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Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

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71–80 of 578 posts

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#71
The more I see stories like this, the more I've come to realize that we really screwed up by allowing this technological experiment to get out of hand.

Not to sound pedantic, but our future generations are going to come to regret this when our planet is a toasted marshmallow, because we couldn't stop being greedy.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#72
post #65
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perverse, just like almost every other form of economic activity on this planet, eg. farming (fertilizer/herbicide run-off), mining (tailing ponds), factories (air/ground/water pollution). The underlying reason is simple: externalities aren't being priced in, which allows the owners of such operations to make money while everyone pays the price.

None of what you listed are similar cases. Farming produced food to eat. Mining produces minerals to build things with. Factories produce goods. Bitcoin produces... A series of bits that some people will pay money for? It seems like bitcoin is basically fine art at this point.

> Bitcoin produces...

trust.

It's only a moral judgement that bitcoin energy use is somehow worse than say, transport, or heating, or anything else that people pay money for.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simpler: ban banks and credit card companies from dealing with anything related to cryptocurrency

That sounds rather rash.

I thought bitcoin wanted to be outside of the traditional banking system? Or are bitcoin fans afraid they won't be able to easily get suckers to pump the coins sky high without the fiat (but mostly unbacked tethers) flowing in?

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#74
post #24

Is it possible for people to source or certify sustainable Bitcoin? Since there is a transaction chain, can you choose to buy or boycott “dirty coins”?

I can't see why not. A government could require exchanges to prevent (or even just delay or tax) the sale of Bitcoins that originate from miners that cannot be shown to have used renewable energy to produce the block. The government could, for example, physically inspect the mining rig, certify it as renewable-powered, and require that the miner uses a particular keypair to sign their blocks in order to identify them as "green." Exchanges use this (government-issued) keypair to determine which Bitcoins are "green," and apply whatever restrictions are necessary on those that are not.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#76

What’s the bandwidth from a probe close to the sun with a Bitcoin miner on it? Beam back the coin, we can wait. Or, mine it near the sun and then bring it back. Could take 20 years, but the returns should be better than the SPY. We’d need a spaceship I guess with the largest solar panels ever. Park it near the sun, mine Bitcoin, come back to earth.

Mining is a race. If you have X seconds latency because you are millions of miles away, you’ll loose $Y over the long run. You can figure out the function which ties X and Y together.

if you have more mining machines because it's powered by a "free" source of energy, the latency will be beaten easily by just increasing the amount of tries you get to do.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#77

This crypto-currency nonsense is getting out of hands.

When profits are being made, who cares what happens to future generations. Cryptocurrency is, for the most part, a contagion. We opened Pandora's box and the genie is out of the bottle. Short of some kind of cataclysmic black swan event, I'm not sure this insanity will end anytime soon. :(

This is one of the few energy consumers that has a pretty straightforward solution: switch to proof of stake. You can't magically switch all existing cars to be 100% electric, but you actually can kind of magically switch all cryptocurrencies to consume orders of magnitude less energy.

The question is if Bitcoin will ever try to switch to it. Unfortunately, it seems like they probably won't anytime soon.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#79
post #75

Well its the cost of a decentralized safe currency, at the end of the day its the users who pay for it, and I gladly pay for it. Keep using your fiat if you want.

Sorry my dude, but we are all paying for this in the ridiculous carbon emissions, whether we we are part of this experiment or not. Save the snark.

Re: Bitcoin miners are buying power plants

#80
post #65
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perverse, just like almost every other form of economic activity on this planet, eg. farming (fertilizer/herbicide run-off), mining (tailing ponds), factories (air/ground/water pollution). The underlying reason is simple: externalities aren't being priced in, which allows the owners of such operations to make money while everyone pays the price.

None of what you listed are similar cases. Farming produced food to eat. Mining produces minerals to build things with. Factories produce goods. Bitcoin produces... A series of bits that some people will pay money for? It seems like bitcoin is basically fine art at this point.

It goes back to what you mean by "perverse". For me it's "business reaping the benefits but passing the costs to someone else". For you it seems to be "pollution being generated but nothing 'useful' is being done". Is that an accurate characterization?

>Mining produces minerals to build things with

are you forgetting the yellow stuff that we hoard in vaults and hang on our bodies, or carbon crystals that we put on our fingers?

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