China’s Inner Mongolia Declares War on Crypto Mining

[IkeaGnome]

1 hour ago, Dracarris said:

If that is true for Canada - good for you. I yet have to be shown a house in the US with double-pane windows.

Double pane aren't the end all be all... It sounds to me like you live somewhere that seems to get cold, but doesn't really compared to Alaska, Canada, Russia, Nordic countries etc.

Spoiler

That picture was after a month or so below -30F(-34C) and almost a week below -40.

 

[Dracarris]

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

That's fine for recently built houses, any houses build prior the 80's (roughly) might have asbestos, and older houses (like mine) might also have lead paint. As long as the walls aren't touched, there no issues, if I want to redo the insulation, then it means I have to hire a special company for the clean up and removal of the drywall and insulation ... that's not money I have.

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Not possible, I'm not attached to the main gaz line, just getting attached means a few thousands. Then there's the issue of the furnace, I can't just install something like this in my house, see above points about asbestos and lead pain.

It baffles me how people still live in houses with asbestos and lead paint, afaik where I live all such buildings are mandatory to be renovated and freed from such substances by law. Seriously: All your excuses boil down to: I have an old house that I could get for cheap and are not ready to invest any money in modernizing it. Guess what, being envrionmental friendly and having state-of-the-art infrastructure does cost money, and it is insanely short-sighted to only look at the net cost you as an individual have over time period x. Older, less environmental-friendly things will always be cheaper, and if we all follow this principle, we'll be collectively in deep trouble very soon. This is why a lot of countries (thankfully) enforce minimum standards for things like cars and houses (not only for newly bought ones).

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Yes, spending almost tens of thousands of dollars to change the insulation on a house doesn't make sense unless there are other issues. It's a few hundred dollars per year. Even over 20 years, it's not worth fixing until the wall need to be opened.

There are other issues: Your house is not environmental friendly. Being a house owner means having to invest quite large amounts of money to keep it up to standard and in shape.

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

That has a VERY limited use, not sure why you even included that one.

How do you arrive at this? In Europe, whole urban/municipal areas are heated in that way. It is a perfect solution for densely populated areas - like Vancouver/Surrey.

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

Nope, heat pumps CAN'T function under a specific outdoor temperature, it has nothing to do with insulation.

Then don't install them in areas that regularly see such outdoor temperatures. Why do you do it (as someone else already asked)?

21 minutes ago, wkdpaul said:

... TV shows and YT isn't a good sample size. There are PLENTY of houses in the US that have double-pane windows. In northern states it's pretty much standards as they see similar climates as Canada.

Seems like you're completely stuck in some preconceived knowledge about how Canada and the US is and that you're putting us all in one giant group ... pretty sure living styles in Spain aren't the same as northern EU countries, same with US states (Texas doesn't have the same building regulation and needs as Maine).

I lived for 6 months in upstate New York close to the Canadian border, with temperatures between -30 and +40 deg Celsius. And there was single pane windows, everywhere.

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Moonzy said:

Thermodynamics would like to have a word with you '-'

 

If I'm not mistaken, if your objective is to heat up an object, your efficiency is pretty much near 100% already if you use resistive heating

 

Resistive heating is the least efficient, but this requires looking at the generation source:

 

- coal, oil, or natural gas(and variants like burning gasses at oil refineries and gasses from garbage/organic sources) is more efficient to directly burn for heat. This is why it should not be used for generating electricity, especially in environments that could directly use the heat (eg Alaska.) what makes this more asinine is burning coal for air conditioning. Even nuclear is better.

 

- solar is inefficient for heating/air conditioning, but any waste heat generated by using it can be repurposed for heating (eg mining/gaming.) Otherwise it’s better used in conjunction with heat pumps.

- geothermal and hydroelectric use steam/falling water that either already exists or has been engineered to do so. So ideally you would siphon off some heat from geothermal to actually heat housing systems using steam systems, but also generate electricity for cooking and spot heating/air conditioning. 
 

(This is why natural gas is never going away as well. Gas furnaces and stoves are far more efficient than all electric heating systems and are faster for tankless water heating.)

 

When you have wind, hydro, solar or tidal power available, there is no “burning” or heating involved, so if a byproduct of your activity generates heat that you can use for heating in cold months, you actually save energy. (Relatively speaking, cooling  costs are increased in warm months, so it may be a net cost anyway.)

 

On the flip side, if fuel is burned to generate electricity, than its a lot less efficient (eg 35%) to generate the electricity from heat to electricity and then to heat again, hitting the environment multiple times in the process.

