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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

#71

Post by delecti »

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.

Implicit in this kind of headline is the presumption that bitcoin is not useful. After more than a decade of scams, I think the burden of proof is on bitcoin to demonstrate utility.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

lgleason wrote: post #47

Meanwhile we have this. https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2023/03/24/america... ....all for a casino ponzi scheme that is creating a very volatile "asset". I'm all for free market, but electricity production in the US is highly regulated and very far from being free market. Also, I'm not an environmentalist, but one of the things that has hurt electric car adoption has been the cost of charging, especially at…

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

#73

Post by Atreiden »

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.

This ignores the negative externalities - namely, the degradation of our ecosystem - of this increased energy production. Our climate has a carrying capacity, beyond which habitability decreases.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

librish wrote: post #33

2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. This is the type of tragedy of the commons issue where regulation is needed. For any one actor they can justify spending infinity energy as long as their ROI is positive. There are enough justifications out there that it's easy to convince oneself that you're doing the world a favor ("I'm just librating finance and fighting the good fight against the central…

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

#76

Post by cr__ »

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,…

Your argument does not make sense.

Increasing usage does not magically increase capacity by the same amount. Even if it did, the increased capacity resulting from the increased demand would not make electricity cheaper, since the corresponding demand would already exist.

In general, increasing demand for a resource increases the price for that resource.

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

#77

Post by thelastgallon »

A Texas Town's Misery Underscores the Impact of Bitcoin Mines Across the U.S: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39235518

An energy poor country, Ethiopia, builds a new dam for hydro, all that supply goes to bitcoin!

Chinese bitcoin miners are flocking to Ethiopia, attracted by cheap energy, ideal climate: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3251352/chines...

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

#78

Post by the_snooze »

sspiff wrote: post #26
throw0101d wrote: post #11

Keep going back to: >> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet. > It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin. * https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604... Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.

Except you're not idling your car, you're effectively redlining it 24/7.

Exactly. It's wasteful by design, with incentives to increase hash rates in the face of efficiencies instead of taking the savings. And the hashes are absolutely useless computations. No one benefits from the 99.99999% of hash guesses that don't "win" the block.

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

#79

Post by 55555 »

There's an argument to be made for crypto to be used to turn power that wouldn't otherwise be economical / linked to the grid / used into money, which can then be turned back into power (in a purely economic sense) later. For example wave energy could power GPUs in the middle of the ocean, with no need to then transmit electricity to shore. Solar could be captured in the middle of the desert. Some oil rigs are mining crypto with the natural gas that leaks from their wells. So long as there's a starlink satellite above, energy can be turned into money on the spot, and then that money can buy energy in another place and time. (Ofcourse, this doesn't actually create new energy.) Something to think about.

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

#80

Post by lgleason »

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,…

Can you substantiate the claim that crypto financed a 2.3% expansion of the US power generating capacity? Most power companies are encouraging people to use less electricity, especially during peak periods, instead of encouraging more use to be able to sell more electricity because of grid limitations etc..
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