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Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

eurasianet.org

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Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#151

Post by booleandilemma »

I’ve brought this up before and I was downvoted for it[0], but I don’t think I made my point clear enough last time.

People seemed to think I was questioning the soundness of the algorithm, but that’s not what concerns me. I was talking about the concept of bitcoin itself.

What I’m concerned with is what if the true point of this thing we have been led to call “bitcoin” is to destabilize countries. What if it’s a new type of nation-state attack, or virus, that we haven’t seen before. Something we don’t yet have a word for. Something that takes advantage of a country’s citizens’ greed while doing things like disrupting power grids and causing countries to be worse off than they would be without bitcoin.

It’s like finding food someone left on your doorstep and eating it without being worried someone is trying to poison you.

Most people that are supporters of bitcoin are driven by pure greed. What if someone has found a way to weaponize greed?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446571

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#152

Post by matheusmoreira »

thinkmassive wrote: post #135
matheusmoreira wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to be competitive. 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…

This is what WiseMining.io is addressing with their Sato “bitcoin boiler.” It uses hashcards (daughterboards populated with mining ASICs) immersed in coolant to augment a typical heat pump setup.

That's interesting. My search for products in this category turned up the Qarnot company which also has a "digital boiler". Apparently, it's a general purpose Linux server that can be used to mine any coin or perform any type of computation.

https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/

Not sure if it's even available outside Europe. I wonder if it's possible to somehow replicate this with a home server. How is it pumping the heat out of the components and into the water system?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#153

Post by jamincan »

latchkey wrote: post #138
bobcostas55 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Specific example: Coinmint in upstate new york is located in an old Alcoa aluminum smelter plant that has long shut down. It gets power from Moses Saunders dam a few miles away. The factory was originally placed near the dam so that it could provide massive amounts of power to keep the pot lines hot 24/7. The whole place is super remote. I've seen the costs for carrying hundreds of MW just a few miles and they are ma…

There's on the order of 7+ million people within 150km of the dam. I don't think I would call that remote.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#154

Post by duxup »

fastball wrote: post #142
duxup wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If mining is a net positive for Kazakhstani miners, doesn't that make the country better off? How does that work?

If mining is profitable that means electricity is costing less than the proceeds of mining. If these miners are Kazakhstani, presumably they are spending the majority of these gains in-country, or are paying taxes on the proceeds. As such this should be a net gain for Kazakhstan, since I assume the majority of people buying the crypto the miners are generating are not in fact Kazakhstani. This doesn't seem complicate…

I understand the imports and exports for goods that employ people create services and etc.

Coin mining doesn't fit / necessarily that pattern at all.

In the meantime they have power shortages so I'm not sure at all what you're thinking about here... your idea of cheap power is pretty meaningless when there's a shortage.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#155

Post by coldpie »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #133
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear. 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 t…

So you think I'm a multi-level marketer? Is it even possible to prove otherwise? I just happen to believe in that project and like to talk about it. Am I supposed to not talk about this stuff? I don't particularly care that energy is being spent on cryptocurrency. What I hate is the fact that energy is being spent on bitcoin in particular. The energy is not supposed to be wasted, it's supposed to buy us something . N…

> I'm totally open to new ideas.

Find a better hobby =/ This casino is not worth boiling the world.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#156

Post by slaman »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #112
matheusmoreira wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh dear. 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 t…

Lululemon is a regular clothing retailer, with no MLM, membership or even loyalty program at this time.

You can't earn any money by re-selling their clothes, you'd probably get sued if you tried.

You probably mean LuLaRoe, a brand that is capitalizing on the name similarity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuLaRoe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lululemon_Athletica

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#157

Post by dpierce9 »

jamincan wrote: post #153
latchkey wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specific example: Coinmint in upstate new york is located in an old Alcoa aluminum smelter plant that has long shut down. It gets power from Moses Saunders dam a few miles away. The factory was originally placed near the dam so that it could provide massive amounts of power to keep the pot lines hot 24/7. The whole place is super remote. I've seen the costs for carrying hundreds of MW just a few miles and they are ma…

There's on the order of 7+ million people within 150km of the dam. I don't think I would call that remote.

Not to mention that all New York power plants, including Moses Saunders, are connected to a massive electrical highway that runs straight to New York City.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#158

Post by rfd4sgmk8u »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #132
rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, ETH switching to PoS is the reason I am holding the currency. In the future I expect all PoW cryptocurrencies to be banned, or severely hobbled, because of their electricity usage and e-waste. I have a long bet on ETH specifically because of its eventual move to PoS. Bitcoin doesn't even have a plan, and when the legal landscape changes it will be in the worst position to pivot. We'll just have to see wha…

Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world.

Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not.

If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentralized monetary systems?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#159

Post by depaya »

golergka wrote: post #42
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it would make more sense to you, but not to most people I think. Electricity has much better uses than cryptocurrency.

If only we had an open, decentralised mechanism to figure out what's a better use of a limited resource is. Oh wait. That's exactly what "cost" is.

Put down your Ayn Rand novel for a second and gain some empathy. A few rich crypto miners pricing many people out of electricity is inhumane.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#160

Post by LurkingPenguin »

latchkey wrote: post #144
cletus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that this gets downvoted because you're not wrong eg [1][2][3]. [1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bi... [2]: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...

China has banned mining. Update cause I'm getting down voted: the point is that the quoted articles are talking about China and are therefore outdated. I'm not referring to what is happening today with regards to the movement of mining. _Some_ miners moved to Kazakhstan, but the truth is, they went global.

Did you read any of the articles? China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.
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