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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

#101

Post by keyringlight »

aierou wrote: post #45
codegeek wrote: post #23

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

Crypto literally cannot be stopped, turned off, banned, or otherwise censored. That is its entire purpose and design. Whether that is good or bad is a different question. (Yes, crypto can be regulated. Of course it can. The point is that it will continue to exist irrespective of regulation.)

As I understand it, the regulation is largely on how it interacts with a country's own currency or banking system, which indicates to me that users need to do this in order to have real-world use. You can have all the virtual currencies you like online and as far as I'm aware no government cares, the taxman isn't looking at your millions of gold in WoW or Eve-online ISK, but they would if it's used the same way crypto currencies have been in their jurisdictions.

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

#102

Post by snapcaster »

mjburgess wrote: post #92
digging wrote: post #57

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 th…

The "security" of btc cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes; that's radically different than the banking system. The more billions it costs to run bitcoin, the more it costs to 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system. It would be useful it some state, eg., russia or china, would just cut off networks and forge bitcoin network traffic -- and hence bring the whole thin…

How would they seal the network in their borders? Why would that bring the whole thing down? Countries that shut down internet don't seem to bring that whole thing down in any sense

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

#103

Post by jgilias »

The whole idea that you can sort energy usage into useful for society or not buckets is pretty ridiculous.

Ok, Bitcoin bad. What about video games? Netflix? Porn?

The very idea of sorting energy use like that is a very slippery slope. We have markets for a reason. They help us determine how the aggregated society values one or another thing without relying on value judgment.

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

#104

Post by oldpersonintx »

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…

[dead]

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

#105

Post by twojacobtwo »

bdcravens wrote: post #66
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.

> Which, like most things, is something that probably be left to the free market. The free market is often at odds with society at large, which is why we have regulations to protect society from the free market.

I was just trying to think of how to put this succinctly. Well said!

In addition, it tends to become more at odds with society as wealth inequality grows and that is at an all-time high and growing. Perhaps a signal that more people need to point out, as you did, every time the free market is tossed out as a universal solve-all.

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

#108

Post by mrguyorama »

webignition wrote: post #89

I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods. A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating so…

It's been tried and it doesn't work because hardware designed for crypto mining needs to be utilized 100% 24/7 or it won't ever pay back or be meaningful, and it that case you either size it to be such a small heat contribution that you don't mind a small heater on during the hot months, or so big that it is impossible to offset in the summer.

Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?

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

#109

Post by titzer »

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.

> probably be left to the free market.

Ah yes, the mythical free market that no one ever questions, the unassailable arbiter of value in this world. This underpinning assumption needs to be pointed out. Clearly, the free market is not infallible. The question is how do mixed economies make best use of markets, regulation, taxation, and have a functioning justice system so that we don't shovel raw human souls into the profit machine.

Most people recognize a role for regulation in matters that concern everyone, particularly when there are large negative externalities that markets can't price in appropriately. I know HN conversations are necessarily curtailed for brevity, but generally, no, wasting vast amounts of energy for temporary profit doesn't seem like the kind of thing that should go unregulated when such waste produces large-scale environmental consequences for us all.

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

#110

Post by MichaelNolan »

triceratops wrote: post #42
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,…

Does it work like that? Why do utilities encourage customers to become more efficient when they could sell more power and make more money instead? And even if it's true, an expansion of generation capacity is only useful if it's eventually freed up for non-crypto uses, right? Otherwise it's just a wash.

> Why do utilities encourage customers to become more efficient when they could sell more power and make more money instead?

 

Depending on where you live, the State likely requires the utility to spend some portion of its revenue on efficiency. Valois a prime example, overall the state uses far less electricity per person, which is at least partially because of decades of efficiency initiatives.

And secondly, if utilities can get their customers to be efficient at the right time of day, the utility will make more money overall even if the total demand decreases.

Lastly, most publicly regulated utilities make very little on selling electricity, they instead make a guaranteed profit on capital investment. So total kWh sold is less important overall.

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