Crypto Miners buying up entire power plants

[Guest willies leg]

5 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Nowhere in the article does it say it is fossil fuel that are being used. 

In fact, the original source (Curbed) that the futurism article links to clearly states that they bought a hydroelectric dam.

 

This is just another example of the LTT forum having no idea what they are talking about and start seething with anger as soon as cryptocurrencies gets mentioned.

If you actually care about the environment like you seem to imply you do, then you should welcome these news with open arms. This is literally an old abandoned environmentally friendly power plan being powered on again to power cryptomining, rather than cryptomining being powered by other, dirtier power sources.

These are good news for the environment. More renewable energy using infrastructure that has just been sitting there doing nothing.

At least this particular news article.

 

Not sure why you put "job" in quotes. It is their job, whether you like it or not.

 

The article is misleading.

In NY they burn fossil fuels at those specific power plants. Used to burn coal. Now natural gas and other fossil fuel. Not solar, not wind, nothing green about that.

 

You don't buy a power plant to be clean.

 

You buy a bunch of land and put up solar panels or windmills.

 

I remember when burning fossil fuels was bad, caused acid rain too.

 

[LAwLz]

21 minutes ago, willies leg said:

The article is misleading.

In NY they burn fossil fuels at those specific power plants. Used to burn coal. Now natural gas and other fossil fuel. Not solar, not wind, nothing green about that.

I think you missed the part where like 80% of the article on Curbed was about the company Core Scientific, which had bought a hydroelectric dam.

There are others that may have bought some coal power plant or some other power plants, but the news piece this article is about is a company buying a hydroelectric dam, which is one of the greener alternatives we got. Not sure why you say the article is misleading.

 

 

25 minutes ago, willies leg said:

You don't buy a power plant to be clean.

Ehm... Yes you do? It depends on what power plant you buy. My housing cooperative recently bought stakes in a solar farm. Of course we had other reasons for buying into that, but clean energy was definingly one of the big factors. Are you seriously going to suggest that anyone buying any type of power plant is not doing it to be "clean"?

 

 

27 minutes ago, willies leg said:

You buy a bunch of land and put up solar panels or windmills.

Am I understanding you currently. You're saying that in your mind, solar panels and windmills are the only clean energy sources? You don't count hydro as clean and people/companies/countries that don't invest in either solar or wind are not doing so to be clean, but for other reasons?

If that's what you think then I think you are rather ignorant about the challenges solar and wind might have in some geographical locations. I just said my housing cooperative bought stakes in a solar power plant. Truth be told, I think it was a terrible idea to build it in the first place. Sweden is notoriously bad for solar power because we barely have any sunlight for half the year. We have very little wind as well outside of a few areas around the coast, so wind power is quite inefficient as well. That's why we rely so much on hydro power. Because it's (outside of nuclear) pretty much the only alternative we got (except the far worse alternatives like coal).

 

I don't know where this hydro power plant is located, but I think it's a very simplistic and naive view of things to just point at anyone not building solar or hydro and say "you're doing it wrong". Especially if we start factoring in the facts that for example this hydro power plant already exists and therefore has a much smaller impact to get working again, compared to let's say getting a massive piece of land, possibly needing to do earthwork on it like excavation and embarkment, install the power grid to the location, manufacture and transport all the solar panels, and the list goes on.

[Kisai]

5 hours ago, Jeppes said:

Hydro dams are not exactly green energy as those have massive effect on ecosystems ocean wide. Fish populations grow smaller as coastal waters get less nutrients because dams stop sediment from getting through. Also huge impact because fish cant go past em upstream.

No point complaining about existing hydroelectic dams. Elsewhere dams are being removed to restore fish ecosystems, too little too late.

 

Fish ladders are a thing, not a very effective thing though. Part of that is due to the kind of resevoir behind the dam. Some dams are extremely tall, and fish do not stand a chance of navigating them. Others are simply not hydro-electric and are rather tailings ponds which is a consequence of mineral mining.

