Kosovo bans crypto mining after facing severe energy supply issues

[niofalpha]

based kosovo as always

[Kronoton]

17 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Crypto is so lucrative some operations have built or bought power plants for their own personal use

 

How is that gonna work if mining is illegal?

 

 

18 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Assuming they follow proper security protocols there is no way they can tell how much money they are making.

 

That is also true for making drugs or pretty much every other criminal activity.

 

Turning that money into a lifestyle without raising red flags is the hard part.

[EL02]

And how exactly will they achieve that? By monitoring the power usage of suspected houses?

[Brooksie359]

41 minutes ago, Kronoton said:

 

The same way they do(or don't) catch people growing weed or cooking meth.

 

They will get a tip (wether by a snitch or unusual power consumption) and investigate. Won't get everybody but for a large scale operations this means they have to go 100% over to the dark side with all the costs and risks connected to that (bribes, having to wash the money and maybe still ending up in jail) which will make it less lucrative/attractive.

Tbh seeing as the war on drugs has always been a pretty big failure it's probably not the best comparison on how something could be successful. 

[puking_parrot]

I guess that´s good. The Kosovo is poor and they have better things to do with their electricity. 

[StDragon]

8 minutes ago, EL02 said:

And how exactly will they achieve that? By monitoring the power usage of suspected houses?

They would go after the big fish, actual large-scale mining operations. They would be identified by utility accounts with a higher consumption period followed by a pass by of the premise with Infrared thermography.

 

Back in the day before LEDs were used, this was how the feds in the US busted growers of illicit plants.

[jagdtigger]

4 hours ago, Stahlmann said:

Normally Germany is one of the first when it comes to introducing new stuff in the name of being "green". I hope the added electricity needs from switching to EVs will further speed up the process to ban it here aswell.

Not to mention the next price hike, AFAIK those idiots just shut down 3 nuclear reactors....

[BuckGup]

13 minutes ago, James Evens said:

A significant amount of them is publicly identified. 

Baidu map blurred these areas and somebody wrote a scanner/scraper. After the they got potential positions they checked with another satellite image provider what there actually is (education facility, military, key industrial, etc.).

If that's the case then China is not enforcing the ban

[jagdtigger]

Just now, James Evens said:

Planned since 2011.

So? The situation is pretty dire on the energy market, following an ancient plan shows a severe case of ignorance for the current trends and lack of competence.

[StDragon]

4 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Planned since 2011.

Well, yeah. Decommissioning a reactor is a multi generational thing. One doesn't simply shut it down, turn the lights off, and put a padlock on the door.  

[jagdtigger]

15 minutes ago, James Evens said:

following an ancient plan is how it should be done

Plans are made so you dont go into things blindly, but your work isnt done when you finished the planning and the project is underway. Far from it, your job then is to watch out for changes that affect the plan and adjust it accordingly. Fail to do that and you can bet your bottom dollar on it that your plan is going to fail. Sadly in this case the incompetent fools wont feel a thing, just the ppl on the bottom of the food-chain....

[Moonzy]

6 hours ago, Dracarris said:

The Balkan state's largest coal-fired power plant was shut down last month over a technical issue

While I agree that non-essential tasks can take a backseat during an emergency situation, I do hope that they actually address the root of the issue so it doesn't happen again

 

Sure, you can use mining as a scapegoat now, but human energy needs is only going to increase and if they don't address it, it is going to be an issue

 

Also, a permanent ban would just be discrimination, imo

[Thaldor]

2 hours ago, Mihle said:

And at the same time is removing all nuclear and voting in EU for Nuclear not be considered green?

As I said: "Hanging", I didn't say anything about hands.

[EL02]

3 hours ago, StDragon said:

They would go after the big fish, actual large-scale mining operations. They would be identified by utility accounts with a higher consumption period followed by a pass by of the premise with Infrared thermography.

 

Back in the day before LEDs were used, this was how the feds in the US busted growers of illicit plants.

