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

tomshardware.com

431–440 of 499 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was the government stepping in, monitoring, and cutting off services is bad.

Wait was that the point? What you mentioned sounded like an unironically ideal state.

I see we disagree on authoritarianism and liberty. Welp, have a good day.

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

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations were also engineered to be un-killable. The way to reach them is to go after the people who run them. Obviously, if that’s the analogy, then the miners are quite secure anyway.

You're arguing that it's a poison (it isn't) but even worse you're proposing a cure that's far worse. So "go after them" in other words would mean: construct a global authoritarian surveillance apparatus that hunts down energy consumers?

That's what I would propose, at least, yes.

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

#433
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m in Montreal area and I don’t know anyone with natural gas.

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

#434
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not. Fiat money drives inflation.

The adoption of fiat currency by many countries, from the 18th century onwards, made much larger variations in the supply of money possible. Since then, huge increases in the supply of paper money have occurred in a number of countries, producing hyperinflations – episodes of extreme inflation rates much greater than those observed during earlier periods of commodity money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money

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

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in case, there are solutions to scale transactions count outside "7 per second", where these "7 per second" transactions are used to settle a larger set of transactions happening on the layer 2. Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it…

> Also, when talking about extra service payment networks like Visa offering, like anti fraud, gotta remember that at least part of problems this service solving is caused by the design of the network itself. And while it is not obviously energy hungry service, it is part of what everyone is paying 2-3% in credit card processing fees. The design of credit cards does suck for fraud. I go to a website to buy a product,…

Payment authorization through credit cards can clearly be improved by providing one-time authorization codes using any number of techniques. Looking back to the theme of the article however, that improvement can be done _completely independently_ of the blockchain and mining ecosystems, with negligible impacts on the power consumption of the existing baking system.

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

#436
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…

Sure, you must be an anti-crypto obsessed person if you are against something essentially useless like bitcoin having a trillionaire market cap and using 2% of the energy of a whole country.

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

#437
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 popcor…

> state violence. It’s obsolete. Lol, that’s what I’m talking about with cult leader vibes. That is completely delusional

It’s fascinating how history informs us about the evolution of state power and its reliance on violence to enforce compliance. Reflecting on the industrial age, we see how the permanence of factories and infrastructure bolstered the state’s capacity for coercion—a tool leveraged to an extreme in fostering ideologies like communism. The physical nature of wealth, exemplified by gold bars, presented an opportunity for straightforward confiscation.

Contrast this with the digital age, where Bitcoin introduces a paradigm shift. The inefficacy of traditional state violence against digital assets is stark. The very concept of borders becomes almost anachronistic when considering the ease with which a Bitcoin wallet can be concealed and transported, unlike the gold coins of yore that families might have smuggled in loaves of bread.

The suggestion that authoritarian regimes would willingly adopt Bitcoin is where the real absurdity lies. Such governments thrive on control and suppression, the antithesis of the free-market principles Bitcoin embodies. To imagine they would facilitate their own obsolescence by embracing a decentralized currency is to fundamentally misunderstand their nature.

Your apprehension that state violence will quash Bitcoin’s rise underestimates the resilience and decentralization of digital currencies. As Bitcoin continues its trajectory, reshaping the financial landscape, it will not be the threat of violence that determines its fate but its inherent ability to provide an alternative to those governed by fiat’s limitations. Your perspective, while rooted in historical precedents of state power, may indeed lead to confusion as you witness the unfolding impact of Bitcoin and its challenge to conventional monetary systems.

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

#438
post #33

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…

As I posted earlier this week:

Each bitcoin mined in the US directly results in more than 264 metric tonnes of CO2. This is based on the following rough calculation:

    1.65 billion metric tonnes * 2% / (900 bitcoins per day * 38% * 365 days)
Based on 2022 CO2 emissions from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 .

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact all the power draw of the traditional banking industry is also in the crypto and not accounted for in this analysis. Crypto still needs POS systems and accounts and large staffs in large offices and all the trappings of finance outside of mining.

Precisely. I don't know how people can argue crypto power consumption against the banking industry when you can drive down main street in any city and pass 15 bank branches and see ATMs every 100ft. Bank of America alone has 69m customers and real people have real needs - things like going to a branch occasionally, calling customer service, taking out cash, etc. Not only is BoA itself larger in terms of users than al…

That comparison is also interesting because the same people who make those comparisons are also perpetually perplexed about why statistically nobody uses Bitcoin, and it’s like … BofA employs thousands of MBAs, they have McKinsey consultants, so you really think they’d have all of those employees and infrastructure cutting into their profit margins if their customers didn’t find those services useful? Focusing on the transaction mechanism is leaving out 95% of banking.

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

#440

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…

Why are you touting that as some kind of good? It would have been appropriate to decommission that dam, and there are other energy intensive industries that would have brought some prosperity to the region.
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