Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

nysfocus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 578 posts

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#431

Post by ballenf »

ayngg wrote: post #159
bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is…

Loss of trust. Trust in society creates enormous efficiencies. We're seeing the loss of those efficiencies as society splits apart into more and more tribes.

Bitcoin, in part, is a marker for loss of trust in governments. Trust in their motives and/or ability to responsibly steward currencies.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#432

Post by FDSGSG »

malka wrote: post #381
roenxi wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a really easy solution for this disaster - a trusted party could run a big relational database that was basically a non-inflating currency and really cheap to run. Except that isn't going to work, because governments are untrustworthy and as history shows will sooner rather than later debase their currency. All people are looking for here is a safe way to store value over time. If governments would let peopl…

"a trusted party" does not exist at scale.

Liberty Reserve was such a trusted party for a long time before Bitcoin became popular. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that the US government shutdown of Liberty Reserve is exactly what kicked off bitcoins popularity in the first place.

On May 6, 2016, the operator of Liberty Reserve was sentenced to 20 years in US federal prison

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#433

Post by adamisom »

bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

Well less energy does have downsides, see: all the things we use energy for. We probably don’t want to tax that except to prevent terrible harm. So I can imagine an argument being along the lines “alternative energy production isn’t ready to meet demand yet, oh and also burning carbon is useful for figuring out alternative energy (see: Tesla and the coal in China that’s burned to make their batteries) so how about instead we greatly fund alternative energy”.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#434

Post by andrewla »

This is painted as a disaster, but I think all we're doing is cutting through to get at a consistent valuation for energy.

In order for Bitcoin to every achieve any long-term viability, in my opinion, it needs to stabilize its pricing. Practically speaking, the route to do that is through a combination of supply chain pricing and credit markets.

Pricing energy in Bitcoin (which is really all this is doing) is an interesting step towards the supply chain problem. This power plant, in all likelihood, would be happy to sell the power to another bidder if the price per Joule is higher than the expected price per Bitcoin per Joule. The natural next step is to just price electricity directly in Bitcoin.

The question then becomes how viable it is to move down the chain -- pricing natural gas or coal in Bitcoin, and putting pricing pressure on the supply chain for more complex energy products (turbines, solar panels, etc.) to match this pricing. If this is feasible (and that's a big "if") then there is a chance that we start to flip the equation -- energy prices in dollars are simply too volatile and Bitcoin becomes a standard option for international settlement.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#435

Post by FeepingCreature »

bb88 wrote: post #335
FeepingCreature wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what if the rich have too much money? That would explain a lot. It would explain why GME stock was shorted %140 of float. How would it explain that? > It would also explain why politicians are so ineffective at regulation. If you were rich, would you want effective politicians? No. You would put your money behind the least effective politicians. Just because you'd want it that way doesn't mean you did it. Motive…

> Just because you'd want it that way doesn't mean you did it. Motive, but where's means and method? Pinky swear with me that you've seriously never heard of dark money. Koch brothers, Russian oligarchs. You've never ever heard of this? Really?

Heard of it, yes, heard of much reason to buy that it had an effect, no.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#436

Post by propertymagnate »

shawnz wrote: post #429
originalvichy wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it be interpreted as misinformation if the information is pretty solidly based? Everyone is looking for low hanging fruit in the race to slow down the climate disaster and it’s an easy target. I’m glad online currencies exist as a technology but I’m not glad an energy intensive one is currently #1 when at the same time the entire tech is taken over by investors/speculators instead of users. And if calculation…

> And if calculations about Bitcoin’s footprint are true it uses up as much energy as Argentina. An entire country. I don’t think that for the use Bitcoin gets in the developed world it justifies energy uses at that level. Compare for example with MGM's properties in Las Vegas which they claim consume 171 MW. That's not quite as much as Bitcoin, but it's still higher than 65 of the countries listed here: https://en.w…

To rephrase that, Bitcoin uses more energy that all of MGM's properties in Las Vegas.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#437

Post by zepto »

tshaddox wrote: post #238
zepto wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin produces money for the miners just like cigarette companies, kidnap for ransom, and muggings.