I don't know about kosovo, but in my country usually the large-scale operations are the ones that don't face consequences. They either bribe someone to not get caught or they just steal electricity.

 

Then again, I don't think it's fair to ban crypto mining as long as the owner pays all the bills. They might have rented out a place to store the electronics, hired workers to maintain them, and security guards to protect the place.

[Heliian]

4 hours ago, StDragon said:

 

Back in the day before LEDs were used, this was how the feds in the US busted growers of illicit plants.

LEDs lower the power consumption but a large scale growop would still not go unnoticed. 

 

Fun fact: it wasn't so much the government but the power companies.  Power that is stolen is their main concern.  Most likely happening to the day.  Since the losses were unmetered, they look for heat signatures that were anamolous. 

[Computer Guru]

The entire thing honestly doesn't make much sense. People will only mine BitCoin/Ethereum/whatever if the cost of electricity is sufficient for them to do better than break even, constrained by the efficiency of the hardware they have. Most people don't have the highest efficiency ASIC miners, and if electricity is even remotely a scarce resource (unless it's being heavily subsidized across the board for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds) then it is not going to be cheap, ergo it's not going to be remotely lucrative to mine.. unless you're tapping into the power company's underground (or overhead) grid or your neighbor's supply, in which case you're already a criminal and this law won't make a hoot of a difference.

[Computer Guru]

2 hours ago, James Evens said:

Welcome to politics.

Significantly raising electricity cost could be destabilizing and might cause the minister/government to not make it to next election cycle.

No raising costs needed: my assumption is that the scarcity of the resource in question was already priced into the current costs (and it does seem to be scarce or they wouldn't be taking these measures).

[CarlBar]

3 hours ago, Computer Guru said:

The entire thing honestly doesn't make much sense. People will only mine BitCoin/Ethereum/whatever if the cost of electricity is sufficient for them to do better than break even, constrained by the efficiency of the hardware they have. Most people don't have the highest efficiency ASIC miners, and if electricity is even remotely a scarce resource (unless it's being heavily subsidized across the board for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds) then it is not going to be cheap, ergo it's not going to be remotely lucrative to mine.. unless you're tapping into the power company's underground (or overhead) grid or your neighbor's supply, in which case you're already a criminal and this law won't make a hoot of a difference.

 

Don't know about Kosovo or the rest of Europe but i know in the UK there's a hard cap on how much companies can raise prices within a given 12 month time-span, it's caused some issue as natural gas prices have gone way up recently.

 

Incidentally thats also the core issue with energy in Europe ATM, it's not a lack of total capacity, but a lack of cheap capacity, (because of a natural gas shortage driving prices up for it, it might turn into a capacity shortfall if stockpiles run out, but Europe does try to keep a stockpile to keep price fluctuations under control, been getting pretty depleted lately though).

[LDGrinn]

Crypto is really bad for the economy of a country and was never an option to be mined after 2015.

I mean, the costs for mining ETH were barely covering at first, and it was only later when people were at some gain.

BTC were always considered a loss after 2015.

The EU prices are about 300-330euro/Mwh for most countries, and eastern Europe suffers a lot from mining, specially when we consider the low salaries there.

 

The only colleges of mine who gained money from mining, didn't pay any elctro.....

They used an existing datacenter and hooked machines there so somebody else had to pay instead.

The rest was trading eth+shitcoin for BTC, but that was slow and consuming a lot of family (free) time.

 

And then we have to pay 2000$ for Nvidia Videa with minimal salary of 400$ currently in Bulgaria? Crypto ruined the chances of my country to get out of the missery.

 

You either listen to 4chan 2009 and mine until 2012 to gain real profit or you lose sanity and resources driven by greed.....sad sad

[mr moose]

Enter the french:-  why you not build nuclear?  you have, how you say, onion for brain no?

[Kisai]

16 hours ago, James Evens said:

Welcome to politics.

Significantly raising electricity cost could be destabilizing and might cause the minister/government to not make it to next election cycle.

