Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages • Hacker News Board

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#201

Post by oblio » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:36 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #188

cletus wrote: 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…

Would you be bothered if folks built their own solar farm to power crypto mining on their own independent grid?

Any way you skin this cat, resources are limited. So it would be taking away resources from other uses.

Plus producing solar farms is harmful to the environment, as is running them.

Unless you actually use solar farms for something useful, you know, replacing stuff with a higher negative environmental impact.

Building your own power grid for crypto speculation is kind of the textbook definition of greed and selfishness.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#202

Post by baybal2 » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:38 PM UTC

dpierce9 wrote: post #198

baybal2 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Kazakhstan/electricity_pr...

There being a price difference between business and residential does not imply a subsidy. It can simply cost more to distribute electricity to businesses, the time power is supplied may be different, and the nature of what is supplied may also be different. Commonly (in the US) businesses have larger supplies, three phase power, and lines and transformers may be buried or harder to access. Midday electricity is also…

Kazakhstan's residential utility subsidies are 3% of country's GDP.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#203

Post by notahacker » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

cinntaile wrote: post #183

notahacker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's immediately clear that cryptomining leads to a more robust and stable electricity network for the people it outcompetes on power. The evidence of Kazakhstan certainly doesn't point in that direction...

What do you mean by outcompeting? I don't know the answer of course otherwise I wouldn't have posed the question but I guess asking questions qualifies for getting downvoted to -3. Some of you are clearly sitting on all the answers but you're not sharing them with the rest of us. We see the short term results, my question was directed at the long term. I don't think it really matters if it's crypto mining or aluminum…

What I mean by outcompeting is that if rich cryptominers are pricing poor Kazakhs out of an electricity supply which was perfectly fine before, I don't see how that counts as a win for their robustness and stability of power supply.

And PoW crypto isn't like aluminium smelting. The value of aluminium smelting isn't in winning an arms race with other aluminium smelters based on how much power they consume, so if you bring more power plants online at a lower-than-average price, market logic doesn't dictate that competing aluminium smelters should immediately seek to buy all that capacity until they've bid the price up to the original level.

The whole "crypto creates demand for innovation in power supply" only makes sense if you believe people haven't been investing in innovation in power supply because there's been barely anybody that wants cheap electricity for the past century or so! That might be the case for [formerly] tiny niches affected by new use cases, like say, lithium batteries suitable for powering vehicles. It isn't the case for Kazakh ability to keep the lights on

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#204

Post by latchkey » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

LurkingPenguin wrote: post #160

latchkey wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently you didn't fully read the article. The shortages aren't the miners, it is the fact that 3 plants shut down...

"On October 15, the national grid operator, KEGOC, announced electricity rationing after three major coal-fired power plants shut down. KEGOC did not directly blame miners, but it used language similar to the energy minister’s and said it was cutting off customers who “over-consume.”"

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#205

Post by politician » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:40 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #176

DonHopkins wrote: post #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 simpl…

I wonder how much coal China burned to fabricate all the computers necessary for you to post this and for everyone else to read it.

Looks like you're being downvoted by all of the people that refuse to own up to their own hypocrisy over this issue. You're exactly correct, of course. China manufactures the vast majority of this equipment, and China runs on coal.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#206

Post by justbored123 » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

vimy wrote: post #175

The crypto hate here is ridiculous. Every thread about crypto is the dropbox thread x 10. Unless you want to live in a dictatorship where the government dictates what is and isn’t a useful use of energy, the constant bitcoin electricity usage hysteria is a waste of everyone’s energy. :-)

Yep, sounds like the problem is that they just can't get healthy price market for electricity going to regulate consumption by just increasing cost to certain brackets.

My shitty country has the same problem, too many illegal power connections that they fail to properly control and punish.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#207

Post by jamincan » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #161

jamincan wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you know how much to costs, per km, to run and maintain those lines?

You seemed to be asserting that without a major user near the dam, they would need to build more transmission lines or otherwise waste the generating capacity available.

This seemed unlikely to me, as transmission grids are built with significant redundancy, especially for the high-voltage networks. For example, the transmission capacity for the 8 500kV circuits from Bruce Nuclear (ignoring 3 230kV circuits) is 1.5 times the generating capacity. I wasn't sure about this particular station, but with a bit of digging, it seems like the Massena-Adirondack lines alone (there are several others) can carry 900MW, which is more than the capacity of the power station. So no additional lines should be needed.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#208

Post by oblio » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #169

coldpie wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm totally open to new ideas. Find a better hobby =/ This casino is not worth boiling the world.

It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them. The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy. China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The…

> It's not even 1% of global energy consumption.

For now. As its usage goes up, its energy consumption will go up, >. It's crazy that we're even talking about a > (!!!) using this much power.

> It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them.

We are working on all of that, I guess you haven't been following the news. It's not easy, but we are.

> The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy.

Same. Electric cars, environmental regulations for factories, increased energy efficiency for houses, etc.

> China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No.

China's working on it and the US and EU are actually kind of gearing up towards a trade reduction.

> No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The very computers we're posting this on?

These computers are also used for work, hobbies, making people's lives better.

> No, I refuse to care. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the real problems that no government will lift a finger to solve.

It's not a drop. It's something we created about a decade ago and it uses up a 100th of the energy the entire world is using. That's crazy. And those real problems are being tackled, you just don't know it or refuse to see or think it's simple and easy to solve.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#209

Post by latchkey » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #197

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…

The crypto miners who set up shop in Northern NY to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power caused electricity prices to spike for local residents, resulting in municipalities leveraging new taxes on the companies or issuing outright bans. This article is from 2018: Plattsburgh went over its power allotment and was forced to purchase electricity on the open market for far higher prices. This cost was distributed…

You picked off the easily googled articles that are unrelated to Coinmint and happened during the crypto boom in 2017 / 2018, when people were renting warehouses and filling them with miners. Everyone got rightfully pissed.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#210

Post by dpierce9 » Wed, Nov 03, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #196

dpierce9 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Moses Saunders dam is connected to the NYISO transmission network. The power system in New York is designed to move power north to south, west to east (lines tend to be symmetric in theory but a good model is that the city is the load). You can look at a price map of New York State and see that. Power from the dam can go from it to anywhere else in New York (or the eastern interconnect) at the cost of transmissio…

The amount of load that is allocated to the Alcoa facility has been negotiated and fixed into contracts and capex has been spent to build out the infrastructure for that. It isn't like you can just flip a switch and direct the power to the NYISO. > at the cost of transmission losses and tolling ... a key point that I feel you're glossing over.

Yes you can flip a switch and direct the power elsewhere, that is what switching yards do. The plant might have a supply contract with Alcoa but if Alcoa doesn’t use the supply they contracted for you they don’t have to throw the power away. Usually those agreements have take or pay provisions which require the buyer to pay regardless of whether they take the power. If they don’t take the power the generator is free to sell it on.

Transmission losses are not nothing but they are not huge. Maybe 2% to New York (it isn’t they far). Maybe 5% total if you include distribution.

Edit: Follow the lines out of the plant, at 44.978432, -74.797925 they split.