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Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

theguardian.com

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Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#71

Post by throwaway73838 »

ben_w wrote: post #68
throwaway73838 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve missed the point. What are you going to do with the solar power in the remote desert? There are no people within hundreds of kilometers. You can’t just mail them the electricity. That’s where Bitcoin comes in, because you can fully utilize that power and then ‘mail’ the output via the internet.

That shows a lack of imagination on your part. If you can afford to put PV + compute + internet in a random distant desert, you can afford to put pure PV in a specific and well chosen bit of desert that has people and houses and power lines and an existing internet connection in it. Which means you can sell the power it makes to those specific people right there. It is, if anything, slightly easier to install PV on t…

Irrelevant. Land prices near settlements will be high.

And take my space example. I could have a Bitcoin farm on the moon, using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins, and then send them back via the internet.

Bitcoin farms can be placed anywhere, not just where there are people nearby. Which was the original point I was making.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#72

Post by throwaway73838 »

ben_w wrote: post #67
throwaway73838 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you’ve missed the point. The money represents energy. You can’t get a bank loan if you only have 10 dollars. You can get a bank loan if you have an income. The Bitcoin enables you to access money that you could not before. This enables you to invest in better uses of electricity and more efficient means of using it in your home town. And let me put it to you like this - when you turn on your power, what do you do…

No, you have missed the point. Money, any money, even cryptocurrency, simply does not do what you think it does . If you want stuff then invest in that specific stuff — you should only be investing in or building a financial network when that in particular is what you need, not when you want something else like “electricity” or “food” — and if you’re really going to call out the $10 as a serious number, at that level…

Dude. Ten dollars was an imaginary number. I’m simplifying to make the maths more understandable.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#73

Post by throwaway73838 »

woodruffw wrote: post #47
throwaway73838 wrote: post #19

I heard an interesting argument for Bitcoin recently. It represents a way to move energy around the world wirelessly. For instance, you can use geothermal power in a very isolated, cold climate that previously would be unusable for any purpose. As Bitcoin’s power needs are decentralized, all it needs is an internet connection. You could have a Bitcoin mine in outer space, if you wanted. Not sure why I’m being downvot…

Bitcoin does not "move" energy. You could exchange a Bitcoin produced with some quantity of energy in one location for another quantity of energy in a different location, but the energy has not moved with the token. Instead, you're just burning those quantities of energy twice. I've used the oil barrel analogy before: an empty oil barrel is a proof that someone has used the oil within it, much like a Bitcoin is proof…

I’ll try and explain it better.

Money is analogous to work. You can’t just conjure up money (that would be illegal).

If I have 50 dollars, I can pay someone to mow my grass. I have just converted potential energy (money) into work.

In the same way, if I have a geothermal power plant in a remote Scandinavian wilderness, I can use that power to generate Bitcoin, and use that store of value to transfer to me which I can then convert into work by employing people, either directly as a service, or indirectly through a good.

I hope that makes more sense now.

To use your oil example - it would be like me mining a barrel of oil in location A, then converting it entirely into Bitcoin, sending the coin to me via the internet, then using the Bitcoin to buy another barrel of oil close to my home. I now have a barrel of oil I did not previously have, because I’ve transferred value (energy) from remote place A to local place B virtually.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#74

Post by ben_w »

throwaway73838 wrote: post #72
ben_w wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you have missed the point. Money, any money, even cryptocurrency, simply does not do what you think it does . If you want stuff then invest in that specific stuff — you should only be investing in or building a financial network when that in particular is what you need, not when you want something else like “electricity” or “food” — and if you’re really going to call out the $10 as a serious number, at that level…

Dude. Ten dollars was an imaginary number. I’m simplifying to make the maths more understandable.

Which is what I thought initially, but then you decided to call out that specific number.

Thus my previous point about getting loans is still entirely valid.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#75

Post by Ekaros »

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #30
zbrozek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't obvious that mining goes away at any cost. Personally I'm in the "do both" camp. Have a simple carbon tax, but also find some inoffensive way to get rid of the mining. Both sound hard.

While we're picking and choosing who gets to consume electricity, let's get rid of video gaming, casinos, porn websites, etc.

