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Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

eurasianet.org

121–130 of 361 posts

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#121
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't meant for Bitcoin to transition to PoS, but rather everyone using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because it's now PoS.

Yeaaaaah i will believe it when i see it. I don't think betting the economy on changing airplane engines mid-flight is a good play. My prediction is that if ETH switches to a PoS consensus model, the value will TANK. If this happens at all. I know the PoS timeline, I think it is fiction.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#122
Don't ever let any Bitcoin or NFT shills get away with lying to you that their cryptocurrencies and CryptoKitties and Digital Pet Rocks run on renewable energy.

And never let any of those get-rich-quick pyramid scheme shills get away without forcing them to openly admit that even though they're burning coal, wasting electricity, destroying the environment, causing climate change, cancer, and heart disease, they simply don't give a flying fuck about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Kazakhstan#Electrici...

>In 2013, the country produced 93.76 billion kWH - 70 billion kWh (81%) from coal, 8 from gas and 8 from hydro. The country has 71 power stations, including 5 hydro power plants located on the Irtysh river, which translates to total installed generating capacity of 19.6 GW. 75 percent of electricity generated is consumed by industry, 11 percent by households, 2 percent by transportation.[25]

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#123

Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy.

That doesn't really help if crypto is also consuming the renewable energy it "helps" build-out.

The problem isn't that the relative proportion of renewable energy is too low, but that the consumption of non-renewable energy is too high. It doesn't matter if renewables make up 10% or 90% if that number doesn't mean a large reduction in the consumption of fossile fuels.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#124
post #57

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…

It does not appear that this particular electricity shortage is caused by moving away from fossil fuels. The coal plant shutdowns mentioned in the article were outages (2 unplanned and 1 planned) [1] rather than permanent closures due to an energy transition.

[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-aft...

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#125
post #82
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically if all electric space heaters were crypto miners as well then crytpo mining would be well distributed, resistant to attack and unprofitable to mine - win, win, win. Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.

There have been a number of startups selling crypto-mining electric heaters, but they've all faced the same problems: - They're much more expensive than normal heaters, and the returns on mining don't make it cost effective. - If you've spent that much money on heaters/miners, you're going to want to max them out 24/7 before they become obsolete rather than just switch them on when its cold, which defeats the point.…

The chips can be less powerful, cheaper, and higher volume because the goal would be to put them in millions of heaters without increasing the base price too much. People buying them would be for heat, not mining. It could be advertised to save a few bucks on heating each month but nothing major.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#126

I didn't realized that Kazakhstan is one of the top giant miners in the world. Is there any reason for this one?

It shares border with China. Mining has been forbidden in China recently, Kazakhstan has cheap electricity, they flocked here.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#127
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically if all electric space heaters were crypto miners as well then crytpo mining would be well distributed, resistant to attack and unprofitable to mine - win, win, win. Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.

Exactly! This sounds like the perfect way to create a distributed proof-of-work network.

More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials.

Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos.

Another shill in this thread just mindlessly repeated the same old lie they parrot all the time:

>Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy.

That's like saying using more Cocaine helps you quit using Cocaine faster.

"Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!"

In an unfortunate and unintended way, it's true...

And the absurd idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked in this thread. Go back and read it.

If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh?

matheusmoreira: Do you really believe in get-rich-quick schemes and perpetual motion devices and miracle cures, even when you can't seem to find any for sale that actually work? Then you must not believe in the free market, either. Is it easier to believe there's a huge well organized conspiracy suppressing these technologies, instead of simply the laws of physics and economics?

Go back and read astoor's comment again, which trixie_'s fancifully wishful reply simply doesn't refute. But of course you can't argue facts with a true believer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560

>Theoretically if every space heater right now was also a crypto miner, it would make any dedicated mining operation completely unprofitable.

If your grandmother had wheels, then she'd be a bicycle.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20gr...

>Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street.

POS = Proof of Shock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#128
post #77
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same about whether bridges to nowhere generate important economic robustness. The problem with this view is it ignores that such activity crowds out the ability to do something actually useful with the same resources, while also producing all the same externalities (both positive and negative).

To say it generates no value is a misstatement. Proof of Work offers some value, it is just consumimg too much. Think about as providing some form of uncensorsable money, eg for orgs like Wikileakd, Tor Project, etc.

But the uncensorable aspect also allows money transfer between organizations that we do want to censor, like terrorists or those who prey on children. So even that supposed benefit is largely nullified.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#129
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically if all electric space heaters were crypto miners as well then crytpo mining would be well distributed, resistant to attack and unprofitable to mine - win, win, win. Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.

But imagine when you want to warm yourself up in a cold time, instead of plunging a simple heater in, you have to deal with a machine which might even need to connect to internet to work (if looking at current IoT devices is any indication). I don't like to deal with such a complexity, unless they make it so simple that I can gift a crypto heater to my suburban grandma and not worry about installing it for her.

I’m sure it would still generate heat still without doing anything other than plugging it in.. Stick a LTE chip in there as a fallback to mine for the company’s pool. Would probably make enough money to offset the cost.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! This sounds like the perfect way to create a distributed proof-of-work network.

More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials. Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos. Anot…

If only we could harvest hate for energy, then we could power our mining machines from your opinion alone!

Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street.

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