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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

#181

Post by itscrush »

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…

Likely wasteful when you can overcome efficiency with heat pumps instead of GPU.

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

#182

Post by FabHK »

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.)

It can certainly be banned, prohibited, and censored to an extent (current BTC gossip protocol is unencrypted via TCP, if I'm not mistaken), plus the on/off-ramps can be outlawed.

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

#183

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

The underlying problem is energy creation, not usage. If we had nuclear power plants everywhere and energy "too cheap to meter", no one would bat an eye at BTC energy usage. We need to stop thinking energy conservation, and start thinking on how we can GROW sustainable energy usage. People live better with more energy.

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

#184

Post by hk__2 »

lovich wrote: post #128
snapcaster wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

That doesn’t work with distributed systems. No single country is able to shut the whole Internet down, for example.

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

#185

Post by wkjagt »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #157
fifilura wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most Canadian houses (at least around where I live) are like this. And it often gets to around minus 20 Celsius here.

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

#186

Post by mrguyorama »

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.

Bitcoin isn't "technology" any more than an accounting book is. Just because you do it with computers doesn't make it technology.

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

#187

Post by eli »

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…

1. There's no need to compare to traditional banking. 2% of all US power is a lot -- the comparison is to all other uses of electricity. (But per-transaction traditional banking is orders of magnitude more efficient.)

2. "I haven't read the study but maybe it's wrong and maybe the real number is way way less"? C'mon. Give me a break. Trusting that an EIA report is generally accurate is not evidence of being "emotional." Handwaving it away without even reading it is.

3. It's interesting and newsworthy that a small number of players are using a tremendous amount of electricity. The article is about bitcoin mining. "Video games" probably use a lot of electricity too, but dispersed across hundreds of millions of users.

4. You're entitled to that opinion, but I assure you that caring about massive energy consumption is not evidence of an anti-bitcoin conspiracy.

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

#188

Post by ziddoap »

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 brave to even remotely hint that you're in favor of crypto on HN!

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

Despite a few people specifically calling this sentence out as 'ridiculous' or whatever, I think this is a completely valid point. If 100% of the energy powering something comes from renewables, who gives a shit?

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

#190

Post by 015a »

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.

Utility companies absolutely do both. Its not an either-or. Capacity only grows when usage grows. But, reducing usage is important, because if usage grows too fast capacity can't keep up, or it might burst too far above the load they've planned capacity for on the short-term.
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