I don't know why electric vehicles should be allowed either. Why not just ban those too? And force people to walk.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#76

Post by Ekaros »

holbrad wrote: post #55
formvoltron wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The planet will die, but at least we have these nice plants and these coins.

Hate to be picky. But the planet is going to be just fine, for a very long time. Unless global warming triggers a nuclear war, humans as a species are also going to be fine.

At this point we are like cockroaches. We ain't going anyhwere anytime soon. Parts of our economy might and overall we might regress somewhat, but humans won't die off.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#77

Post by tenuousemphasis »

zbrozek wrote: post #58
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're picking and choosing who gets to consume electricity, let's get rid of video gaming, casinos, porn websites, etc.

That's why the second task is hard. Probably the right way to do it isn't via the electricity angle, but the securities or commerce angles.

If all electricity is generated by renewables and/or dirty electricity is expensive due to a carbon tax, why do you want to ban bitcoin mining too?

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#78

Post by tenuousemphasis »

rsynnott wrote: post #66
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we're picking and choosing who gets to consume electricity, let's get rid of video gaming, casinos, porn websites, etc.

When was the last time you bought an incandescent lightbulb?

It's been a long time, but I don't understand your point.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#79

Post by ben_w »

throwaway73838 wrote: post #71
ben_w wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That shows a lack of imagination on your part. If you can afford to put PV + compute + internet in a random distant desert, you can afford to put pure PV in a specific and well chosen bit of desert that has people and houses and power lines and an existing internet connection in it. Which means you can sell the power it makes to those specific people right there. It is, if anything, slightly easier to install PV on t…

Irrelevant. Land prices near settlements will be high. And take my space example. I could have a Bitcoin farm on the moon, using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins, and then send them back via the internet. Bitcoin farms can be placed anywhere, not just where there are people nearby. Which was the original point I was making.

Here’s a question for you. Which makes more BTC: (1) the world today, (2) an alternate reality where the mining algorithm is the same but it’s being run on Matryoshka brains enveloping every star in the universe (all operating at the Bekenstein bound for efficiency and which can somehow communicate instantly)?

The answer is “they are the same”.

> Land prices near settlements will be high.

Irrelevant, the cost of getting stuff far away from a settlement is higher, even ignoring things like cleaning the panels and replacing obsolete compute. (Plus for your mining rig you need to get internet to it, which is even more expensive and at that point you should be asking serious questions about installing a power line instead of a data line, and yes people already suggest that for the moon with microwaves etc., I’ve had that conversation at least a decade before BTC was even invented).

Whenever the cost of getting to uninhabited places (in a controlled way not e.g. messages in bottles or crashes, which risk the destruction of your equipment and are unlikely to result in good PV orientation) has been lower in the past, people move to those places and make a new community and suddenly it’s no longer far from a settlement.

Also, literal profitable businesses literally put literal PV on literal rooftops literally at zero cost to the people under them and literally fund this by literally selling their output to the people living literally under them, and have done literally for years now.

QED the cost is not prohibitive, money can be made this way because it is already being made this way.

> using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins

The only cooling on the moon is because the sunlight is not uninterrupted. The vacuum of space is a fantastic insulator.

Now a second question. Have you heard of Dutch disease?

Because even if you go back to the setup in the first question and change it to make whatever number of BTC you fancy, money just does not function in the way you’re expecting it to.

No get-rich-quick scheme can be scaled up to a community, even in the rare cases that they aren’t scams. And trying to, breaks stuff.

At best, even if BTC (or whatever cryptocurrency you want) had no flaws and was a perfect system, all money is just a token of wealth, it is not wealth itself.

Re: Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

#80

Post by jhgb »

kcplate wrote: post #70
jhgb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False dichotomy; they could have done neither. NOT operating an old coal plant NOR building a new plant would have produced zero emissions.

Pretty sure the only way to have produced zero emissions was to not mine the bitcoin at all. Old or new plant, or consumption of power from the existing grid would have produced some level of emissions, although Montana tends to have pretty high renewable energy from hydroelectric.

> the only way to have produced zero emissions was to not mine the bitcoin at all

Yes, obviously. And what's the downside of that?

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