 

 https://thefisheriesblog.com/2021/03/23/do-fish-ladders-work/ reports fish ladders are at most 60% effective.

 

Anyways.

https://decrypt.co/73374/bitcoin-miners-win-reprieve-new-york-lets-anti-mining-bill-die

Quote

The authors of Senate Bill S6486B were nonetheless concerned about the precedent being set in the state, as Greenidge and other Bitcoin mining firms had taken up residence in closed fossil fuel power plants. Those plants, the bill said, were shut down "due to reduced energy demand, improved transmission capacity and non-economic carbon-based fuel sources."

 

Rebooting them was counterproductive in legislators' eyes. 

 

It probably doesn't take much to thought to connect point A (bitcoin) to point B (closed power plant), and honestly the only way they're going to make a dent in this is by banning the use of coal, oil and natural gas in any form, and that's just... not practical. At best they could ban the use of coal to power things, but as long as oil and gas are still used for residential and commercial scale heating (think water boilers in apartments, condos, hotels, and stove/ovens in resturants/kitchens,) it's never going to happen. Simply banning one form of cryptomining just means another will take it's place.

 

[Moonzy]

Aight boys, let's wrap it up

Hydro power is now evil as well

[BuckGup]

22 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 and honestly the only way they're going to make a dent in this is by banning the use of coal, oil and natural gas in any form, and that's just... not practical. 

 

The world could currently run off 100% clean nuclear power but people are stubborn. So it's not necessarily a logistics thing but human. 

[lostcattears]

What service or what does crypto mining produce? What value does it have for a countries to not out right ban crypto? Does the service or produce of mining justify the value of the coins? Because that is a whole lot of energy consumption for what seems to be done with very little work.

[StDragon]

8 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Wind creates a lot of noise pollution which disturbs wildlife, requires a ton of area as well which is not available everywhere.

 

Hydro dams, like you said, can affect wildlife where they are installed although that (like solar panels) depends on where they are installed. 

 

We have to pick our battles. Personally, I'd love for nuclear power to become more popular and attract more investments and research, but if I can't get that then I'll be happier with hydro than let's say coal.

 

The power plant the article talks about is old and abandoned. This is not some cryptominer "taking" renewable energy from some other industry.

The result of these news is that we have MORE renewable energy in the world.

Offshore Wind generation is gaining momentum, but maintenance is going to be a big deal given the corrosive nature of the ocean. My gut feeling is that once ROI is met, what remains will be driven to literal ruin and finally abandonment. Time will tell.

 

Nuclear gen 3+ and 4 would be ideal due to the inherent safety in design, but there's still a stigma rebuffed by NIMBY-ism due to historical issues.

I would say that if given the permits, building geothermal plants would make the most sense for Crypto mining. With drilling technology financed by advances in fracking, ironically that makes geothermal more obtainable like never before. It also addresses the pesky issue of not needing to worry about building out high-voltage transmission lines to tie into the grid; at least in the beginning.

[Brooksie359]

5 hours ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

You make a good point, but allow me to rephrase it for you:

 

The environmental and ecological harms done by fossil fuel based power plants far exceeds those done by hydro-electric plants. Therefore, any and all fossil fuel power that is offset by new hydro-electric power would be justified. In the absence of the hydro-electric power, these miners would (arguably) be on the standard grid which relies heavily on fossil fuels, so this constitutes a harm reduction.

 

I could buy that. But it hangs on the self-interested agency of the miners. We as a society have the option to do better. We could decide collectively that the hydro-power be used to offset existing fossil fuel power, instead of using it to add new power consumption to the grid. In so doing, we would more greatly reduce the harms done by generating the power that we need.

 

(This is called "steelmanning" by the way. The opposite of a "strawman". I made the best version of your argument, before contradicting it.)

(and this is "strawmanning", you constructed an obviously weaker version of my argument so you could knock it down, because you aren't tough enough to handle my actual argument ).

 

You don't seem to follow the logic. I think you should take a closer reading of what I said:

In case economics isn't your forte:

 

Opportunity Cost: The loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.

