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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

#271

Post by TomSwirly »

adventured wrote: post #94
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…

> 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…

Crypto transactions cannot create or destroy fiat currency.

If you buy and hold cryptocurrency, at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones.

So if you make money by selling some cryptocoin, that is _entirely_ because someone else purchased it at a greater price than you did.

Their expectation is that someone else will later buy it at a greater price from them, and that person will be buying it on the hope that someone will pay yet more again.

No actual cashflows appear anywhere in this process.

What happens when there isn't a new Greater Fool?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#272

Post by zherbert »

labster wrote: post #265
zherbert wrote: post #261

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity. Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the g…

Bitcoin mining uses up all of the efficiency gains from energy saving over the past decade, and more. Bitcoin incentivizes carbon production by keeping electricity demand artificially high, even dedicating entire coal power plants to a single mining location. Therefore, cryptocurrency has already guaranteed we will never have time to advance on the Kardashev scale.

That's preposterous, Bitcoin incentivizes production of whatever energy is cheapest. That does not necessarily mean fossil fuels, though it is often that those are cheaper.

Hydro is a perfect example. A sizeable percentage of all Bitcoin mining is done with cheap hydro.

Bitcoin will do the same for nuclear, making it cheap and plentiful.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#273

Post by TomSwirly »

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…

> Namely, a decentralized, private, anonymous, uncensorable, unsanctionable digital cash network.

In other words, the perfect ability to money launder, evade taxes and purchase contraband. Great.

But what would a law-abiding person do with this?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#274

Post by Aretas77 »

zherbert wrote: post #261

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity. Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the g…

Take the benefits and double them up to get the drawbacks.

The components used for mining could have much better use cases and the raw material shortage does not make this easier.

I doubt that mining is the reason why countries/companies/people are pushing for that cheaper green energy.

Additionally, the cryptocurrency market right now is a mess, an online casino one might say, where only few can benefit.

And to push prices up, people are encouraging others to buy them, to push the prices up more and not because they believe in the future.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#275

Post by politician »

honkycat wrote: post #247
matheusmoreira wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the first to admit that bitcoin failed to achieve everything it was supposed to. However, criticizing cryptocurrency as a whole over energy usage of all things is hypocrisy. It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. The world is being destroyed, but not by this.

0.55% of energy consumption[0] is not a trivial amount of energy. 0: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

If that energy were produced by solar, then it would require 332 km^2 of 290W 60-cell solar panels which is roughly the size of downtown Austin, TX.

The ability to tile a land area the size of a smaller American city with relatively bad solar panels to power half a percent of the world's energy usage is pretty amazing.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#276

Post by L33tCrown »

rfd4sgmk8u wrote: post #109
Fiahil wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually PoW accentuates the concentration of miners, while in Ethereum 2 you are limited to a few mining machine, thus distributing more equally the mining power.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#277

Post by zherbert »

Aretas77 wrote: post #274
zherbert wrote: post #261

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity. Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the g…

Take the benefits and double them up to get the drawbacks. The components used for mining could have much better use cases and the raw material shortage does not make this easier. I doubt that mining is the reason why countries/companies/people are pushing for that cheaper green energy. Additionally, the cryptocurrency market right now is a mess, an online casino one might say, where only few can benefit. And to push…

You think the current global financial system is energy efficient? How about the raw materials used by global militarizes financed by unending money printing? If you fast forward a couple decades, and Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, mining will be far more efficient than the amount of enormous military spending and middle-eastern oil production financed by fiat currencies and the petrodollar standard.

You people are advocating for shutting down one of the most important human advancements of all time – money that is directly linked to energy.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#278

Post by politician »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #266
honkycat wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0.55% of energy consumption[0] is not a trivial amount of energy. 0: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...

Yeah, but in the grand scheme of things it's nothing. A nuisance at best. If people really are worried about climate change, they need to stop trading with China, regulate big oil, invest in public infrastructure and transportation, heavily incentivize development and usage of clean energy sources, etc. Bitcoin is just a convenient distraction from the real problems. Regulating it will contribute virtually nothing to…

Indeed. If folks weren't just virtue signaling about climate change, then we could get on with tiling a third of the State of New Mexico with solar panels to power the North American hemisphere.

We already have the technology and the land area.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#279

Post by politician »

TomSwirly wrote: post #270
politician wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sun is not a limited resource, not until we're a K2 civilization anyway -- and we're no where close to K2. The other materials in solar panels are abundant and reusable. There is plenty of unoccupied desert to build on. In what way are resources limited?

> The Sun is not a limited resource, Photovoltaic cells and the materials to use them _are_ limited and the amount of power produced by solar today is _very_ limited. > not until we're a K2 civilization anyway People should read less science-fiction and look at the actual world as it exists today.

Yes, let's look at the actual world as it exists today: the land area required to power the annual global energy consumption (110 TWh) with the inefficient solar panels that we have today is smaller than the US state of New Mexico.

How's that for pragmatics?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#280

Post by Aretas77 »

zherbert wrote: post #277
Aretas77 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the benefits and double them up to get the drawbacks. The components used for mining could have much better use cases and the raw material shortage does not make this easier. I doubt that mining is the reason why countries/companies/people are pushing for that cheaper green energy. Additionally, the cryptocurrency market right now is a mess, an online casino one might say, where only few can benefit. And to push…

You think the current global financial system is energy efficient? How about the raw materials used by global militarizes financed by unending money printing? If you fast forward a couple decades, and Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, mining will be far more efficient than the amount of enormous military spending and middle-eastern oil production financed by fiat currencies and the petrodollar standard. Yo…

It is not efficient, I agree. But the cryptocurrencies should be of low priority right now, there are much more significant topics and problems, plus - how do you expect people to use cryptocurrencies if they won't even have any computers due to various shortages caused by the miners?

Maybe sometime, but not right now.

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