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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

#251

Post by thinkcontext »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #72
vel0city wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm generating more energy than I'm using. I don't consider efficiency to be a significant concern at the moment.

I also produce a surplus and I sell it (for more than the local utility charges to boot). More efficiency is more money in my pocket, is it not for you?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#252

Post by sudosysgen »

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. :-)

You're not free to use the grid as you please. That's not how freedom works anywhere. The grid can decide to subsidize some uses, tax others, and forbid some.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#253

Post by latchkey »

oblio wrote: post #194
latchkey wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can't be that much since we've had long distance high voltage transmission lines for decades, even in relatively poor countries. Plus, if you really wanted to because there was no other use, you could, you know, shut down the hydro power plant and return the land to nature. Hydro power plants still have an environmental impact, no point in running them for what is practically, speculation.

In the US, the people who pay for those lines are the consumers and it isn't cheap to run. This translates to more expensive power bills.

Shutting down the dam isn't going to happen. It is split by Canada and the US and does more than just power Coinmint.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#254

Post by sudosysgen »

dpierce9 wrote: post #100
baybal2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Residential rates are not typically subsidized, they are regulated and billed at cost plus. The only thing that can be called a subsidy is a delay in raising costs. When local utilities are required to supply at a fixed price and that fixed price is less then cost + fixed profit margin, then they are losing money. The remedy for this is to ask their regulators to change the fixed price to account for both the higher…

This is true in the US generally as well as some countries with already very low energy generation costs. For developing nations residential electricity is normally subsidized.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#255

Post by azth »

honkycat wrote: post #250
azth wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another. All crypto currencies are used for gambling? Can you give us a good solution to hedge against government induced inflation that does not involve usury or having enough cash to purchase property outright to rent it out? Note: almost all companies deal with interest in some way or another, even if they don't need to, so usury is embedded in…

Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation? Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" while plugging their ears when people talk about subsidies for the gas, meat, defense, and other "profitable" industries.

> Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market"

I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your typical capitalistic position.

> Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation?

Yes. In Islam, we have something called Zakat, a form of "wealth tax" if you will. Its proceedings go to impoverished people, among others. It has been documented that in Iraq during the Ummayad period, there were no poor people left to even accept Zakat, after everyone was paying their share.

Of course we still need to handle the root cause: move to a currency that is not bound to interest that keeps growing, and the government can print money at will, devaluing everyone's hard work in an instant.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#256

Post by honkycat »

booleandilemma wrote: post #151

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…

Government induced inflation is a useful tool for controlling food prices and other economic concerns.

Allowing people to abandon their currency for another one only used by wealthy people could starve people who do not make enough money to catch up.

Look at the housing market. It has become a store of wealth. And now people can't afford housing and we have a massive unhoused epidemic.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#257

Post by dogman144 »

latchkey wrote: post #209
ilamont wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ya would have to agree. That far upstate NY, it's a different game.

The other aspect to consider, which is being dropped, is Coinmint operates with support from NYS via Empire State Development, so there's that.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#258

Post by sudosysgen »

fastball wrote: post #139
throw1234651234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no capability to increase supply. See my other post - Eastern Europe is out of coal and nat gas. Belarus has excess energy from Nuclear, but is still triaging exports. People will go without power this winter if this isn't done.

So don't rely on coal and nat gas? What about solar? Wind?

Both solar and wind are simultaneously underperforming in Europe at the moment because of weather phenomena that reduce wind and increase cloud cover, plus of course winter. There is no solution outside of nuclear, coal, and nat gas. And Europe, save for France, doesn't have enough nuclear to go around.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#259

Post by nathias »

paganel wrote: post #65
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…

> 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…

so crypto doesn't count for supply and demand or what are you saying?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#260

Post by dogman144 »

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.

Lol your 150km loop captures Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston in Canada and Watertown/Plattsburgh NY.

All of these are about as apples to oranges in relation to geographic ties to Massena as you can get.

Between Massena and those places is a whole lot of nothing for a couple hours.

That's like saying there is some meaningful geographic tie between Bethlehem, PA and NYC (133km), or that "Unity House, PA" is not remote because it's 143km away from NYC and its 8.4mil residents.

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