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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

#151

Post by westbywest »

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.

The conflict of self-interest and common good becomes especially perverse when power utilities themselves start mining coin at their own facilities (for additional profit). https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ameren-deploys-bi...

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

#152

Post by hotpotamus »

lurking15 wrote: post #106
malermeister wrote: post #10

Ban it already. We're in a global energy and climate crisis. Stop wasting it for make-believe computer money.

it's like people can't understand it was engineered to be un-killable

Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.

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

#153

Post by mjburgess »

digging wrote: post #126
mjburgess wrote: post #92

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…

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…

only of the global network. states own the network infra in their borders, so they can partition it to any size they wish.

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

#154

Post by josu »

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…

>re: 4

"The results of this survey show that the members of the BMC and participants in the survey are currently utilizing electricity with a 63.1% sustainable power mix."

https://bitcoinminingcouncil.com/

The BMC is mostly composed of US miners.

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

#155

Post by superkuh »

mminer237 wrote: post #32
superkuh wrote: post #2

And how much energy does maintaining the military that backs US currency use? Much more and it's violent. The use of energy to protect bitcoin from attack from nation states is non-violent. It really is an efficient and ethical use of the energy.

Are you implying that we could or should replace USD with BTC? Bitcoin uses over 2% of the energy to process 0.02% of the transactions. Aside from all the geopolitical & economic detriments that would incur, scaling Bitcoin up to the national level would require us to increase our energy production roughly 10000% just to power the mining. And then you're further implying that doing so meant we could or should disband…

Nope. I'm just pointing out that the energy isn't wasted and it's is appropriately proportional to the task it faces.

It would be a much worse world if basic utilities started refusing to provide service just because they had opinions about your usage and emotionally didn't like it.

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

#156

Post by Liftyee »

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…

I've always wondered about this. I think, if the cost is no issue, replacing electric heaters with powerful computers (or crypto miners) is justified and actually beneficial. If you don't like supporting the crypto world you can always run Folding@home or your favourite distributed computing project to contribute to research and heat your home, all with the same amount of electricity.

Of course, buying heat pumps probably has higher ROI than buying crypto miners for heating...

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

#157

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

fifilura wrote: post #123
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…

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.

Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient

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

#158

Post by spankalee »

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…

> Energy consumption is frankly not a phenomenon I give two shits about, as an environmentalist. Fossil fuel consumption is.

Sorry, but this is a ridiculous statement.

Electricity is one of the most fungible things in existence, and renewables don't yet make up 100% of production, therefore any additional consumption _for the most part_ might as well be 100% generated from fossil fuels.

Even if a miner has a contract with a solar farm for all of their power, that's still electricity that someone else could be using instead of electricity from fossil fuels.

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

#159

Post by photochemsyn »

Previous discussion, 6 days ago:

"Over 2 percent of the US's electricity generation now goes to Bitcoin (arstechnica.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838

The EIA analysis suffers from lack of comprehensive coverage and equal treatment of energy consumers - e.g. where's the EIA report on energy consumed by running high-frequency trading algorithms, which apparently are involved in 50% of stock market transactions these days? If the EIA's method for calculating cryptomining electricity consumption was applied across the board to all economic sectors, would they end up concluding total consumption was 2X total production or something nonsensical like that?

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

#160

Post by 303uru »

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…

You're going to compare the entire banking system, which services essentially every American to this complete waste of time and resources which services a vanishingly small number of people?

>The point is the amount of crypto being mined.

Is it? According to who? You? What's the utility of crypto? I've yet to see any materialization other than casino and funding terrorism.

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