4 ms·
Cryptocurrency miners have the fast ramp-up and scale required.
by philipodonnell 9y ago
Cryptocurrency miners have the fast ramp-up and scale required.
- labster 9y agoBut they're profitable at high energy demand times too, so there's no incentive for them to run only during low demand.
- walrus01 9y agoCryptocurrent miners have a strong incentive to locate in places where the $ per kWh rate is consistently low 24x7x365, not just for peaks. Such as near a hydroelectric dam in east Wenatchee WA. Mining also requires very little in the way of network connectivity, maybe 10Mbps at most, so it can be located just about anywhere.
- DrScump 9y agoRelevant article from this week regarding miner activity in that area: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16551848
- _delirium 9y agoIt appears empirically that they don't. If they did, there wouldn't still be peak-production periods when energy was near zero cost, since they would've arbitraged that out.
- stordoff 9y agoDoes that run the risk of being damaging to the currency network -- could transient spikes of mining push up the difficulty and thus affect functionality once the energy price goes back up?
- usrusr 9y agoYou don't even need energy spikes for that, it already happens when hashrate is mobile between different networks.
- stordoff 9y agoThat's actually what made me think of it (Nicehash pushing up the difficulty on the smaller coins); I just wasn't sure if something more cyclical would have the same effect or be easier to counter.
- imtringued 9y agoCryptocurrency mining isn't enetgy constrained. Right now it it is capital constrained. Your primary costs are fixed upfront purchases of ASICs and GPUs.