 

Here's the thing, If your energy is state subsidized, then any cryptomining you do, is owned by the government, since you're repackaging their resources. I expect any country that subsidizes energy to either enact cryptomining bans, or to seize equipment and wallets used for selling their state resources without their permission.

 

In the US where most electricity generation is private, that likely won't be a thing, but the the US is largely the exception to the rule. However public utilities are still regulated in the US, and you can bet that any state/cities that has known cryptomining farms is aiming to raise the energy costs because they just see it as another way to profit.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

Here's the thing, If your energy is state subsidized, then any cryptomining you do, is owned by the government, since you're repackaging their resources.

 

No it's not, if that was the case then everything anyone made using electricity would be owned by the government.   Government subsidies and ownership are two very different things.

[Kisai]

56 minutes ago, mr moose said:

No it's not, if that was the case then everything anyone made using electricity would be owned by the government.   Government subsidies and ownership are two very different things.

No. Because everything else isn't repackaging energy as currency. All cryptocoin mining is doing is converting energy into something that can be traded without anything physical being traded unlike batteries.

 

[EL02]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

No. Because everything else isn't repackaging energy as currency. All cryptocoin mining is doing is converting energy into something that can be traded without anything physical being traded unlike batteries.

 

But you're still paying for electricity. I don't know of you're using the right term here. The government subsidies certain things so the consumer pays less.

[Kisai]

34 minutes ago, EL02 said:

But you're still paying for electricity. I don't know of you're using the right term here. The government subsidies certain things so the consumer pays less.

Do you really think that when the state owns all the energy plants, that it really costs you less than your neighbors?

 

Here's the thing. You, the tax-payer, are paying for the power plant, and you are paying the power plant to provide you with energy that "you use". However if that power plant can only produce X amount of power, and you're consuming enough that the power producer must raise prices by importing energy from private producers or out-of-state producers, then yes, you're raising the cost of energy for everyone in your state.

 

Which means that if you put an unreasonable burden on the electrical grid (eg mining at home with more than 4 GPU's) that the supply lines coming down your street are catching fire, the utility or the state should come to your door and tell you to knock it off or you'll be fined for the damage.

 

When I see photos of people with dozens of GPU's in what appears to be a living room in a home, that's where I'm like "there is no way that is safe or legal", just from the building code violations alone.

 

Data center's being rented for mining? I hate those too, but at least those aren't going to burn down the neighborhood when left unattended, like grow-ops do. Data centers also pay industrial rates for energy that the utility gets paid for, use-it-or-lose-it. 

 

So coming back to the idea of "should the state be able to claim anything from energy you use?" Well if it's being subsidized at 4 cents kwh when it imports it at 10 cents, then absolutely. But if it's own generation (eg hydro/solar) is 4 cents, but costs them nothing but maintenance to produce, then that's just a question of if your "excessive use" is exporting a state asset or not.

 

Like to take a local example. BC has both public and private power producers. It also pays Alberta for energy off-peak, and Alberta buys from BC during on-peak, and BC also transports power to Washington which is then transmitted to California when they have peaks in usage. For all intents, BC Hydro is 9 cents/kWh if you're using a reasonable amount of energy and 14 cents/kWh if you're using more than 1350kWh.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2017/market-snapshot-electricity-exports-from-b-c-california-are-increasing.html

 

BC exports energy at $80.62/MW.h to California , which is, you guessed it 8 cents/kWh

 

 

 

That's not the entire story, but suffice it to say, if your state has to import electricity, and energy is controlled by the state utility, then the state has as responsibility to recover unauthorized exports of that energy out of state. So if you're running bitcoin and Ethereum mining, and that same state is experiencing power outages, you should be the first one to voluntarily shut down. Do you think that happens?

 

Likely never. Despite all these reports of power companies wanting to get into bitcoin so they don't have to spin down generation of things like nuclear and coal/gas generation because they can't spin those up to meet demand, rather it would be easier to shut down some purpose energy-load that they ALSO make money on. Boy would it ever suck if the energy utility got into the cryptocoin mining business and put their own mining rigs first while letting hospitals and schools go without power.