. Heat pumps must move existing heat from somewhere though. Won't those come from burning fuels? I have a lot of solar panels in my home. I'm generating more energy than I'm using. I don't consider efficiency to be a significant concern at the moment.
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> 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?
> Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that? Realistically? Cost. If your goal is to heat a space, it's much cheaper and more reliable to NOT use thousands of dollars of silicon. Doing calculations based on the site below, you might be able to heat a smallish bedroom with a very beefy PC. I can get a space heat…
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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.
And so it begins. In the developed world in particular, we're seeing the move away from fossil-fuel power. This is good but currently relatively expensive. Crypto mining is starting to have very real impact on the ability of other people to live. It is adversely and disproportionately affecting poor people (who pay a greater share of their income for power). And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for s…
> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. Whenever you sell it, if you generated a profit on that sale, you are going to pay taxes on it (at least in the US). That's a real value for society. Can it ever be enough to offset the added squeeze on the electricity grid (which we really don't need right now, with EVs coming on and our grid in serious need of upgrade/expansion)? Someone will have…
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Monero is a proof of work cryptocurrency. I like PoW, it is the most secure distributed consensus algorithm we have discovered. If Monero was as popular as Bitcoin, it would use something similar to the energy. None of it is a 'waste of energy'.
I agree with you. It's a waste of energy because that energy is being spent mining BTC, a useless coin that isn't anonymous, private, decentralized, fungible, it isn't even an actual currency. It should be spent mining Monero instead which actually does have all of those properties.
But it is not Bitcoin. It likely will never have the attention of large capital holders (eg: Financial Institutions). Ignoring the regulatory risks (which absolutely exist), IMHO the real critical risk is that bugs or bad math will break the economic model.
With transparent blockchains like BTC, you can trace every satoshi. With opaque chains like XMR, you risk that a bug in the code will permit invisible inflation. This has happened before! (https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/exploiting-low-o...).
The same problem applies to all ZK based solutions -- Zcash, Grin, Mina... You are one mistake away from invisible inflation that will sap all the value from the coin.
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I'm a bit of a crypto enthusiast, but I generally agree that crypto-mining suck too much power out of the grid for it's current utility level. However, your comment is a bit short-sighted and doesn't account for the switch of Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake algorithms that is currently happening. PoS use A LOT less power and doesn't need extensive mining farms. See also: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-p…
No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.
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> Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". Which is a shit take anyway because that means that non-renewable energy (plus the renewable energy non-consumed by the miners) is now more expensive for everyone else, it's the basic law of supply and demand. And in the process those miners are also making non-renewable energy a more desirable investment because i…
Energy is not fungible. Just because you have electricity in place A doesn't mean you can get it to place B in a cost-effective way, so mining next to, say, a hydro station with spare capacity (where electricity is cheap) doesn't necessarily have any impact at all elsewhere.
You could say that one could build a new hydro station just for delivering energy to crypto miners but that would open another can of worms as we're slowly starting to realise that hydro stations are not the most environment-friendly things imaginable (especially when it comes to habitat loss and disruption).