91–100 of 209 posts
Electricity there is very cheap (ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 US cents per kWh). The government has closed around 300 mining facilities in order to reduce energy shortages. There are tens of such videos on the Youtube channel.
We should define something like a "Nakamoto scale" . A Nakamoto Type I civilization would be one that converts all available power of a planet into waste heat and funny numbers, a Nakamoto Type II civilization does that with all the power output of a star and so on... basically the Kardashev scale [0] but with the restriction that useful output SHOULD NOT be produced [1]. Edit: lowered requirement level from MUST NOT…
Thermodynamically, life can be described as an open system which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of itself.
Crypto currencies still have a problem with creating copies of itself, but humans are happy to oblige.
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Heat pumps are approximately three times as efficient as electric heating.
They also don't provide very much heat output when it's cold outside
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They also don't provide very much heat output when it's cold outside
It needs to be really cold. Like -15°C and some go as low as -40°C. They degrade in efficiency but are still better than a space heater. In the worst case they are exactly as efficient as a space heater.
As I understand most heat pumps in cold climates are usually installed with "backup heat" sources for this reason.
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It needs to be really cold. Like -15°C and some go as low as -40°C. They degrade in efficiency but are still better than a space heater. In the worst case they are exactly as efficient as a space heater.
Sure, but at the point where the efficiency is sufficiently poor, why not run a Bitcoin miner instead of the heat-pump-turned-space-heater? As I understand most heat pumps in cold climates are usually installed with "backup heat" sources for this reason.
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Abkhazia is a Georgian territory occupied by Russia. Russia is the #1 reason for poverty in the region.
I'm in no way supporter of Putins regime and I totally agree that he'll do everything to keep all countries around poor and unstable, but come on. Original war in Abkhazia happened when USSR crashed and it was your usual ethnic conflict. Not some orchestrated hybrid war like in Ukraine, but real civil war. I've been in both Abkhazia and Georgia and people of both countries relise that and count themself the righteous…
Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds.
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Sure, but at the point where the efficiency is sufficiently poor, why not run a Bitcoin miner instead of the heat-pump-turned-space-heater? As I understand most heat pumps in cold climates are usually installed with "backup heat" sources for this reason.
A mining rig that runs only a few days per year when the outside temperature is too low sounds very inefficient. This is the same problem that the plan to store excess renewable energy by producing hydrogen has. If you have the hardware, you would want to have it running as much as possible.
I warned about this a few weeks ago, and people were skeptical. But sadly “in retrospect it is inevitable”. Where is the flaw? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26220992 Let me refine my prediction to describe the transition period. Bitcoin will actually deepen inequality in the world, by robbing the third world countries of electricity first, and no one in first world countries will care. The politicians of the t…
The flaw is greed.
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"This crypto experiment keeps yielding more interesting results." I completely agree. I don't pay attention to a lot (or any) online economic circles, but I'm astounded at the pushback of high profile economists (Krugman, et al) against the shear novelty of the moment for their discipline. Regardless of whether or not someone "believes" in bitcoin, the reality of the times is that cryptocurrencies are creating fantas…
These “experiments” have real life consequences on ”subjects” who never agreed to be part of it. We should maybe create a crypto-country where crypto-currencies fanatics are free to experiment all of this on themselves instead of all of us… (it’s a joke, please don’t create a crypto country!)