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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

#91

Post by SauntSolaire »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #73
e-dant wrote: post #41

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.

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…

Very mundane explanations for all of these things -- you could basically make a similar argument about anything at anytime if you were to phrase it similarly.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#93

Post by LiamPowell »

devsda wrote: post #89
Workaccount2 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Do thermophotovoltaic cells operate on different kind of heat? Is it impossible to convert heat into other forms of energy without "consuming" materials like in the case of steam, geothermal or even the ones that need a cold body to utilize thermoelectric effect.

TPVs don't rely solely on the temperature of an object being high, they instead rely on two objects on either side having different temperatures. As heat moves[1] from one side to the other some of the energy from that movement is turned in to electricity.

[1]: Technically the movement itself is heat, the objects don't contain heat, rather they contain internal energy, but the two get mixed up more often than not.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#94

Post by dehrmann »

hetspookjee wrote: post #85
kanemcgrath wrote: post #15

I 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 have the feeling that particular energy output does not so much, really. For example this plant in the image is about 700x400m and when multiplied with the suns peak output you already get a potential energy of 280MW. And this site almost triples that. The sun shines practically everywhere, though. Humans produce about 20TW globally at this time (ChatGPT), while the sun adds about 174000TW of energy to the earth. I…

I think that works out to 0.01%? There's some hand-waving around solar radiation in the atmosphere vs. on the surface and double counting some that goes to solar power, but the number looks smaller than the variation in solar output over the solar cycle.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#95

Post by spyder »

stouset wrote: post #37
dangalf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

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.

Only true for our current computers and not true with reversible computing. With reversible computing you can use electricity to perform a calculation and then "push" that electricity back into a battery or a capacitor instead of dumping it to the environment. It's still a huge challenge, but there is a recent promising attempt:

"British reversible computing startup Vaire has demonstrated an adiabatic reversible computing system with net energy recovery"

https://www.eetimes.com/vaire-demos-energy-recovery-with-rev...

https://vaire.co/

Short introduction video to reversible computing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmZTGeIwnc

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#97

Post by sixtyj »

dangalf wrote: post #17
theamk wrote: post #2

"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.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

They could make a second floor with eggs and newborn chicken. /s

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#99

Post by charcircuit »

dangalf wrote: post #17
theamk wrote: post #2

"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.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

The electricity is doing computer things, building bitcoin blocks.

Re: Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

#100

Post by tasuki »

stouset wrote: post #37
dangalf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.

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.

> every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.

Yes it ends up as heat, but with some forethought, it could be used to eg heat people's homes rather than as waste.

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