 

Thats why baseboard electric heating is popular for crappy housing, it’s cheap, inefficient, and expensive to operate. But you only need to heat the room you are in. Heat pumps are the most efficient, and next to that any fuel-operated boiler system. Electric forced air furnaces require a stupid amount of  energy, and heat the whole building at once. That’s great if every space needs it, but typically you only live out of one room at a time.

 

The most efficient compromise is radiant floor heating, but it’s difficult to install and is readily a shock hazard for pets and clumsy people like Linus.

Like in British Columbia, Canada, one of three tells a luxury building is not luxury at all is if you see baseboard heating. The next is stainless steel appliances with wood veneer/painted cabinets. The last is closets you can’t walk inside of.
 

Luxury properties all have gas fireplaces, gas stoves, heat pumps/radiant floors, solid wood cabinets, something solid other than Granite countertops (granite is the bare minimum for BC, anything less is won’t sell except to someone who is going to flip it.)

 

It’s kinda funny really. The cheapest worst housing and the best housing all have heating designed to save energy, but all the condo buildings have the worst heating/insulation setup and as a result most of them are now rotting from the inside. And they wonder why their insurance is skyrocketing.

 

Before we drift too far off topic, I would like to see someone actually do a controlled test where “Mining pc’s” are used to heat rooms independently, and one where baseboard electric heating is used to heat the room to the same temperature and see how much energy the two use to maintain that temperature.

 

[WkdPaul]

45 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

It baffles me how people still live in houses with asbestos and lead paint, afaik where I live all such buildings are mandatory to be renovated and freed from such substances by law.

Sadly, that's not a thing here.

 

Quote

Seriously: All your excuses boil down to: I have an old house that I could get for cheap and are not ready to invest any money in modernizing it.

Again, that's all assumptions ; my house cost me $500 000 CAD, and it's not in a good state, recent houses that are in good shape around me are close, or over 1 million ... I'm sorry that I only have the budget I have and that I'm not a millionaire I guess.

 

To get an idea of the properties in my area ;

https://www.realtor.ca/map#ZoomLevel=15&Center=45.521517%2C-73.678488&LatitudeMax=45.53027&LongitudeMax=-73.65273&LatitudeMin=45.51277&LongitudeMin=-73.70424&Sort=1-D&PropertyTypeGroupID=1&PropertySearchTypeId=1&TransactionTypeId=2&BuildingTypeId=1&Currency=CAD

 

 

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There are other issues: Your house is not environmental friendly. Being a house owner means having to invest quite large amounts of money to keep it up to standard and in shape.

Yes, I'm aware of that, that's why we're having the second floor renovated this summer, just that will be above $40k (walls and roof insulation, electrical work, windows changed, etc...). Then years down the line, when I have the money, I'll do the ground floor. I owned a property before, and I know all this, so there's not need for the condescending tone.

 

 

 

Quote

How do you arrive at this? In Europe, whole urban/municipal areas are heated in that way. It is a perfect solution for densely populated areas - like Vancouver/Surrey.

Because it's true, North America isn't densely populated, as such, HERE in North America, it would have a very limited use.

 

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Then don't install them in areas that regularly see such outdoor temperatures. Why do you do it (as someone else already asked)?

Because efficiency ? I'm utterly confused here, why do you think it's used ? Because we're idiot that love to throw money out the window ?

 

Heat pumps are efficient UP TO A CERTAIN POINT, and they allow for heating AND cooling (AC in summer, heating in winter), here in Canada, most of the supplemental heating will be electrical, because we produce electricity mainly with hydro and it's dirt cheap. Other places in the US, and in some places in Canada, the supplemental heating is either going to be oil or gas, because in those are, that's what's going to be cheaper.

 

 

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I lived for 6 months in upstate New York close to the Canadian border, with temperatures between -30 and +40 deg Celsius. And there was single pane windows, everywhere.

No sure what to say, most people I know and places I've been have double-panes, never once saw single panes in the northern states I've been (Been to TX and VA and they do have single pane there, but not that I've seen in ME, VT or NY).

[Dracarris]

7 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

Yes, I'm aware of that, that's why we're having the second floor renovated this summer, just that will be above $40k (walls and roof insulation, electrical work, windows changed, etc...). Then years down the line, when I have the money, I'll do the ground floor.

That's cool But won't that bring all the problems about asbestos and lead paint you mentioned before (I am a bit confused, before you said you can't invest into insulation)?

7 hours ago, wkdpaul said:

Because it's true, North America isn't densely populated, as such, HERE in North America, it would have a very limited use.

