This life is needlessly absurd.
Why does this even exist?
And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
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Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#42"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose. It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new…
All computations eventually becomes heat. There is no computers that doesn't generate heat.
We can generate less heat per computation but it eventually cannot be avoided.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Interesting question - how much will end up as sound, or in the ever smaller tail of things like storing a bit in flash memory?
Almost none. A long time ago a friend and I did the math for sound, photons (status LEDs), etc and it was a rounding error of 1% or something silly like that.
And that’s ignoring that sound and photon emissions typically hit a wall or other physical surface and get converted back to heat.
It all ends up as heat in the end, just depends on where that heat is dumped and if you need to cool it or not. Most watts end up being even more than the theoretical heat per watt due to said cooling needs.
There is literally no way around the fact that every watt you burn for compute ends up as a watt of waste heat. The only factor you can control is how many units of compute you can achieve with that same watt.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#44This life is needlessly absurd. Why does this even exist? And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
The authoritarian state of KYC/AML might be even more absurd to some.
Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back.
It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Interesting question - how much will end up as sound, or in the ever smaller tail of things like storing a bit in flash memory?
All sound will end up as heat.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#46I always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.
I did a quick alalysis and it actually matched the ~1.5 degree celcius rise pretty accurately. It required a bunch of incorrect simplifying assumptions, but it was still interesting how close it comes. Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup…
Your math is completely wrong.
We use ~20 TW, while solar radiation is ~500 PW and just the heating from global warming alone is 460TW (that is, how much heat is being accumulated as increased Earth temperature).
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#47Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space. Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
> Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species
> *But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species"
Us being the dumbest spacefaring species does not necessarily imply the existence of spacefaring species other than us.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#48This life is needlessly absurd. Why does this even exist? And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
The authoritarian state of KYC/AML might be even more absurd to some. Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back. It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.
well put
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat. If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
Interesting question - how much will end up as sound, or in the ever smaller tail of things like storing a bit in flash memory?
Heat is the graveyard of energy. Everything that uses energy, or is energy, is actually just energy on it's way to the graveyard.
The energy of the universe is a pool of water a top a cliff. Water running off this cliff is used to do stuff (work), and the pool at the bottom is heat.
The "heat death of the universe" is referring to this water fall running dry, and all the energy being in this useless pool of "heat".
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#50"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
Seriously, the only way I would accept Bitcoin mining is as a winter heating source that pays for itself. Why can't people sell those?