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How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

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Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#41

Post by LegitShady »

oblib wrote: post #36
TigeriusKirk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says that's the plan. We'll see if it works out that way. ------------------------------------------------------------------- “When you can consume 20% of your electricity on site and sell roughly 80% back into the grid, and can shut down our miners in a minute if we need during peak hours, that offers a massive benefit with regards to smoothing our supply and demand across the energy grid,” Ward said, de…

"When you can consume 20% of your electricity on site and sell roughly 80% back into the grid" That would make sense if the mining made you more money than the grid and you had excess power, but what would be the point of selling your juice to the grid if that is the case? Seems to me like powering as many miners as you can with your supply of installed power would have to be the goal at all times and the grid would…

the return on electricity probably doesn't feature the potential explosive growth the same way bitc mining does.

This is gambling on bitc but hedging using electricity sales.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#42

Post by ur-whale »

dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

>Maybe I'm just not smart enough to understand BTC.

There is one aspect of BTC that IMO does not receive enough attention.

Can you think of any other asset that:

    1) strictly no one knows you own, yet you do own it absolutely, short of losing your mind or dying.

    2) can't be seized by anyone, especially if 1) holds true

    3) is highly likely (because of - among other things - finite, known-ahead-of-time supply) to preserve (or even increase) its value and therefore shields your wealth from erosion.
Bitcoin is not a perfect match for these requirements:

    for 1, you have to be a little careful how you acquire it and spend it (direct mining is the best way)
    for 2, you also have to be careful how you manage your keys
    for 3, you have to average out volatility over sizable stretches of time (~2 years)
Still, there isn't IMO anything around that fits the bill as close as BTC does.

A lot of people have a lot of negative things to say about BTC, but the fact remains: theses 3 properties are highly desirable, hence IMO the reason why BTC in such high demand.

All the negative arguments against BTC (power usage, ransomware, no intrinsic value, there's a million clones of it, unbearable volatility, can't be used as a currency, maxes out at 7 tps, miners will bail when rewards goes down, and all of the other "wont you think of the children" type arguments) don't carry much wait in the face of these 3 properties.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#43

Post by polote »

dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

What's the difference between BTC and a GOOG share ? Google doesn't give any dividend and the GOOG share has not any voting right. But even the GOOGL share there is a voting right, but Google founders will have the majority anyway.

So what's the difference ? In both case you posses a piece of electronic paper that can be exchanged on a market and there is no other benefit.

Not defending BTC, I'm just curious

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#44

Post by scotty79 »

Aterio wrote: post #5

Always a good idea to build and consume renewable energy and then making heat out of it. Texas power grid sounds very good: cheap and reliable. Ah wait wait we talk about searching for arbitrary hashes which can't be recycled or actually used in a state which probably needs AC in summer and an independent unstable power grid in a time were every additional CO2 generated creates even more pressure for our society. Per…

It's always a good idea to find a way for people to profit from extending renewable capacity beyond what's profitable from established users.

If you can't make goverment pay for energy produced by excess wind and solar thrn greedy bitcoin "investors" are next best source of cash.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#45

Post by beezle »

asciimov wrote: post #32

The reason EROCT, the Texas Republicans (TRP) and the minesr are doing this is to raise prices on electrical power. During the right time of year, the cost of power can often go negative overnight. Ercot wants to get rid of this and ultimately raise the price of power as negative power prices have consequences for all the middle men involved. In Texas there are lots of middle men, negative power means they might owe…

I've clearly missed something but what is attraction of miners that a municipality would offer any tax breaks at all? (assuming those are property type taxes as there would be no sales tax)

As you point out, at the high end it may be 100 jobs, I suspect probably far less are needed to mind the data/mining center?

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#46

Post by ur-whale »

asperous wrote: post #23
dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

If you think about it like gambling it makes sense. It takes about $14 billion per year to maintain the current price given that new bitcoins are "mined", so that's the theoretical supply inflation right now not subtracting deflation from lost coins. The gambling industry worldwide revenue is $219 billion. That's just one theory of its value if its purely used for speculation. That said I still believe it could total…

> It takes about $14 billion per year to maintain the current price

I would put this in the "speculation" bucket.

First: as surprising as it may seem, not all miners sell their coins (it's cheaper to mine coin than to buy them, therefore someone wanting to invest 10M in BTC is better off buying mining equipment and paying for the power to run it).

Second: it's very likely that, the exact supply of Bitcoin there ever will be being a known quantity, the "cost" of as-of-yet-unmined coins is priced in.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#47

Post by twalla »

ameminator wrote: post #25
walrus01 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's OK, if it gets too cold in Texas you can always fly to Cancun for a while, as shown by the example of some notable local politicians who espouse a "the free market will fix everything" philosophy.

Haha I don't live in Texas and it always did seem strange to have key infrastructure privatized in the way that they did. To be fair, however, almost no community is ready for the effects of climate change (despite the reporting). In fact, most people have trouble with statistically rare events, so it doesn't surprise me. It's hard to say whether a government-managed endeavor would have been more prepared if I'm bein…

Pretty sure I've made this comment before but one of the main reasons Texas runs its own grid is to avoid the need to meet federal regulations, which ironically and also unsurprisingly, contain winterization guidelines.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#48

Post by captn3m0 »

polote wrote: post #43
dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

What's the difference between BTC and a GOOG share ? Google doesn't give any dividend and the GOOG share has not any voting right. But even the GOOGL share there is a voting right, but Google founders will have the majority anyway. So what's the difference ? In both case you posses a piece of electronic paper that can be exchanged on a market and there is no other benefit. Not defending BTC, I'm just curious

Google has assets (both physical like servers and virtual like user data) and revenue, the liquidation of which can make the shareholders whole.

With BTC, there’s no underlying asset.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#49

Post by dcolkitt »

dvt wrote: post #9

I'm genuinely curious when the fat lady will stop singing in regards to Bitcoin. I sort-of understand the allure of ETH and its derivatives ("programmable money" does bring something new to the table), but BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November; or it's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one; or it's supposed to be "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of…

> BTC is supposed to be a "value store" yet is down 30% from November

It certainly would be hard to argue against the fact that gold and silver are stores of value. (Even if you don't invest in them, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of market demand for precious metals comes from store of value.) Yet silver is currently 55% off its peak, just a few years ago gold was 40% off its peak.

Store of value doesn't imply that an asset can never decline in price. It implies that an asset is likely to hold its value when other assets in your portfolio are down significantly, or even worse when other assets are seized or destroyed.

> It's supposed to be a "currency" but you can't use it as one

The dollar is a currency, but the majority of dollar owners live in foreign countries where you can't pay for things in dollars.

> "decentralized" but mining is monopolized by a handful of mining pools

The concentration of miners is essentially irrelevant at current levels to decentralization. From a user's perspective decentralization matters because of the possibility of censorship. Bank of America can freeze my account. To censor a transaction in the Bitcoin network for more than 1 day would require controlling 99% of the hash power in the network. Consequently a Bitcoin transaction has never been censored in the history of the network.

Re: How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

#50

Post by scotty79 »

bee_rider wrote: post #27
trhway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC providing demand for renewables stimulates the development of renewables. Any massive investment like in renewables carries a risk, and the higher the demand the lesser the risk for the investment on the supply side.

BTC + a very high carbon tax might actually be an interesting way to incentivize the desired overbuilding on renewables. But Texas is probably going to skip the second part.

Another interesting idea would be for the government to constantly buy any amount of energy produced by renewables at guaranteed price using tax money, and "distribute" it evenly to all enrgy users. This way people using least energy wouldn't pay for electricity at all and people building wind farms would have real good incentive to build more.
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