Whether or not this method (apparently called district heating in English) can be used does not depend on how densily populated a country as a whole is. A fundamental aspect of the concept is that it is applied very localized to small, but densily populated areas like citys and towns. And North America has a lot of those, with a ton of people living and households being there that you can cover. Matter of fact, it is widely used and growing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Canada

Quote

District Heating is becoming a growing industry in Canadian cities, with many new systems being built in the last ten years.

Quite interesting: Both Surrey and Vancouver do have such systems.

[starry]

Is any of this stuff really the fault of individuals who use more power than you, or is it the fact that in the grand scheme of things, those in power will continue to use toxic materials and pollutant power sources because its more profitable? Would anyone even be having this conversation if the world ran on solar? Absolutely not, because burning electricity for financial gain wouldn't be valid scape goat to hate on crypto. A lot of people continue to act like its the fault of everyone around them that the earth is dying but really were all in this shit boat and were just trying to live on it. I'm not trying to absolve humanity of responsibility, just pointing out that a lot of the time blame is misplaced, and generally when I see stuff like "x is killing the environment because it uses a moderate amount of power", the writer doesnt actually care about the environment, just fanning their own hatred for x thing.

 

Might as well skewer everyone who cooks a lot while youre at it. That takes power too.

[Dracarris]

17 minutes ago, starry said:

Might as well skewer everyone who cooks a lot while youre at it. That takes power too.

People tend to forget the scale on which mining consumes power. We are talking multiple 100s of Watts for a single mining rig that are constantly, 24/7, sucked from the grid. Exactly this is what makes the big difference, not the amount of power, but the 24/7 usage. Even if you cook a lot, you have the stove maybe running for 2-3h per day. Even a hardcore gamer which uses his PC for 8-10h a day has the average CPU and GPU utilization nowhere close to 100% during gaming and between 0-10% during all other times.

 

Running my 1060 / 6700K for mining would literally double to triple our electricity bill for a two-person household, which includes cooking multiple times a day, fridge, washing machine, dry tumblr, entertainment systems, three 4K screens running 8h+ a day in home office and so on.

 

The scale of mining energy consumption becomes clear when you think about what could be done instead with the amount of energy that is used. You can literally chose between supplying a full additional household or a mining rig. And I think this is quite insane.

[Moonzy]

4 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Running my 1060 / 6700K for mining would literally double to triple our electricity bill for a two-person household, which includes cooking multiple times a day, fridge, washing machine, dry tumblr, entertainment systems, three 4K screens running 8h+ a day in home office and so on.

How many kwh do you use a month, if I may ask?

[Dracarris]

4 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

How many kwh do you use a month, if I may ask?

214 at an all time high during lockdown with two people working from home, otherwise between 135 and 165.

 

Running a 300W rig constantly for 30days causes 216kWh. I think this paints a very clear picture.

[Kisai]

50 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

 Matter of fact, it is widely used and growing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#Canada

Quite interesting: Both Surrey and Vancouver do have such systems.

This is only in use in very limited application because the vast majority of BC is hydro-electric.

 

You need a lot of context for this, because new construction never has it. 

 

Central Heat Distribution LTD, has been around for decades, but it powers only very specific 180 old-construction buildings (built between 1960 and 2000,) and some new-construction. That's because the steam plant has a fixed capacity.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/720-beatty-street-vancouver-office-tower-approved

Quote

An agreement has been reached to use an unused void space underneath BC Place next to Expo Boulevard for an expansion of the steam plant. There will also be new electric boilers in the basement levels of the office building through a BC Hydro connection, replacing the long-running use of natural gas. Creative Energy says there will be no increase in cost for end users.

This is what "industrial" level electricity use is like. So if the steam plant operates continuously, that is still more efficient than retrofitting the buildings using it to use electricity alone for heating. Especially since the buildings that use the steam system are basically all located on the downtown peninsula  (about 4km^2) and there's not a lot of pre-1950 construction there.

 

The Northwood plant (which is the other one) was built for the 2010 Olympic Village, which is just south of the downtown peninsula. It runs on gas. Collectively Vancouver's district heating covers the highest-density portion of the City of Vancouver, that's it. Everything else is at the two Universities (of which the UBC steam tunnels get used in a lot of film/tv show shoots.)

 

Surrey's system is a heatpump, but like the Central Heat LTD's system, it covers only a very small portion of the city (basically the Whalley city center, but they plan to have them at all three population centers.)  It's also unique to BC as it takes advantage of the geology of BC. It currently heats 17 buildings.

https://www.surrey.ca/vision-goals/sustainability-energy-initatives/surrey-city-energy

 

So that's three different district heating sources in Metro Vancouver, two using gas. There are more:

https://bcbioenergy.ca/resources/district-energy-systems/

 

Anyway, BC is probably where you'll find heat pumps in high-end housing. Also note the co-generation projects on the same site, many of those are at existing pulpmill locations.

