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Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

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Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#51

Post by hamburga »

Retric wrote: post #39
015a wrote: post #28

The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using,…

This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.

Source?

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#53

Post by hellojesus »

codegeek wrote: post #23

Why is crypto still a thing ? I may be dumb but just don't get it.

I coincidentally just came to HN looking for this exact answer following the headlines about BTC soaring. [1]

The use cases for it I see are:

1. Cheaply send large payments without having to pay a bank fee (instead you pay btc fees plus conversion to and from fiat fees).

2. Anonymously transfer money if using a washing service (illegal to offer one in the US) or if you spend rawly mined coins.

IMO, crypto is a US gov invention that was pushed to speculative theater to give threat actors huge incentive to break sha256/512 publically, as the best use of such tech atm is to steal massive amounts of money. It therefore acts as a canary for when someone finally does figure out how to crack it or easily solve prime factorization.

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/bitcoin-soars-post-etf-laun...

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#54

Post by lgleason »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #38

Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.

Except the US electricity market is not a free market. Most people only have one provider to choose from.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#55

Post by domoritz »

015a wrote: post #28

The crypto industry financed a 2.3% expansion of the US's power generating capacity. I don't care what we're spending energy on. Being stingy about it just makes all of us poorer. There's a quadrillion-cubic-kilometer flaming ball of plasma in the sky. We have the ability to generate literally infinite electricity; and quite literally the only way we get to that is by increasing the amount of electricity we're using,…

Still, generating energy even with solar has impact on natural resources and the environment.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#56

Post by williamdclt »

Hash-Basher wrote: post #22
gipp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah those companies generally use that energy to produce things of value to people

A global, decentralized, censorship-resistant monetary asset is not of value to people?

Many years into crypocurrency being a thing, we have a non-theoretical answer to this question: apparently not, no. Not for legal purposes at least (people do get value from it as a way to buy drugs or other illegal things/services)

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#57

Post by digging »

I'm not a crypto proponent per se, but I do feel the need to be reasonable about it, and this reads like pure emotional anti-cryptocurrency sentiment.

(edit: while I still can, I'm going to jump in and repeat that I'm criticizing this as a bad article which isn't saying anything very meaningful on its own. Thanks everyone for doing the author's work for them and gathering more data. I won't be upset if it's proven that crypto is intrinsically bad for everything I love - except insofar as I believe it can't be stopped.)

1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.

2. The title of the article is itself editorializing the content of the article and is speculative according to their own words. From TFA: "[The EIA] released a study suggesting that cryptocurrency mining represents up to 2.3% of U.S. power demand." It could be less, much less, or much less, although I haven't read the actual report yet (I'm criticizing this article only), because "suggesting" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting

3. "Just 137" isn't meaningful AFAIK. Who cares if it's 100 or 10 or 10,000 miners? The point is the amount of crypto being mined. (The number of miners will always be in flux by design anyway.) And the answer to that, from TFA: "The EIA found that the global share of Bitcoin mining that takes place in the U.S. grew from 3.4% in 2020 to a whopping 37.8% in 2022." So roughly ~2% of US power is generating over 1/3 of the world's Bitcoin. This is only obviously bad if you believe Bitcoin is a total waste of energy, which I don't, but I understand that some do.

4. Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is. From TFA: "We intend to ... quantify the sources of electricity used to meet cryptocurrency mining demand." Meaning this has not been done, and publishing scary warnings is premature. If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#58

Post by dylan604 »

Y_Y wrote: post #3

Look how many company are using most of the crude oil. They're allowed to buy this commodity and they profit from using it, what did you expect would happen?

Fun fact: the US military is one of the largest consumers of oil. If you want to equate them to a company for conversational purposes, that's fine with me. This is one of those situations where the gap between 1 and 2 is really big.

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#59

Post by krasin »

hugepuppy wrote: post #50

Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.

I would be with you, if bitcoin was only allowed to use carbon-free electricity. The reality is that they sometimes buy coal mines ([1]) and burn coal onsite without paying for the externalities. And that's something to be worried about.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

Re: Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power

#60

Post by raincole »

jonathan-adly wrote: post #38

Power usage by itself is meaningless. The real question is the power providing utility or not. Like, no one thinks data centers for AWS are bad. They provide real benefit and utility. But, perhaps power wasted on cloth dryers and Christmas lights are a western frivolity. So, the real argument is Bitcoin useful or not. Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market.

It's really hard to gauge how much utility cryptos are providing. After all, people who need cryptos the most are those who can't use "proper" channels to transfer money.
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