 

                Relevant question: What is the cost of using this energy for this purpose, rather than using it for the next best alternative?

 

Resource Allocation: The assignment of available resources to various uses. Resource allocation arises as an issue because the resources of a society are in limited supply, whereas human wants are usually unlimited, and because any given resource can have many alternative uses.

 

                Relevant question: Is powering this mining facility with our limited renewable energy the best allocation of our resources?

I never actually scrutinized the generation of the energy. I merely posed the question:

Which you have not answered. Granted, it is a difficult question to answer.

Well I am just gonna say that your are fairly optimistic about human nature because I doubt the sort of change you talk about would ever happen. Unfortunately miners will continue to mine regardless of what other people think and there is little that will stop it so imo them using renewable is the best possible outcome knowing that there isn't a way to stop them from doing it in the first place. 

[Bombastinator]

This is predictable.  Cryptomining uses ever increasing amounts of electricity.  Eventually it will become too expensive to make and the supply of new cryptocoin will dry up except for those stealing power to make it. It’s been out of the hands of small (non billionaire) players for years.  Look at nicehash.  Do you actually make coin yourself?  No.  you make parts of it for another group who gives you some of what you make. The actual production is too rich for your blood. 

[Arika]

This thread went about as well as i thought it would.

 

"cryoto miners are destroying the planet by using so much electricity for nothing"

*crypto miners buy a decommissioned renewable energy power plant to power their GPUs cleanly*

"How dare they!!!!"

 

This tells me it's never been about how much electricity they use and what the effect on the environment is. it's always  been about either the GPU stock or just some underlying hate for miners for some other reason.

[Bombastinator]

18 minutes ago, Arika S said:

This thread went about as well as i thought it would.

 

"cryoto miners are destroying the planet by using so much electricity for nothing"

*crypto miners buy a decommissioned renewable energy power plant to power their GPUs cleanly*

"How dare they!!!!"

 

This tells me it's never been about how much electricity they use and what the effect on the environment is. it's always  been about either the GPU stock or just some underlying hate for miners for some other reason.

One hears what one wishes to.  There isn’t any “unused” hydro.  Hasn’t been for a hundred years.  The problem with hydro is that there isn’t enough of it.  That’s also been true for a hundred years.  Countries have been making wild investments like 3 gorges dam in an attempt to make more hydro. Power is fairly cheap and simple to put into a grid. An “unused” power plant is “unused” because it has an efficiency or environmental problem that caused it to be taken offline.  Levi’s didn’t build or pay for the dam that hydro plant is connected to, the citizens of the area did.  There’s a massive shortage of what “almost exclusive use” means you have clearly chosen it to mean something.  I don’t know what it means practically in this instance.  I’m pretty dang sure a company didn’t buy a hydroelectric dam in the US though.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

1 hour ago, Bombastinator said:

This is predictable.  Cryptomining uses ever increasing amounts of electricity.  Eventually it will become too expensive to make and the supply of new cryptocoin will dry up except for those stealing power to make it. It’s been out of the hands of small (non billionaire) players for years.  Look at nicehash.  Do you actually make coin yourself?  No.  you make parts of it for another group who gives you some of what you make. The actual production is too rich for your blood. 

Yeah, even bigger miners use pools....

Nicehash just takes its cut and makes it Bitcoin.

If I had 500gpus I'd probably still add them to a pool to make my income passive and stable. I'd still get a larger cut if I found a block, but I also make sure it's a predictable amount a day

[Bombastinator]

4 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Yeah, even bigger miners use pools....

Nicehash just takes its cut and makes it Bitcoin.