 

 

 

[Moonzy]

16 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

214 at an all time high during lockdown with two people working from home, otherwise between 135 and 165.

 

Running a 300W rig constantly for 30days causes 216kWh. I think this paints a very clear picture.

I see, that's awfully low considering the things you mentioned

 

My family of 3 uses about 500-600kwh a month, before considering mining

And we don't cook on electric, nor own a dryer, nor watch TV, the only thing we use is air-conditioning while we sleep, and three fridges, I guess

 

But let's take that 216kwh as fact

A 1060 6gb consumes 90W while mining, adding 50W for the rest of the idling system (pretty standard and accurate from my experience), you get 140W, considering your PSU is 90% efficient, that's 155W from the wall

 

155W*24*30=  111.6 kwh,  not really

29 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Running my 1060 / 6700K for mining would literally double to triple our electricity bill for a two-person household

That you claimed

[Jet_ski]

[Dracarris]

14 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

I see, that's awfully low considering the things you mentioned

That's because we have modern and energy-efficient devices and appliances.

14 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

155W*24*30=  111.6 kwh,  not really

That you claimed

So we just let the 6700K slip under the carpet? I claimed 1060/6700K mining constantly. Even leaving the CPU out of the picture and assuming the actual numbers are as low as you claim, that is an awful lot of energy compared to the non-mining consumption. And any current mining rig most probably consumes a lot more than 155W; at this point my system is more than 4 years old and average power consumption of especially GPUs has increased a lot.

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Dracarris said:

I claimed 1060/6700K mining constantly

Only an idiot would mine on a 6700k, let's be realistic here

 

You might as well say u can mine on a gtx480 then, if you wanna go that route

 

2 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

that is an awful lot of energy compared to the non-mining consumption.

It is, just not double or triple of a 2 person household, as it's never true from my experience as well

[Dracarris]

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Only an idiot would mine on a 6700k, let's be realistic here

 

You might as well say u can mine on a gtx480 then, if you wanna go that route

That is not the point here. Take any system that has both a CPU and GPU that is suitable for mining, which is the usual case for miners and take its power consumption.

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

It is, just not double or triple of a 2 person household, as it's never true from my experience as well

Even a 200W system would literally double our consumption (144 for mining vs the stated 135-165).

[Moonzy]

18 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Take any system that has both a CPU and GPU that is suitable for mining, which is the usual case for miners and take its power consumption.

the only CPU that's profitable in mining is the ryzen 3000 and 5000 series... even then idk if it's still true today

i never gave much thought to it nowadays since the profitability of it dropped and it barely broke even, the wattage is better suited to go to a GPU instead

 

21 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

Even a 200W system would literally double our consumption (144 for mining vs the stated 135-165).

sure

 

so... what's wrong with that again?

 

On 3/10/2021 at 2:33 AM, Moonzy said:

This is a subjective view, with regards to whether it's a waste of energy or not, so let's not continue on this point

 

Saying mining is damaging to the environment is agreed upon, but whether it's wasted energy is subjective, and from what I read, some say profiting isn't a good reason to use energy, and some disagrees, both sides arguments are subjective and we'll never see an end to it

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Dracarris said:

That is not the point here. Take any system that has both a CPU and GPU that is suitable for mining, which is the usual case for miners and take its power consumption.

CPUs in mining systems are exclusively idle, as such the package power is very low. The original stated power figures given by @Moonzywould be accurate even for a 6700K system.

 

If I have a look at real time package power of my 4930K (with an OC applied and increased vcore) it is ~40W with few Chrome windows open with decent number of tabs open in each, and a few background apps. A 6700K would be less than this, and in a mining configuration it wouldn't be OC'd and vcore wouldn't be increased. That does depend though if you are a gamer who mines on the side like I do, then it would have both of these applied but still the CPU would be idle anyway.

[leadeater]

2 hours ago, Moonzy said:

the only CPU that's profitable in mining is the ryzen 3000 and 5000 series... even then idk if it's still true today

CPU mining never was a real thing and never will be, even when it's net profit the amount is so low it's just not worth it. The only people that would ever mine on a CPU are people that have free power, or are doing it out of interest

[Moonzy]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

CPU mining never was a real thing and never will be, even when it's net profit the amount is so low it's just not worth it. The only people that would ever mine on a CPU are people that have free power, or are doing it out of interest

There's a new algo released in 2019 November, exclusively on CPU to mine monero

 

It's been decent throughout 2020, but during December the profitability dropped a lot so I stopped my 3900x from mining

My 3900x only runs at 70W while performing 90% of the performance of a stock 3900x at 140W, still barely breaks even lol

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

There's a new algo released in 2019 November, exclusively on CPU to mine monero

Yep, but I don't think many actually do it. Wendell talked about it during one of his server videos and how it was fairly good on an EPYC system, but still not actually worth it.

