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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

#371

Post by imiric »

hellojesus wrote: post #234
lurking15 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

weird how you discount the obvious use case espoused by the bitcoin community: an absolutely scarce digital commodity secured through energy itself

I have a hard time understanding what the value of that is in its pure form. What is the value of a scare digital commodity in and of itself?

What is the value of physical currency, or a balance in a digital system? It's all supply and demand.

When physical currency used to be backed by gold reserves, then it could be argued that gold itself has material value, but nowadays it's all fairy dust[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiTfnpgNkmI

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

#372

Post by alchemist1e9 »

lovich wrote: post #368
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes both intellectual and emotional maturity to understand and accept the wisdom and power of free markets. Bitcoin is delivering what the market wants an uncensored currency outside the control of governments. This is only the beginning of the outrage over Bitcoin, wait until it does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch…

replace "Bitcoin" with "God" in this comment and it sounds like a cult leader. Since the beginning of time there have always been a group of humans who would like the ability to not follow the rules set by whatever accounts for leadership in their group. Bitcoin isn't feeding some novel desire. And Bitcoin/crypto evangelists still havent grappled with the fact that if they ever actually succeed in becoming a real riv…

Ok let’s try it:

> It takes both intellectual and emotional maturity to understand and accept the wisdom and power of free markets. God is delivering what the market wants an uncensored currency outside the control of governments. This is only the beginning of the outrage over God, wait until he does another 10x gain in value and fiat currency failures grow worldwide. The next few decades will require a lot of popcorn to watch the show when calls to ban God only result in more rapid spikes in his value appreciating.

Not really getting the cult leader vibes, sorry.

but I sure am getting some creepy authoritarian vibes from your comment. Feels like you’re itching to help hand out this violence …

I know you will smash down the doors of these disobedient Bitcoiners and seize their coins from under their pillows! or maybe bomb some mining facilities.

Good luck with that state violence. It’s obsolete.

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

#373

Post by cr__ »

015a wrote: post #309
cr__ wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument does not make sense. Increasing usage does not magically increase capacity by the same amount. Even if it did, the increased capacity resulting from the increased demand would not make electricity cheaper, since the corresponding demand would already exist. In general, increasing demand for a resource increases the price for that resource.

Increasing usage trivially and obviously increases capacity by ~the same amount. A toddler could understand this, because obviously the lights are still on. We use more and more energy every year (except 2020, for obvious reasons). There aren't rolling blackouts. Thus, capacity responds to usage. I don't know why you're reaching for the word "magically". There's nothing magical about the mechanism of how this happens…

> Increasing usage trivially and obviously increases capacity by ~the same amount. A toddler could understand this, because obviously the lights are still on.

It may increase capacity over time, if someone thinks they can profit from bringing new supply online. This is known as supply elasticity, and it’s pretty well-studied. It’s not trivial, and it’s not instant. In the meantime, demand from crypto may also reduce demand from other consumers, who now have to pay more for electricity. Electric usage is more nuanced than “are the lights on or off”—families can and do decide to keep the house colder in the winter if prices are up because some people decided to waste a bunch of electricity on crypto in a data center somewhere.

You’re missing the point, though: the thing that absolutely does not happen when you increase demand for a resource is that resource becoming cheaper, unless that demand goes away later, after the supply has increased. This is a called supply glut—also pretty well-studied.

Now, given that the entire cryptocurrency sector is a con and will eventually vanish like a turd down a toilet, there may very well be a period later on where the result of all this nonsense is that we have lower electricity prices for a while. Until that happens, though, you aren’t making electricity cheaper by using more of it.

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

#374

Post by dmoy »

digging wrote: post #197
acdha wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is your first mistake: the traditional banking system does not have a security model predicated on the ability to waste power. Bitcoin does, and it’s dynamic so there’s no way to waste less power which isn’t explicitly ceding control. The second error is tr…

I do admit that the comparison is not a strong one. It wasn't intended to be, honestly, it was just an easy example. My point was more that the data presented in the article aren't very useful on their own . Again, if you think all cryptocurrency has 0 value, then all usage is obviously bad. But the reality is that it has some value, and much of that value is in the form of scams (most types of coins, by number, are…

> My point was more that the data presented in the article aren't very useful on their own.

Yea this is a constant issue in almost all journalism. Numbers are provided mostly without context. E g. "$100k of drugs seized in bust". But was that a single day's re-up? Does it meaningfully impact the local drug supply at all?

---

In this case we can dig into numbers somewhat. Bitcoin.com claims the traditional banking sector uses about 2x as much energy. But cryptocurrency handles a tiny, tiny fraction of worldwide banking stuff, so if it was operating at the scale of e.g. 20,000 qps of credit card transactions, for example, it might have substantially higher energy use compared to now.

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

#376

Post by acdha »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #339
acdha wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of them? It hasn’t had much impact on the real economy so clearly most people do not consider it better.

The entire history of fiat currency is a combination of warfare and currency collapse. Why was the Bank of England created? To wage war. Perhaps “wasting” 2% of the world’s electricity supply will look a lot better when civilization scale money laundering and currency collapse is a thing of history, not to mention the curb on national budgets being allocated to war machines!

Are you seriously arguing that money laundering or military spending will go away if Bitcoin is more widely used?

Continuing this, “fiat currency” has a specific meaning in economics: it’s a currency not backed by a commodity. Bitcoin is a fiat currency because the only value it has is based on social consensus, making it exceptionally volatile, but at the time the Bank of England was founded the pound sterling was based on silver (hence the name) as it had been for a millennium and it transitioned to gold for a couple centuries. The reason the Bank of England was founded wasn’t due to the choice of currency but rather credit, and as with war I find it unpersuasive that humanity will discontinue either.

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

#377

Post by qeternity »

rlpb wrote: post #279
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

Visa's count presumably relates to direct consumer small value transactions though, whereas Bitcoin transactions are typically much larger "clearing" transactions. If Bitcoin is scaled up, that would be the only option - each transaction would be a clearing transaction incorporating many individual consumer transaction movements.

This is an argument _against_ Bitcoin.

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

#378

Post by tdeck »

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

It's pretty common in the Pacific Northwest. Heat pumps are unreasonably expensive here in the US so they're still fairly uncommon and the PNW has abundant, relatively cheap hydro power.

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

#379

Post by Symbiote »

latchkey wrote: post #359
manquer wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

Look on a map. There is nothing (in the US) that is close to there that would consume the ~500MW of power the dam produces and sends to the plant. The plant was shut down and nobody made an effort to direct the power elsewhere. Transmission is insanely expensive at scale. I've seen their power bills and I talked to their head electrician who worked at the plant when it was operational. That's the best citation I can…

Have you looked on a map? The plant is right next to the largest power line between the USA and Canada, right between Ottawa and Montreal. A (presumably) new-ish wind farm is on the New York state side.

Have you read their website? "With 435MW of transformer capacity at its Massena complex" — that is the amount they can draw from the grid, not the generating capacity of any nearby power plant.

The plant is here: https://openinframap.org/#15.08/44.98237/-74.74862 (checked with several sources, e.g. https://www.gem.wiki/Massena_Complex).

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

#380

Post by asadotzler »

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.)

"You can't regulate it away"

"Of course, you can regulate it away."

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