If I had 500gpus I'd probably still add them to a pool to make my income passive and stable. I'd still get a larger cut if I found a block, but I also make sure it's a predictable amount a day

..and someone is creating the pool. This is my point. Even people bigger than yourself still aren’t big enough to play in a more than employee fashion.  The person that owns the pool is the only player.  Everyone else just works for him.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, overthe6r said:

I like how every thread looses it's context after few hours

 

 

Also, I don't think hydro power is a good thing

 

Hydro power is the only clean, safe, and perpetually last forever without refueling power source. Yes maintenance is required on anything with moving parts, but if the dam is made out entirely of concrete (think Hoover Dam) there's really no way for the dam to fail if the spillways are below the high water mark and capable of draining the reservoir faster than it can be filled in an emergency.

 

Every dam failure, is a result of the dam not being built to withstand high levels of rain (likely due to trying to conserve water for energy generation.) Most existing hydroelectric dams started as flood-control dams and generators were added later. 

 

7 hours ago, Moonzy said:

Aight boys, let's wrap it up

Hydro power is now evil as well

No, I don't know how you get that read off anything here. Dams have been around for literately 3500+ years. What makes them problematic, has really only happened in the last 20 years, as a consequence of climate change and green-energy movements now being taken seriously instead of laughed off. 

 

Two things happen when you dam a river or tributary, you block wildlife that lives in the water (let's not forget that beavers make dams too, and the block a lot more than a concrete dam does, and are responsible for floods and landslides as well when water flows over top of it,) and you destroy farmable land, which is why you want to combine everything when a dam is built. You build it to siphon off some of the river, use it to irrigate the farms nearby, push it through a hydroelectric dam at the end, while filtering farm run-off, and then return the water to the river at the end as clean as it went into the farm in the first place. Large-scale dams do not do this, large scale dams flood entire river valleys turning them into hundred-foot+ deep lakes. But hey, flood control comes at an environmental cost. 

 

The "farm" problem is really not a problem in the first place, while yes maybe it destroys farmland, most dams are not built on "farmable" land to begin with. For example, many river valleys in Western North America, have no farmland other than small tracts leftover from glaciers, which themselves were created by ice plugs blocking the valley before they melted. So you don't put dams on the "farm" land valleys, and instead put the dams on the steep tributaries that are not farmable, and fish ladders for the fish. An example of boneheaded environmental concerns running head first into short-term planning of politicians is the Site C dam in BC. This is a project that should have been built in 1981, but was deferred and still hasn't been built (due to be completed in 2025 now) because energy prices didn't justify the construction costs, and BC Hydro bought from IPP (Independant Power Producers) instead, and most of those IPP's have been dirty energy (burning wood from cogeneration at pulp mills.) 

 

So "oh, wow, we flooded usable farmland" ... that has never been used, and will never be used because it was never economical to farm on, be it transportation or labor, or amount of usable sunshine it gets. The same excuses used to flood other parts of BC (most of BC, WA, OR and CA are steep valleys, so you can't grow a lot of farm things on the rainshadow side of the valley anyway, and the wet side will drown everything else not acclimated to it.) At any rate the solution to this already exists and it's called vertical farming, and is 10-100x more efficient than growing plants in dirt.

 

So, let's propose an actual "use" for cryptomining heat here, what if you got the heat from the energy being burned on cryptomining to heat your hydroponic vertical farms? That's not really any less efficient than resistive heating or heatlamps to maintain thermal equilibrium, and would save burning natural gas in that case. But nobody is doing this, and I can't imagine anyone bothering to do this when the money to be made is on the cryptocoins and not the hydroponic farming.

[Moonzy]

@Kisaididn't think I needed to put /s but ya

I just find it hilarious that no one really cared about the negatives of hydro until mining is involved and we start asking if hydro is worth it

 

Just like no one cared about computer energy consumption until it has to do with mining

[PriitM]

16 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Oh cool. More fossil fuel power plants being powered back on just for the sake of mining virtual currency that people decided to attribute value to. Just what the world needed.

Makes you wonder why there were freak "heatbubbles" around the northern hemisphere this year... truly baffling without ANY explanation...