Edited March 12, 2021 by leadeater

[Moonzy]

7 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Yep, but I don't think many actually do it. Wendell talked about it during one of this server videos and how it was fairly good on an EPYC system, but still not actually worth it.

Yeah it's not worth spending the extra on CPU to mine it

 

The money is better spent on a GPU, literally 5-10x the income per dollar spent lol

 

Ask me how I know

[LAwLz]

15 hours ago, Moonzy said:

I have no comments on other heating method as I'm unfamiliar with them and what will it take for them to operate at wider temperature ranges, so I focus on what's available now, which is resistive heating.

 

But, do you agree that mining is equivalent as resistive in term of heat per watt, and that mining is also generating some income while resistive heating doesn't?

Or is there any downside to mining compared to resistive heating that I haven't thought of?

If you're interested, Technology Connections released a video last week about heat pumps. He has lots of great videos about thermal-related stuff.

Heat pumps are far more efficient than resistive heating. The heat pump he uses in the video provides about 5.5 times as much heating per watt as resistive heating in ideal conditions. And as he says, it works even when it's cold outside (like some of my relatives here in Sweden can attest to) although at a lower efficiency. On average, including the below-freezing months, it is about 3 times as efficient as resistive heating.

 

 

[WkdPaul]

7 hours ago, Dracarris said:

That's cool But won't that bring all the problems about asbestos and lead paint you mentioned before (I am a bit confused, before you said you can't invest into insulation)?

We don't have the money for the whole house, no

 

We're doing this because when we bought the house, the inspector found a few issues with the roof and it's insulation, so that was always something we were going to do, also, the 2 rooms at the front of the house were joined into one giant master bedroom, it's way too big and so we decided to re-divide it, but to do that we need to rebuild part of the hallway, and a few other things. We also found issues with both windows in that master bedroom, so in the end, we decided to do it all at once in a "while we're doing A, B, and C, might as well do everything" type of thing.

 

Like I said, we don't have the money, but it needs to be done, and it would cost more to do one thing at a time, only to go back a year later to do something else. The money is going to out of our mortgage (we have line of credit as part of the mortgage, so that's where the money is going to come from).

 

When that'll be paid off, we'll look into doing the ground floor (mostly due to electrical issues and the kitchen needing a refresh and a new floor), but that will be a lot more expensive since that includes the kitchen and we won't be able to live in the house while the ground floor is being worked on. In then end, that might be over $100k for the whole house, it's not cheap (but still cheaper than buying a house with no issues, see my previous post about houses selling for up to a million ... i's insane IMO), and all that will not lower our electricity bill by much (though we'll have heat pumps installed for cooling and partial heating, s that will help for sure), but it's an investment on the value of the house.

 

And that's how most people view this, not as a way to save on electricity, but as an investment so that the house can be sold for a much higher price later, an unmaintained house will still go up in value, but not as much, and from what we saw from our last property, every $ invested, brings back at least double when sold.

 

 

And BTW, if we didn't buy that house, someone else would've, and it wouldn't change how energy inefficient it is, but at least with me mining, I'm getting money back that I can use for small things around the house, instead of it being purely wasted with electrical baseboards heating.

[Moonzy]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

The heat pump he uses in the video provides about 5.5 times as much heating per watt as resistive heating in ideal conditions.

Yes I'm somewhat familiar with what a heat pump is, just not enough to know how hard it is to make it operate at a wider temperature range, since heat pump operate based on difference in temp between the condenser and the boiler, and if that gets too great then it cease to function

[rand_althor_cometh]

On 3/4/2021 at 12:58 PM, tikker said:

I wonder if it will propagate and more countries will start attacking it more aggressively.

 

Yes people around the world are trying, except the ones that should be. Ideally we all do our part, but still the majority of CO2 still comes from just a few companies. The problem is that green energy is expensive and there are little to no incentives for the big players to switch. Bitcoin is the lesser one to worry about so far in the grand scheme of things. Not to say we shouldn't find an alternative to the mining, it is using a huge amount of power, but also not all from gray energy.

 

 

This is such lazy rheoteric. It's not like those big companies aren't providing something valuable with that CO2 production. Such as power or transportation. They're not calculating a useless hash over and over.