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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

#311

Post by manquer »

latchkey wrote: post #252
burnished wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it has a bigger share than early 2000s US aluminum processing (a notoriously electricity intensive process), which was using 1.5% https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS0...

Coinmint operates in an old Alcoa plant in upstate NY near Canada. It runs entirely off a dam that was built to power smelting. Power that would otherwise be going to waste (the location is too remote and too expensive to transmit elsewhere). By using the power, it actually helps keep the dam running. https://www.coinmint.one/ Update: if you're going to downvote me, see below before you do so. I have been there, I ha…

> too expensive to transmit elsewhere

Citation needed .

It is rarely if ever too expensive to transmit electricity anywhere . We have offshore wind solar farms in remote places , there is even cross continent lines between Africa and Spain .

I am deeply skeptical it is too expensive for upstate NY to transmit power when there is probably 50 million people living in metro areas within say a 750 mile radius .

Every other dam is remote, every coal plant is remote they are all perfectly able to transmit to urban and industrial centers

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

#313

Post by downrightmike »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #304

The most interesting and fitting comparison IMO is the comparison to gold mining: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining. Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable). With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant envi…

The thing about bitcoin mining is that it requires more power, the more power you use. They network can work on far smaller resources.

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

#314

Post by [deleted] »

sspiff wrote: post #26
throw0101d wrote: post #11

Keep going back to: >> Explain Bitcoin as completely as possible in a single tweet. > It's like if idling your car 24/7 occasionally produced solved Sudoku puzzles that you could then exchange for heroin. * https://twitter.com/VessOnSecurity/status/113524359527398604... Edit: per /u/tgamblin (of Spack fame), this was originally from @Theophite.

Except you're not idling your car, you're effectively redlining it 24/7.

[deleted]

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

#315

Post by FabHK »

throw0101d wrote: post #287
JoeCortopassi wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is cryptographically secured distributed accounting ledger, that created a novel way to incentivize participation

As someone who has used cryptography† since he downloaded PGP 2.x in the early 1990s, and was around for the Crypto Wars (using the "non-us" Debian repos), I am aware what Bitcoin is technically-speaking. † This includes using chained hashes: * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=opie&sektion=4 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1760 * https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2289

> Crypto Wars

Ah, the good old days, when "crypto" meant cryptography, and not some polluting get-rich-quick scheme.

ETA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

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

#316

Post by pcthrowaway »

boc wrote: post #212
rglullis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard talking points from Bitcoin proponents.

Yeah that's a fair correction. Proof of Work appears to be a much, much better solution from an energy standpoint, although I'm less informed about the nitty-gritty.

Proof of Stake is the widely deployed consensus model which isn't designed to waste energy.

Actually, there are lots of other ones, but Proof of Work is the only one that is designed to add security by requiring a lot of hashrate (which translates to a bunch of energy) to submit blocks ("mining" in proof of work)

Proof of work was a brilliant innovation at the time, but as it turns out, smart people iterate on technology over time to improve it. The fact that bitcoin didn't sink like a stone after being improved upon (just from a resource-usage perspective) by most other blockchains really highlights the greed and single-mindedness of most crypto speculators.

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

#317

Post by eli »

digging wrote: post #224
eli wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "emotion…

> "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. That's not what I said. I said the author of the article did read the study and describes it as possibly wrong. In fact the article does actually mention a range given,…

With all due respect, maybe you should read the report.

The 137 facilities they are talking about use an 2.3% of US electricity when run at capacity.

Separately they use CEBCI data to come up with a top-down estimate of bitcoin mining at 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity.

Putting the two together suggests the true number is at the high end of the range.

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

#318

Post by abeppu »

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #129
abeppu wrote: 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...

But it does seem like US electricity prices are meaningfully higher than for a number of countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East. I wonder what stops mining from going to places where electricity appears to be cheapest.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price... https://www.statista.com/statistics/1391069/cheapest-residen...

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

#319

Post by andy81 »

downrightmike wrote: post #313
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #304

The most interesting and fitting comparison IMO is the comparison to gold mining: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/comparisons estimates 175.34 TWh per year for Bitcoin mining and 131 TWh per year for Gold mining. Most gold is used in a similar way like Bitcoin (hoarded as a store of value because people believe that other people will continue to consider it valuable). With Bitcoin mining, I believe the only relevant envi…

The thing about bitcoin mining is that it requires more power, the more power you use. They network can work on far smaller resources.

That would require the price to drop proportionally (or waiting for halvings).

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

#320

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

wkjagt wrote: post #185
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

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

Interesting. In my suburb of Vancouver, pretty much everyone is natural gas furnace, although people seem to be replacing them with heat pumps.
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