[PriitM]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

This is predictable.  Cryptomining uses ever increasing amounts of electricity.  Eventually it will become too expensive to make and the supply of new cryptocoin will dry up except for those stealing power to make it. It’s been out of the hands of small (non billionaire) players for years.  Look at nicehash.  Do you actually make coin yourself?  No.  you make parts of it for another group who gives you some of what you make. The actual production is too rich for your blood. 

Investopedia explains what crypto is, if you can read between the lines. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• By mining, you can earn cryptocurrency without having to put down money for it. (Mining rigs still cost money)
• Bitcoin miners receive Bitcoin as a reward for completing "blocks" of verified transactions, which are added to the blockchain. (Pretty much self-explanatory)
• Mining rewards are paid to the miner who discovers a solution to a complex hashing puzzle first, and the probability that a participant will be the one to discover the solution is related to the portion of the total mining power on the network. (More people mine, less chance you will get a coin. But in reverse, who ever needs those answers need less time to get them)
• You need either a GPU (graphics processing unit) or an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in order to set up a mining rig.

https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-does-bitcoin-mining-work/

 

Now, crypto was created with the good will intent of keeping crypto transactions honest. In reality, you are part of a human audited botnet, that keep try to keep counter fitters out of the loop. You are rewarded a coin...which you must turn into fiat currency in order to have ANY use. The kicker is: the people who give you the coin are also the one who buy it up afterwards. Its a way of laundering fiat currency and having a near impossible to break bank vault to keep said wealth. In the mean time, traditional speculation trade has taken over crypto to skim off the top. 

TL;DR... you are helping the hyper rich hide their riches. 

[Chiyawa]

Finally, some... Light in Crypto currency mining operation?

 

Well, I mean, I'm not very fond of crypto currency, but I must say I'm impress that someone put an effort to make crypto currency viable using renewable energy and reviving the old infrastructure back. At least those thing don't go to waste. So good for them.

 

Hope more crypto miners follow them and get creative of their power rather than stealing electricity and profiting from it. Who knows, if enough geniuses found a new source of electricity, they will become our new hero.

[Moonzy]

7 minutes ago, Chiyawa said:

Hope more crypto miners follow them and get creative of their power rather than stealing electricity and profiting from it. Who knows, if enough geniuses found a new source of electricity, they will become our new hero.

News headline in ten years: "Crypto investors successfully funded the first successful nuclear fusion reactor, it generates unlimited power from a gallon of sea water"

 

People:"nuclear fusion bad"

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, lostcattears said:

What service or what does crypto mining produce?

Mining is necessary to verify the transactions and adding them to the blockchain.

 

7 hours ago, lostcattears said:

What value does it have for a countries to not out right ban crypto?

Not much, but the same can be said for most things in life. The default should be to have things allowed and only banned if absolutely necessary. You could argue that we should ban all harmful things, but that would be a very dystopian world we would live in. For example, what value does it have for a country to not outright ban video games? Or music? Or comic books? 

 

7 hours ago, lostcattears said:

Does the service or produce of mining justify the value of the coins? Because that is a whole lot of energy consumption for what seems to be done with very little work.

Now I am not following you. When you say "value of the coin" do you mean the high price of a bitcoin when converting it to/from USD? Because that's a very different question than for example "why does it require so much computational power to do what seems to be very little work".

It requires very much computational power to do seemingly very little work because of how the blockchain was designed. Block production is (for some reason currently unknown to me) designed to be very stable. A certain amount of blocks are always being mined and produced. But in order to keep the block production stable even though more or fewer computers may be mining, the difficulty of mining is flexible.

So the more people who mine, the more difficult it becomes, by design.

 

If everyone except like 10 people stopped mining tomorrow, given some time the difficulty of mining would scale way back and everything would keep working despite only 10 people mining (and those people would be bathing in bitcoins).

So the reason why it uses so much power is because so many people are mining. I don't think the inventor expected people to build massive mining farms and buy power plants to run them with. He probably expected a couple of people to run it in the background on their computers.

 

 

 

6 hours ago, StDragon said:

Nuclear gen 3+ and 4 would be ideal due to the inherent safety in design, but there's still a stigma rebuffed by NIMBY-ism due to historical issues.

