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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

#121
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…

Regarding 1, I haven't seen comparisons to the overall energy consumption of the banking sector, but a lot of people have talked about the per-transaction energy of bitcoin vs other kinds of transactions, and the ratio is pretty crazy. I don't think banking is "particularly energy-efficient", but there's not a lot of reason for it to be especially energy intensive. The information surrounding accounts/transactions/portfolios etc is all pretty concise.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/881541/bitcoin-energy-co...

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

#122

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.

Energy is not infinite. It requires resources to create it. The resources available to us in today's energy grid are finite, and the cheap and accessible resources produce side-effects that cause pollution and change the climate in ways we're still struggling to understand fully (but we know for sure: nett bad).

If the entire US grid was using renewables, the entire stack was carbon-free and the work had been done to offset the building of those facilities and all the transmission gear between production and consumption, your argument would hold up: using energy in this scenario becomes side-effect free. Using more of it would cause the creation of more of it, and more efficiently from a capital investment perspective, and prices would come down for everyone.

But that is not what is happening today.

The grid is already facing capacity issues. The industry is already concerned about "congestion": adding demand via EVs and heat pumps all over the globe is going to stretch the grid as it is. The cost - both time and capital - of upgrading it all is unfeasible, so we need to find ways to reduce consumption.

Add into the mix the need to complete the transition to renewables, and we're in a situation where really, Earth needs to become more conscious about energy usage and more efficient in its use.

If 2.3% of the power was being used to fabricate new technologies that would change the situation - manufacturing of more efficient machinery, building new wind turbines, fabricating new solar panels - we could make the argument that while energy resource is not infinite, this process would help us move to a point of better resource management.

Using it to create magic numbers that libertarians trade with each other, is just silly.

It's especially silly, because they could simply switch to a less energy intensive mechanism, and still have their magic numbers to try and take down central bankers with.

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

#123

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…

Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful.

You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time.

This changes the equation.

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

#124
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…

> The "security" of any cryptocurrency is proportional to how much energy it wastes

This only applies to Proof of Work blockchain.

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

#125

In the same context: How many top ranking games on steam waste the same amount of electricity? Shouldn't they be responsible for building fusion reactors, too, by that logic? If not, why?

Every piece of inefficient software is wasting tons of energy. But since we're using it for economy activity that makes money it is OK...which is actually the same reason people are mining bitcoins.

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

#126
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…

I'm not an expert here but my understanding is that even if a so-called 51% attack were to happen, it would only be meaningful as long as it could be sustained. The simplest case is a single tainted block, after which other miners could roll back by consensus. If a nation wanted to "permanently" take over >50% of the network, I believe the Bitcoin community would see that coming, and it would be a colossal investment of energy for a not-very-good chance of taking over. Bitcoin.

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

#127

Due to the extremely competitive nature of Bitcoin mining, the miners must seek out the cheapest power on the market. By definition, cheap power has low demand, so the miners are not crowding out other "higher" uses of the power. In many cases, this power would be otherwise wasted. In some cases, miners are capturing vented or flared waste gasses from other processes (gas wells, landfills). Many miners have power pur…

Or, you know, sell all the GPUs and buy a bunch of batteries.

Crypto mining is not needed to do grid balancing and wasting energy on pointless computation is always worse than short-term storage.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://xkcd.com/538/

Countries have this neat tool called violence that tends to override all security whenever humans are a linchpin

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

#129
post #90

> 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. What drove that? Since this is the kind of thing that you could do pretty much anywhere, why should a such a disproportionate amount of it happen in the US?

"China Banished Cryptocurrencies. Now, ‘Mining’ Is Even Dirtier."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/climate/bitcoin-china-ene...

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

#130

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.

Given the current geopolitical landscape, I'm not sure it's utility is overall positive.

Now, I'm myself torn on this, but I wonder.

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