Crypto Miners buying up entire power plants

[Bombastinator]

This is a twitchy subject because of its application to politics.  It’s arguable that it shouldn’t even be discussed here because of that.  There are fairly simple arguments about why your point doesn’t make sense but I’m going to not make them.  I even made them then erased them. I don’t know how to point this out in a feasible manner.

[Beskamir]

On 7/20/2021 at 7:29 AM, 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.

While I agree, I think it's important to note that we're also wasting huge amounts of energy and resources on keeping the existing banking infrastructure running.

[Guest willies leg]

4 hours ago, Beskamir said:

While I agree, I think it's important to note that we're also wasting huge amounts of energy and resources on keeping the existing banking cryptocurrency infrastructure running.

 

FTFY

 

[tikker]

10 minutes ago, willies leg said:

 

FTFY

While I agree, I think it's important to note that we're also wasting huge amounts of energy and resources on keeping the existing banking cryptocurrency gaming infrastructure running. 

FTFY. Also, you're getting into circular reasoning here. The point being argued is the energy consumption of crypto. You cannot refute a counter example with "but crypto uses a lot of energy", because that's what the entire argument is about.

 

No point in regurgitating everything here, just search for crypto related threads, but there are other things out there that "waste", as you put it, a comparable amount of energy. We should use crypto as a steppting stone to start scrutinising more things.

[dalekphalm]

4 hours ago, Beskamir said:

While I agree, I think it's important to note that we're also wasting huge amounts of energy and resources on keeping the existing banking infrastructure running.

while true, studies have shown that on a per transaction basis, traditional Merchant Processing (Eg: Credit Card) uses an order of magnitude less power. It might use more power in total (not confirmed - could be less or more in total), but it's also facilitating a much much much more massive amount of transactions every day.

[jagdtigger]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

while true, studies have shown that on a per transaction basis, traditional Merchant Processing (Eg: Credit Card) uses an order of magnitude less power. It might use more power in total (not confirmed - could be less or more in total), but it's also facilitating a much much much more massive amount of transactions every day.

Not to mention the processing speed.....

[dalekphalm]

Just now, jagdtigger said:

Not to mention the processing speed.....

Well yes - how often are transactions processed for BTC? Every 10 minutes? Or has that changed since the last time I was into mining?

 

The main problem with Proof of Work cryptos such as BTC is that by the very nature of how the network works, they're the exact opposite of energy efficient.

 

BTC could be massively more energy efficient than it currently is. Literally all they'd have to do is drop the difficulty. But dropping the difficulty would completely destroy the rate at which coins are produced (causing too many coins to be generated too quickly, which would, among other things, probably cause hyper inflation or hyper deflation).

 

The problem is circular because the difficulty goes up as more people mine. Then the people mining, buy faster hardware to compensate. The faster hardware then causes the coins to be mined faster, which then initiates a difficulty adjustment upwards. Causing more people to buy faster hardware, etc, etc, etc.

 

It's a great system, if mining didn't use any electricity. But it's a terrible system because of that. We don't actually need all the extra processing power to deal with the blockchain (though I assume as the chain grows, there's likely some small amount of increase in processing required), since most of the difficulty is entirely artificial.

[tikker]

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Well yes - how often are transactions processed for BTC? Every 10 minutes? Or has that changed since the last time I was into mining?

Bitcoin is indeed 10 minutes per block. On average it has ~1500-1600 transactions per block at the moment, so around 250k per day. The difficulty goes up or down to maintain that 10 minute block time. The 10 minutes seem to be a conservative compromise.

[leadeater]

27 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

while true, studies have shown that on a per transaction basis, traditional Merchant Processing (Eg: Credit Card) uses an order of magnitude less power. It might use more power in total (not confirmed - could be less or more in total), but it's also facilitating a much much much more massive amount of transactions every day.

I just can't see Credit Card transaction processing using more than crypto mining personally. Like I know the amount of tractions being processed is almost unfathomably huge but at the same time I also know how much power transactional processing takes on quite a few different database backends and also application front ends and you can do millions per minute in low hundreds of watts.

 

A single Bitcoin transaction is estimated to use 1.7MWh, 1.7MWh is a HUGE amount of transactions on a traditional OLTP application.

[Bombastinator]

15 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Well yes - how often are transactions processed for BTC? Every 10 minutes? Or has that changed since the last time I was into mining?

 

The main problem with Proof of Work cryptos such as BTC is that by the very nature of how the network works, they're the exact opposite of energy efficient.

 

BTC could be massively more energy efficient than it currently is. Literally all they'd have to do is drop the difficulty. But dropping the difficulty would completely destroy the rate at which coins are produced (causing too many coins to be generated too quickly, which would, among other things, probably cause hyper inflation or hyper deflation).

 

The problem is circular because the difficulty goes up as more people mine. Then the people mining, buy faster hardware to compensate. The faster hardware then causes the coins to be mined faster, which then initiates a difficulty adjustment upwards. Causing more people to buy faster hardware, etc, etc, etc.

 

It's a great system, if mining didn't use any electricity. But it's a terrible system because of that. We don't actually need all the extra processing power to deal with the blockchain (though I assume as the chain grows, there's likely some small amount of increase in processing required), since most of the difficulty is entirely artificial.

Some cryptocoins seem to me to have had a massive problem with deflation for some time in that the value of individual coins climbed way way into the nosebleed section. What is a single Bitcoin worth nowadays? Was it ever intended to have that much value?  People are trading thousandths of a coin now. Bitcoin would be tighter money than gold ever was. 

[Beskamir]

18 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

while true, studies have shown that on a per transaction basis, traditional Merchant Processing (Eg: Credit Card) uses an order of magnitude less power. It might use more power in total (not confirmed - could be less or more in total), but it's also facilitating a much much much more massive amount of transactions every day.