I was amazed by how many people watched the HBO series Chernobyl and went "wow, nuclear power is so scary! We need to get rid of it!".

Meanwhile I was watching it going "wow, the political system in the soviet union sure was terrible. Oh and nuclear seems very safe because humans needed to fuck up on several occasions, with old and outdated tech, for things to go poorly".

[Chiyawa]

3 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

News headline in ten years: "Crypto investors successfully funded the first successful nuclear fusion reactor, it generates unlimited power from a gallon of sea water"

 

People:"nuclear fusion bad"

Well, I mean I don't really want the power source that is similar to the sun go hay wire and burn half of the planet that's for sure. Ha ha.

 

Well, everything has its ups and downs. As long as we know the risk, willing to take it and far outweigh the cons, I guess it's okay. Horrible accident in Chernobyl, but juicing up the entire planet? Still a little concern, but can't ignore the benefit.

[Bombastinator]

39 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

News headline in ten years: "Crypto investors successfully funded the first successful nuclear fusion reactor, it generates unlimited power from a gallon of sea water"

 

People:"nuclear fusion bad"

Other headline: “crypto people don’t understand how fusion works”

 

people: “well that’s to be expected”

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, overthe6r said:

@Kisai
Hydro powers are destroying rivers

Hydro power plants have their own problems.  Nothing is perfect.  The problems of hydro are, so far as we can tell, smaller than the problems of other energy generation systems.  They’re not zero though.  Almost nothing is zero.  If they ever get fusion completely off the ground (it’s already partially off the ground) it will have problems too.  There is no and has never been a free lunch.

[Beerzerker]

1 hour ago, overthe6r said:

@Kisai
Hydro powers are destroying rivers

If that were true I personally would have noticed it firsthand since there are several in this area. Absolutely zero issues of this kind reported or seen by myself or any others around here.

It is true nothing is perfect and each method has it's own drawbacks but out of all the various ways of generating it hydro is about as good as it gets on many fronts vs the rest in use.

 

[tikker]

  

10 hours ago, overthe6r said:

I like how every thread looses it's context after few hours

No mere thread can contain the crypto train.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

So, let's propose an actual "use" for cryptomining heat here, what if you got the heat from the energy being burned on cryptomining to heat your hydroponic vertical farms? That's not really any less efficient than resistive heating or heatlamps to maintain thermal equilibrium, and would save burning natural gas in that case. But nobody is doing this, and I can't imagine anyone bothering to do this when the money to be made is on the cryptocoins and not the hydroponic farming.

This is a pretty interesting and cool idea actually.

1 hour ago, PriitM said:

Now, crypto was created with the good will intent of keeping crypto transactions honest. In reality, you are part of a human audited botnet, that keep try to keep counter fitters out of the loop.

Pretty sure that keeping counterfitters (and malicious actors in general) out is what honesty means. This was the point of the PoW blockchain.

1 hour ago, PriitM said:

You are rewarded a coin...which you must turn into fiat currency in order to have ANY use.

Places are slowly starting to accept crypto, so this isn't true.

1 hour ago, PriitM said:

Its a way of laundering fiat currency and having a near impossible to break bank vault to keep said wealth. In the mean time, traditional speculation trade has taken over crypto to skim off the top. 

Plenty of crypto has been stolen and exchanges have been hacked. Sometimes it was people giving out details they weren't supposed to, sometimes it were compromises elsewhere.

1 hour ago, Chiyawa said:

Well, everything has its ups and downs. As long as we know the risk, willing to take it and far outweigh the cons, I guess it's okay. Horrible accident in Chernobyl, but juicing up the entire planet? Still a little concern, but can't ignore the benefit.

Nuclear energy is kind of the airplane of energy generation. Generally it's as safe or even safer than other methods. It's just that if something goes wrong, for example a plane crash or a Chernobyl, it goes catastrophically wrong. The upside is that we don't need as many of them.