Ok. Now point at one of the AI datacenters for making titty pics and get back to us. Absolute corporate shilling / distraction.
Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#72The government(s) could tax bitcoin mining servers with 1000% tax.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#73This 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.
We stare at screens full of text and pictures every day. We had screens full of text and pictures 20 years ago. Yet somehow we have justified re-creating every single component multiple times over, spending hundreds of trillions of dollars, to get the same thing we had 20 years ago.
We've been able to talk to machines, have them understand that speech, and do work based on it, for decades. But we're all still typing into keyboards.
We've had devices which can track our eyes to move a mouse pointer for 37 years, but we all still use our hands/thumbs to move a mouse.
We had mobile devices which had dedicated keys for input which allowed us to input without looking, and we replaced those with mobile devices with no dedicated keys (so we have to look to provide input) and bodies made of glass so they would shatter when dropped and required additional plastic coverings to protect them. Even automobiles, where safety is a high priority, also adopted input devices which require looking away from the road.
Our world includes a government which is indented to be led via decisions from all the people, and could easily be overthrown by all the people, but only a select few people actually get to make decisions, and they don't have to listen to the people, and basically do whatever they want (wrt the other few people who get to make decisions).
Yes, life is needlessly absurd. It's best not to think about it unless you wanna end up in a padded room.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Well, at least until somebody devises a system that transports or projects it so that the heat ends up somewhere not-Earth. It'd still be heating the universe in general, of course, even in the form of sprays of neutrinos.
That reminds me of a sci-fi book, Sundiver by David Brin, where a ship is exploring the sun by firing a "refrigerator laser" to somehow pump-away excess heat and balance on the thrust.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#75So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use? Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math
I think a large steel foundry uses approximately 1/10 of the power of this facility. Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne Production : 150 t/hr 500*150 = 75 MW/h
I'm not 100% but I think you may have confused watts and watt hours somewhere in there. Wouldn't it be X kWh/ton?
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#76So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use? Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math
You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.
A third of my bill is the "base services" charge.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.
These discussions often turn into a ‘is this per hour? Per year?’ Discussion, which I find irritating. And now I’m that guy. Is this a daily usage thing? I test based on my home usage and the numbers seem way out. I use about 25kWh per day.
Isnt 3000x more per day, the same as 3000x more per year? Or 3000x more per unit price?
I have a smaller house, we use about 13kWh per day. 4kw highest spike during the day around 5-7pm when people are cooking and doing laundry.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
The minimum amount of energy needed to compute decreased asymptotically to 0 as the temperature of space goes to 0. This is the reason a common sci-fi trope where advanced civilizations hibernate for extremely long times so that they can do more computation with available energy.
That’s a common trope? Can’t say I’ve run into it. But I’d like to! What are some good examples?
In the book Calculating God, a character notes that this is a common civilization-wide choice. Living in virtual reality, rather than trying to expand into the vast expanses of space, is a common trope as much as it's a logical choice. It neatly explains the Fermi Paradox. In some fiction, like The Matrix, the choice might be forced due to cultural shifts, but the outcome is the same. A relatively sterile low-energy state civilization doing pure processing.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#79Earlier 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.
I read it as the inefficient part isn't the compute efficiency, the inefficient part is dumping all the resulting heat into the environment without capturing it and using it in some way to generate electricity or do work. On a related/side note, when there's talk about seti and dyson spheres, and detecting them via infrared waste heat, I also don't understand that. Such an alien civilization is seemingly capable of b…
All energy inevitably changes into heat eventually, and in the steady state, power in = power out.
There is no way to get rid of heat. It has to go somewhere; otherwise, the temperature of the system will increase without bound.
Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
These discussions often turn into a ‘is this per hour? Per year?’ Discussion, which I find irritating. And now I’m that guy. Is this a daily usage thing? I test based on my home usage and the numbers seem way out. I use about 25kWh per day.
Isnt 3000x more per day, the same as 3000x more per year? Or 3000x more per unit price? I have a smaller house, we use about 13kWh per day. 4kw highest spike during the day around 5-7pm when people are cooking and doing laundry.
I was trying to work backwards to see what they were using as their ‘per house’ measure.
Your usage is very low. Do you use electricity for water heating and cooking? If so, that’s impressive.
We do, and charge a car.