Just like those things? That sounds like a stretch. As far as I can tell, we’re talking about the externalities of the energy usage of Bitcoin miners, which are the same per unit of energy (given some generation method) as any other usage of energy. That’s not even remotely comparable to activities that directly earn money by stealing or getting people addicted.

> That sounds like a stretch.

No more of a stretch as comparing it to farming or art.

I’m not making a judgement here, just listing other activities that make money for people and which have externalities, since ‘making money for the miners’ is claimed as a good.

You be the judge.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#438

Post by jerry1979 »

jariel wrote: post #320
ayngg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it seems like Bitcoin (and other pow cryptocurrencies) are almost like the climate change scapegoat for a number of social and economic issues that have seemingly come to a head recently to facilitate their rise. People mine because it is expensive, it isn't the other way around, so the real questions we should be asking in good faith are things like "Why it is profitable in the first place?" and I think it is…

No, this is really quite upside down. "People get too caught up on bitcoin because it is new and nobody understands it" We understand it quite well thank you (and it's not new!) - far far more often than not, it's the BTC proponents who don't really grasp what it is, and it's not the 'technical aspects' that are the most salient factors. Bitcoin creates no value. It's 'profitable' to an individual, but not the system…

> Bitcoin creates no value.

Bitcoin creates a "source of truth" which has lots of value for people. For example, working at an organization where everyone wants to cooperate to deliver a product, figuring out who should own, update, and report on sources of truth takes lots of effort. But those sources of truth within organizations help people coordinate their collective efforts.

Out here in the regular world where we cannot trust each other, having a ready-made source of truth has lots of value because it lets people all over the cooperate who otherwise could not.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#439

Post by dmurray »

bransonf wrote: post #94

It’s a simple equation: So long as there is more money in mining BTC than there is cost in energy to mine it, mining will proceed. No entity in the world can control the price of crypto. But, we can and already do regulate energy production. I think we need a carbon tax, that is specifically a financial disincentive towards any means of energy production that directly pollutes the atmosphere. Seriously, what are the…

> Seriously, what are the current best arguments against levying such a disincentive?

The best argument against it is: it's very hard to enforce it on everybody internationally, and if one country adopts it unilaterally, then production just moves to another country (making everyone worse off - same amount of pollution, but the production is presumably less economically efficient).

The second best argument against it is "the tax shouldn't be $x/ton, it should be $0.5x, which is a more accurate reflection of the external costs".

A distant third, but very effective in practice, is "the carbon tax is good, but it shouldn't apply to Special Interest Area X, because of these social/political/historical reasons..."

These aren't completely unsolvable problems, and people do try. But if your question was genuine, I hope you now see that there are some reasonable arguments not to just do this tomorrow.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#440

Post by ChrisClark »

ziml77 wrote: post #386
jstanley wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if energy were priced correctly ... would BTC become higher in value? ... If energy were to become more expensive, the growth in supply would slow. It doesn't work like that. The consensus algorithm targets 1 block mined every 10 minutes. If the amount of energy expended goes up (i.e. blocks are mined more frequently) then the difficulty increases to counteract it. If the rate of block production decreases, then th…

And this is exactly the problem with Bitcoin. Adding more computational power to the network changes absolutely nothing in terms of the amount of mining completed per unit time. Instead it just shuffles around the chances of being the one to succeed at a block. This is something that I'm not sure many people actually understand. Because in the physical world, increasing your energy input into mining will result in mo…

Yeah, the only point of the mining system is to secure the blockchain. As more and more energy is spent on it, the more energy is needed to attack it.

It just turns greed into security. As long as it's profitable to mine, it's practically impossible for someone to do a 51% attack.

Post reply on HN