From my understanding, fees are lower (at least depending on which cryptocurrency is being used) than credit card fees and assuming those are adequate reflections of the amount of energy, oversight, infrastructure, greed, pollution, etc involved with either system, I still think cryptocurrencies have potential for replacing traditional processing with less impactful systems at some point in the future.

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/20/2021 at 8:54 AM, Brooksie359 said:

If they can get renewable energy to supply their mining then that would be great. Much better than the alternative. I agree though that it would be great if they could sell the excess capacity to the local grid. 

Nuclear would actually be a better option, thought that would require significantly more dedication, as "renewables" are unpredictable and do not provide stable power requiring batteries that are very dirty. Meanwhile Nuclear produces stable power year around to a fault which is exactly what these servers need.

[jagdtigger]

10 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Nuclear would actually be a better option

Its pretty much the only option with idiots pushing EV's.....

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/20/2021 at 3:02 PM, Moonzy said:

Aight boys, let's wrap it up

Hydro power is now evil as well

Scratch that all power is bad, Coal causes acid rain and CO2, Natural Gas does the same but less bad, Solar requires panels made with harmful chemicals that require lots of power to make and harmful batteries to boot, and will never degrade while eating tons of land and burning birds, wind requires lots of power, harmful chemicals, and money to make as well as batteries, likes catching on fire, and chopping birds, Hydro messes with the ecosystem (and kills fish?), Nuclear can go nuclear and creates hazardous waste.

Well people it seems we have two options learn to live like the Flintstones, or go to space. LOL. XD

[Wh0_Am_1]

2 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Its pretty much the only option with idiots pushing EV's.....

Sounds about right.

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/20/2021 at 3:10 PM, BuckGup said:

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

With one caveat, doing so like with solar and wind makes no economical sense past a certain point. As nuclear power has the opposite issue, it is stable to fault. It has the inability to peak with demand so for economics sake it would be better to throw nuclear in for the base demand and then natural gas in for peaker plants.

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/21/2021 at 12:17 AM, PriitM said:

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. 

Or for certain currencies with an encrypted block chain you are allowing people for good or ill to make transactions out of view of the government and publics eye, allowing people to both commit crimes and circumvent oppressive governments.

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, Beskamir said:

From my understanding, fees are lower (at least depending on which cryptocurrency is being used) than credit card fees and assuming those are adequate reflections of the amount of energy, oversight, infrastructure, greed, pollution, etc involved with either system, I still think cryptocurrencies have potential for replacing traditional processing with less impactful systems at some point in the future.

The thing is that transaction fees aren't an accurate reflection of the energy required to process a transaction. 

 

With bitcoin the transaction fee is set as low as possibly by the markets supply and demand (but they are still extremely high, at least for bitcoin). 

For regular transactions processed by Visa and Master card, the transaction fees are set as high as possible because they have a duopoly and want to make as much money as possible. 

 

Transaction fees are simply not an accurate way of gauging power consumption per transaction. 

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/20/2021 at 11:27 PM, Kisai said:

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.

I think you missed the point... @Moonzy was simply joking/being sarcastic over the fact that forum was extremely toxic towards hydro power or any other "non-renewable" or perceivably "harmful" power sources. 

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/21/2021 at 4:02 AM, Justaphysicsnerd said:

Lets see the Techno-king defend Crypto Mining now ! Miners are using fossil fuel to power up their rigs...I think he is gonna say don't worry dodge mining is powered by Nuclear Power Plants, a certain old dormant one in Ukraine near Privyet

AH YES! I do believe that they were powering up reactor 4! Marvelous! By the way, Good Sir  while we are on the topic, shall we discuss about that one powerplant in Cherynobyl that those Soviets built that failed being the only catastrophic failure of any powerplant reactor in the history of the world?

[Wh0_Am_1]

On 7/21/2021 at 4:21 PM, Bombastinator said:

Depends if you’re a criminal or not.  If yes, then yes.

As long as we remember that being a criminal is subjective. Just depends on your perspective and morals. 

[jagdtigger]

33 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Cherynobyl that those Soviets built that failed being the only catastrophic failure of any powerplant reactor in the history of the world?

And lets add that the main culprit was as usual human stupidity....

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

I think you missed the point... @Moonzy was simply joking/being sarcastic over the fact that forum was extremely toxic towards hydro power or any other "non-renewable" or perceivably "harmful" power sources. 

Maybe read the thread before you fill it up with non-productive single-replies. I certainly knew it was sarcasm and Moonzy replied saying so, TWO WEEKS AGO. Use the multi-quote feature when replying to things more than an hour old. It is considered bad form, everywhere, to reply to old posts without something new to add, as it's just spamming the forum.

 

As for the subject, it's long past moved on to talking about how inefficient other forms of payment processing are.

[Guest willies leg]

23 hours ago, tikker said:

FTFY. Also, you're getting into circular reasoning here. The point being argued is the energy consumption of crypto. You cannot refute a counter example with "but crypto uses a lot of energy", because that's what the entire argument is about.

 

No point in regurgitating everything here, just search for crypto related threads, but there are other things out there that "waste", as you put it, a comparable amount of energy. We should use crypto as a steppting stone to start scrutinising more things.

Problem with crypto is it wastes tremendous amounts of energy while doing nothing meaningful.

Would be better if crypto mining helped solve a real world problem.

[BuckGup]

4 hours ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

With one caveat, doing so like with solar and wind makes no economical sense past a certain point. As nuclear power has the opposite issue, it is stable to fault. It has the inability to peak with demand so for economics sake it would be better to throw nuclear in for the base demand and then natural gas in for peaker plants.

Well technically we have had the technology with nuclear to power the entire world 100% carbon free for decades. It's just people are too scared after accidents