231–240 of 499 posts
> 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?
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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
I'm in Wyoming. My heat is direct electric. The house doesn't have ducting and Wyoming power is cheap.
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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
Cryptocurrencies are peer-to-peer systems. If you control the network they're on, you can do anything you like. Take the peer-to-peer traffic of the cryptocurrency network of any area, prevent it from getting outside that area (ie., just block it talking to IPs outside some range) -- then to that network , you can trivially control the total hashing power. So split any cryptocurrency network into small segements, the…
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I coincidentally just came to HN looking for this exact answer following the headlines about BTC soaring. [1] The use cases for it I see are: 1. Cheaply send large payments without having to pay a bank fee (instead you pay btc fees plus conversion to and from fiat fees). 2. Anonymously transfer money if using a washing service (illegal to offer one in the US) or if you spend rawly mined coins. IMO, crypto is a US gov…
weird how you discount the obvious use case espoused by the bitcoin community: an absolutely scarce digital commodity secured through energy itself
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> 1. There is no comparison made to the energy consumption of the traditional banking industry, which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry. Despite declaring yourself not one, this (and every other one of your points) comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD in any reporting about the energy usage of crypto. This is especially laughable when you then say > ~2% of US p…
> this comes up _every single time_ crypto proponents are trying to seed FUD And it's worth pointing out that it comes up every single time without a shred evidence, just a hunch that the crypto enthusiast ensures us is correct. I'd love to see some actual numbers on the energy consumption of the banking industry vs. crypto. Or lets be real, let's compare the amount of energy used by the banking sector to provide the…
What evidence could I possibly provide for the claim "This article doesn't give any evidence of impact."
It is very clear that crypto transactions, for example, are much less energy-efficient than USD transactions. The article could have easily mentioned that, but it didn't.
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…
> 2.3% to support so little economic activity is just insane. It kind of is! But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. At this point BTC is, functionally, just an alternative asset that hedges against inflation. As governments print increasingly more money, and the amount of BTC stays the same, each BTC becomes worth more. It's very simple. The demand for such an asset is apparently…
You might lose 30% of your value, but hey, you didn't lose that 3.2% to inflation!
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This 2.3% mostly came from fossil fuels not new green generation capacity. You need to consider where these miners are located based on electricity costs and what infrastructure is built there not simply a hypothetical grid where arbitrary power can be moved anywhere at zero losses.
Wrong. And not just a little wrong; a LOT wrong. 86% of new energy capacity added in the United States in 2023 was from non-fossil fuel sources. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1304-augu... .
They're using 2.3% of power, not 2.3% of green power. Also, every watt of green power crypto takes is another displaced to fossil. I am sympathetic to the argument that what one does with market-rate power is one's own business. But the environmental argument for crypto is bunk.
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…
Sure, but 2.7% of USA's electricity is almost certainly more than all of traditional banking. Now, I've just tried googling that, but the results are clearly being distorted by the exact things you're complaining about here, with estimates varying from 15.8 GW to 558 GW worldwide and that higher value being about 20% of global electrical demand which is obviously wrong as it's a bit more than the entire commercial/public sector of the global economy combined.
> which I am sure is not a particularly energy-efficient industry.
Compared to what it could be, perhaps. But it would be surprising if it was as bad as a system which specifically regards using as much computational power as possible to be a security measure.
> The point is the amount of crypto being mined.
But that's designed to be independent of the energy use?
Also, mining isn't the value proposition of a currency, transactions are. One of the arguments that I often hear that's supposed[0] to be in support of bitcoin, is that it prevents inflation. But mining is inflation. Unfortunately, Bitcoin specifically has a transaction limit too small for just interbank balancing, let alone for direct personal use — for that, the system-wide limit would only barely cover Berliners taking cash out of ATMs once per week.
> If Bitcoin mining ends up using a higher proportion of renewable energy than, say, traditional banking, it could be seen as a net good for crypto use to rise.
No. To find out why, let's take it to absurd levels: build a Dyson swarm, cover the sun, use all that to mine crypto. What changes, economically or environmentally?
Nothing. Literally nothing.
The rest of the economy doesn't get greener, there isn't any more cryptocurrency than there would have been, the transaction rate hasn't changed.
[0] it doesn't actually support Bitcoin, but why is out of scope for this comment
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…
We can get a reasonable upper bound: the block reward is 6.25 BTC + fees (the blocks I saw tended to have around 0.5 BTC in fees), so let's be generous and say 7 BTC per block. 144 blocks per day are 52560 blocks or 368k BTC per year. Currently, they're worth 47k each, so $17.3B/year.
The 91 TWh figure (from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364) seems derived directly from a 240 TWh global power consumption multiplied by the assumed % of mining happening in the US, so since we're using global revenue, it only makes sense to use the global number, 240 TWh = 240e9 kWh.
17.3e9 USD / 240e9 kWh => 7.2 ct/kWh
That's the absolute maximum that electricity could cost in order for mining to be profitable.
That's making some very generous assumptions - I used the current price (annual high!) instead of the much lower average over the past months or year, and it completely ignores the very significant cost of the mining hardware. But given that 7.2 ct/kWh is roughly what industrial electricity costs in the US, and miners might be able to get power cheaper (since they can be more flexible than e.g. an aluminium plant that would suffer expensive damage if power is cut unexpectedly), it's not an entirely unreasonable number for an upper bound.
Getting accurate numbers through mandatory reporting isn't the worst idea, if only to prevent such bullshit headlines.
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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
The town I live in is bisected by a MOD railway and, from what I understand, permission was never granted for whatever was needed to supply natural gas on my side of the tracks. This rules out some of the more common traditional heating systems found in these parts.
We bought the house ~two years ago. The building itself was (and still is) quite sound but was a wreck in terms of features (no heating system at all, no flooring at all, and in terms of a kitchen and bathroom facilities it was quite ... minimal).
My partner had long hoped for underfloor heating downstairs as she loves the feel of walking on warm flooring. I have to agree that it is a delightful luxury and we don't otherwise have too many vices.
Direct electric underfloor heating felt like the least hassle in the long term and the easiest for self-installation. The alternative was a wet underfloor heating system (water filled pipework set in screed). The wet system is capable of leaking and eventually failing with expensive repairs, the electric system less so.
We use infrared wall-mounted heaters upstairs. As far as direct electric heaters go they're quite efficient. They heat the objects in the room rather than the air and it feels like the warmth of the sun on your skin.
I agree wholeheartedly that heat pumps are a more efficient option and could indeed be used as a direct replacement for our upstairs wall-mounted heaters. This is something we hope to put in but was not previously affordable when we were re-working the entire of the inside of the house from nothing.
As far as I understand, we would need a wet system for underfloor heating if we were to utilise heat pumps and at this stage that would be a prohibitively expensive re-work of what we already have.
Hopefully roof-mounted solar and a battery of some sort should even out the costs a bit.