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Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

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Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#161

Post by Out_of_Characte »

maxerickson wrote: post #144
Isinlor wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main point is that this hunger for resources without regard for consequences is the very core of life. We did not exist back then. And cyanobacteria did not have a great plan of creating mammals.

Note that I qualified my statement. I didn't say that the great oxygenation event was objectively useful to the moon, I said it was objectively more useful to air breathing mammals than running difficult computations to control write access to a ledger. The random waste from cryptocurrencies just turns into heat, so I expect it opens up ~zero new possibilities. Have fun though!

How would you even define 'more usefull' in this context?

How is cryptocurrency waste heat different from bank server waste heat? Only because crypto has a dramatically worse efficiency? I guess both my crypto wallet and my bank account are products of waste heat that produce zero new possibilities.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#162

Post by varjag »

levosmetalo wrote: post #106
varjag wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah no, that's not quite the full story. Abkhasian regime persists largely due to continued presence of Russian troops. Much of the residual economy in the break-off region revolves around the Russian bases as well. The rest of it is the lowest tier Russian "visa free" tourism, also guaranteed by Russian military presence. Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Ru…

> Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds. You mean "history" in a sense that the local population would be ethnically cleansed from the Georgian majority and the ones that survive relocated to Russia? And then they would be marked as aggressors because they dared to try protecting themselves with arms, and refused to just disappear from t…

No, I mean they would continue to live on the territory they lived for centuries (somehow without apparently being ethnically cleansed by Georgians all that damn time). And without Russian involvement it would have long since went into participatory politics.

And it's not just a speculation, there was a perfect A/B test. Ajaria, another autonomous region of Georgia, long since had independence ambitions too. However that conflict fizzed out without notable violence.

The difference from Ossetia? It does not border Russia and there weren't substantial troops stationed at the time of USSR dissolution.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#163

Post by saalweachter »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #77
Uberphallus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there during my urbex days. Frozen conflict zone, not unlike Transnistria, South Ossetia or Nagorno Karabakh. The border is militarized, except the Georgian side which doesn't seem to consider Abkhazia a threat. Lots of abandoned infrastructure because the native Georgian population was killed and/or fleed, and hasn't been harnessed for some reason. Abkhaz cross the border daily to buy basic stuff from Geor…

SD cards should be pretty easy to hide as well, unless they do X-rays on your shoes and the like I guess? Could put a micro SD card in a SIM card slot in your phone maybe.

Eh, the problem with practicing amateur spycraft is that then you look like a spy if anyone notices.

Sure, maybe they're extremely unlikely to find an SD card in your shoe -- extremely! -- but if someone does find an SD card in your shoe, they're going to want to know why.

Just leave it in your pocket and dump it in the X-ray bin with the rest of your pocket trash. It's unlikely anyone will notice, and if they do, you're just a tourist with an SD card for your camera. Maybe they throw it away, maybe they copy it, but it's unlikely to end with you spending four hours being questioned about why it was in your shoe.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#164

Post by f311a »

wruza wrote: post #132

The speaker doesn’t mention any blackouts, she only describes how they shut down few illegal crypto farms (only 230 units of unspecified model or power consumption). I believe there is more to the story and that doesn’t mean that there is no blackouts, but for completeness sake this video is incoherent with this thread’s headline. Blackouts may be caused by e.g. shitty, cheap, unmaintainable grid, or by local corrupt…

That’s true, they didn’t mention blackouts in this particular video, but that’s one of the reasons they have been doing this for more than a year.

There are a lot of articles in Russian on this subject.

In English: https://www.rferl.org/a/bitcoin-blackouts-russian-cryptocurr...

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#165

Post by behnamoh »

sandworm101 wrote: post #133
_Microft wrote: post #57

We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale" . A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1]. Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT…

Arthur C. Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

> Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

I'm sorry I didn't understand this. Could you explain?

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#166

Post by marci »

zepto wrote: post #141
Isinlor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically what all life does. Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself. Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.

Not really. Life transforms matter and energy into increasing structure and complexity. A classic pathological life-like process is the paperclip maximizer. The paperclip maximizer transforms matter and energy into a regular structure of low complexity. Crypto is one step worse than the paperclip maximizer. It converts matter and energy into pseudo-random numbers. The only structure discernible within the randomness…

Now let's clippyfy the universe:

https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index.html

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#167

Post by maxerickson »

Out_of_Characte wrote: post #161
maxerickson wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that I qualified my statement. I didn't say that the great oxygenation event was objectively useful to the moon, I said it was objectively more useful to air breathing mammals than running difficult computations to control write access to a ledger. The random waste from cryptocurrencies just turns into heat, so I expect it opens up ~zero new possibilities. Have fun though!

How would you even define 'more usefull' in this context? How is cryptocurrency waste heat different from bank server waste heat? Only because crypto has a dramatically worse efficiency? I guess both my crypto wallet and my bank account are products of waste heat that produce zero new possibilities.

The comparison was to oxygen.

And then I'm separately making the claim that using proof of work won't set the stage for anything interesting in the future, no matter how much heat it generates.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#168

Post by xyzzyz »

behnamoh wrote: post #165
sandworm101 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arthur C. Clarke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out." Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end.

> Eventually we will have calculated all the necessary derivations and the universe will come to an end. I'm sorry I didn't understand this. Could you explain?

You need to read the short story referenced above to understand the context.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#169

Post by lainsoykaf »

trixie_ wrote: post #63

Idea to solve the crypto energy problem - sell space heaters as dual purpose crypto miners. People need space heaters. They buy them, but they also mine crypto (as a free byproduct of the space heating). The number of crypto mining space heaters out there dilute the value of dedicated mining so much that people don't bother with it anymore. Even buying the space heater to make money from mining crypto doesn't make th…

This can't work because it just raises the efficiency of mining. That means mining will become cheaper. That means your reward is higher. That means you can mine more for the same money. That means every miner does that, increasing the part of the heat that's wasted.

In the end, the exact same amount will be 'wasted' as before.

Re: Bitcoin miners in Abkhazia are causing blackouts in remote villages [video]

#170

Post by hoppla »

EU regulates how much power my vacuum cleaner and my lightbulb can use. And to what end? So that some greedy miner can buy cheaper electricity to make numbers and heat! The only way I can see that the environmental problem called Bitcoin can end, is to make it a more expensive.

Power prices could be increased by usage to motivate consuming less and punish those who use too much.

There will still be countries that mine and burn coal so that others can mine Bitcoin. But I believe there are more sustainable industries that could benefit from these wasted resources

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