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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

#261

Post by dannyobrien »

spankalee wrote: post #158
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…

I'm not sure this is true, but happy to be proven wrong: if there was a geothermal source, say, hundreds of miles from anywhere, the transmission losses might make it uneconomic to exploit, but it would be usable for proof-of-work or a similar project.

(Not arguing for or against this application, and it may be that this is too rare a phenomenon to matter; just quibbling over the fungibility.)

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

#262

Post by wongarsu »

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…

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

It's proportional to the amount of money it "burns", in the form of capital costs (miners) and electricity costs (for those miners). If electricity prices would rise tenfold globally, electricity use from crypto miners would drop by about the same factor.

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

#263

Post by danbruc »

qqqwerty wrote: post #226
Symbiote wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visa used 189GWh in 2017, worldwide, of which around half was data centres [1]. That handled 111.2 billion transactions, so about 1.7Wh per transaction (half for datacentres). Bitcoin used 844670Wh per transaction [2]. [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... [2] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

That is bonkers if true. To put some context around that, our EV can drive around 4000 miles on that amount of energy. Meanwhile, I am not sure you could even unlock the car on 1.7Wh.

1.7 Wh is 1,000 W for 6 seconds, I really hope that this is enough to unlock a car.

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

#264

Post by bdcravens »

infamouscow wrote: post #137
bdcravens wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Except it's not a free market. Those same regulators also give tax breaks to large inefficient corporations and tell small businesses they must close down for arbitrary intangible public health reasons, while the large corporations can remain open. In both examples, it's the regulators whom are detrimental to society, not the free market. Virtually everyone that champions regulations are not for regulation, but for i…

While you're not incorrect about the flaws of regulation, none of what you said is an argument for laissez-faire.

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

#265

Post by twojacobtwo »

015a wrote: post #199
Retric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

Wouldn't the current supply ratio be more accurate, if we can't determine exact sources?

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

#266

Post by digging »

boc wrote: post #198
digging wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suspicions are wrong, but you're welcome to add to the debate if you have anything to contribute.

I'll be upfront with you: bitcoin is probably the worst "tech" ever mass-adopted. That's my bias. 1. The banking industry is thousands of times more important that crypto for everyday Americans. It's what literally makes our entire economy run. Crypto is used for speculation. What you should be comparing bitcoin against is the energy it takes to list a few ETFs on an exchange, which is essentially the cost of a few h…

I'm not sure if I was unclear or if the people debating me are too charged to read my precise meaning, or both.

> "It could be less, much less, or much less," This is a filler argument.

Actually my argument is, "This article claims it could be much less, and that we aren't even sure of the range given, but the title definitively claims the maximum value." I'm saying this article is bad and is FUD, that's why I said the thing about specifically criticizing the article. (Yeah I don't think I was that unclear actually.)

I'm actually ambivalent on the rest of your arguments. They would have made good talking points in TFA, which made none of them.

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

#267

Post by webignition »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #232
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

A bit of a tangent, but do you mind saying what you pay per kWh?

I'm currently on £0.36 GBP per kWh (about $0.45).

Just wondering what counts as cheap!

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

#268

Post by rlpb »

mjburgess wrote: post #167
Throw73747 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 51% attack it. If you can outwaste energy, you can hijack the system Out hashing does not give you any extra powers. Maybe you will be able to rollback a few minutes of transactions, that is all.

if you split the network, you can add your own machines, that can rewrite the history arbitrarily from the future of that split. As for "a few minutes", it depends on which one we're talking about. BTC, yes -- but disrupting the global BTC network requires only a few minutes of time. Just dump everything into unusable addresses, and watch the reaction.

> can rewrite the history arbitrarily

No, you cannot do that. Transactions would still need to be signed by the corresponding owners. All you could do is reorder (and thus invalidate) some transactions, drop some transactions, or add some that weren't originally included.

> Just dump everything into unusable addresses...

Nope; that's not possible. You wouldn't have the signatures to do that even with 51% hashing power.

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

#269

Post by lottin »

pton_xd wrote: post #227
FireBeyond wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But honestly that's the price we pay for not having sound monetary systems. Are you implying that BTC is a "sound monetary system"? Because many people will argue with that.

Not at all, I'm saying BTC is an asset that hedges against unsound monetary systems.

No, the international monetary system is perfectly functional, as evidenced by the fact that it supports the global economy just fine.

Bitcoin is neither an alternative to the international monetary system, nor a hedge. It's a joke. A gambling instrument for financially illiterate people.

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

#270

Post by ben_w »

hk__2 wrote: post #184
lovich wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

0) yes they do, in extremis half a dozen HAEMP would basically take out the whole internet

(b) "seal the network in their borders" is much easier than that, lots of networks basically act like that already due to either voluntary compliance with local laws, or due to direct government interference with the networks

iii. the miners aren't really all that distributed, they group together for the same reason everyone else groups together instead of being free-range anarchists

[δ] all you need to do to shut down a currency within a country is arrest people using it, which is very easy and has a long history

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