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Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

eurasianet.org

281–290 of 361 posts

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#281
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your t…

Interest is not the same as usury whatever definition you use. The fact that your faith equates them does not make them equal. You are perfectly free to use them interchangeably in your mind but most people do not do so, and your use leads to misunderstandings. Interest, in traditional western societies is just the measure of the present value of future time, which is understood as valuable. Thus, money+time=“more mo…

> Interest is not the same as usury whatever definition you use.

In Islam, there is no difference. If I lend you $10,000 and I ask for $10,000.01 back, that $.01 is usury. They are equal because both operate on the same exploitation principle, that not only pries on the poor, but exacerbates the wealth inequality gap that everyone is complaining about today. Once the door is open to artificially differentiate the two, many other immoral things become acceptable. We've seen it time and time again.

We don't deny the time value of money, we jus say that use money in a moral way to extract value over time, by taking appropriate risk in a manner that is not exploitative.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#282
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your t…

Interesting! I didn't know about Zakat and Islams relation to usury. Thank you for educating me!

Any time :)

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#283

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity. Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the g…

If you're honestly looking for the best solution to plentiful, on-demand, cheap electricity, energy storage via batteries is a much better solution. Why burn up excess energy from a wind farm, rather than storing it to be reused during peak periods?

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#284
post #65
post #57

And so it begins. In the developed world in particular, we're seeing the move away from fossil-fuel power. This is good but currently relatively expensive. Crypto mining is starting to have very real impact on the ability of other people to live. It is adversely and disproportionately affecting poor people (who pay a greater share of their income for power). And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for s…

> Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". Which is a shit take anyway because that means that non-renewable energy (plus the renewable energy non-consumed by the miners) is now more expensive for everyone else, it's the basic law of supply and demand. And in the process those miners are also making non-renewable energy a more desirable investment because i…

If big crypto-mining syndacates start using small scale nuclear (as some have shown interest in doing) to be carbon neutral, they could be on the vangaurd of proving out the technology and be a net positive in the medium to long term.

They really want low, consistent prices for electricity. Hydro gives them that but nuclear could also. Solar and wind do not.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. Whenever you sell it, if you generated a profit on that sale, you are going to pay taxes on it (at least in the US). That's a real value for society. Can it ever be enough to offset the added squeeze on the electricity grid (which we really don't need right now, with EVs coming on and our grid in serious need of upgrade/expansion)? Someone will have…

Crypto transactions cannot create or destroy fiat currency. If you buy and hold cryptocurrency, at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones. So if you make money by selling some cryptocoin, that is _entirely_ because someone else purchased it at a greater price than you did. Their expectation is that someone else will later buy it at a greater price from them, and tha…

The value of fiat could go to zero.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#286
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world. Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not. If your economic thesis is based on hoping the government bans something, why are you even playing with state-resistant decentrali…

> Nah, I don't think it can be banned. At least not in the non-authoritarian parts of the world. Why can't it be banned? It's wasteful and closer to a Ponzi scheme than an actual currency. > Even if it is, they would need to break my fingers to prevent me running a Bitcoin node. And I will get the blocks via Satellite. If there was a credible threat, we would go somewhere it is not. That could be hard if many of the…

As someone who has been in this space a long time, I assure you I am idealistic in my positions. Hopelessly idealistic.

What does Ban even mean? That it is illegal to run in places like the US? Very unlikely, and as more institutional money flows into it, it grows more unlikely. Some places are starting to put 401k/pension funds into it. Some places are raising it as legal tender. There is also that 1st amendment thing.

So will it banned like drinking straws? (which are still available) Or banned like drugs? (which are still available).

I feel you WANT it to be banned because it tickles your authoritarian tendencies. I am glad we live in a world, at least today, where your wishes are ignored.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#287

Bitcoin mining incentivizes the plentiful production of cheap electricity. This will make it so that there are no such thing as power shortages in the future and push us towards a Type I civilization on the Kardashev scale. Bitcoin mining reduces the risk for energy generation projects, because they no longer need to worry about who will purchase the extra capacity. Bitcoin mining can act as a load-balancer for the g…

If you're honestly looking for the best solution to plentiful, on-demand, cheap electricity, energy storage via batteries is a much better solution. Why burn up excess energy from a wind farm, rather than storing it to be reused during peak periods?

Batteries are actually terrible at storing large amount of energy for any significant period of time, otherwise this would be the solution everywhere

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.

Actually PoW accentuates the concentration of miners, while in Ethereum 2 you are limited to a few mining machine, thus distributing more equally the mining power.

Actually, no, the opposite. One of the fundamental problems with PoS is that it has no externally observable metric that a block is correct. PoW is trivially externally verifiable. This is good for decentralization. There can be no lies from the miners.

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#289

Don't ever let any Bitcoin or NFT shills get away with lying to you that their cryptocurrencies and CryptoKitties and Digital Pet Rocks run on renewable energy. And never let any of those get-rich-quick pyramid scheme shills get away without forcing them to openly admit that even though they're burning coal, wasting electricity, destroying the environment, causing climate change, cancer, and heart disease, they simpl…

I wonder how much coal China burned to fabricate all the computers necessary for you to post this and for everyone else to read it.

[deleted]

Re: Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have not recently done the math What calculations are these? How do I figure out if it's worth it?

Assuming you already have a gas furnace (I do, was in the house when I bought it), and the option is to either use resistive heat (space heaters, computers, inefficient lightbulbs) or the natural gas furnace, you would need to look at two main things. The cost of electricity per BTU and the cost of natural gas per BTU. On a somewhat recent decently high gas usage month that emulated a cold winter (forgot to turn off…

Oof, misnamed a unit there. CCF = centa cubic foot. 100, not 1/100.
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