19 ms·

Extreme Bitcoin Mining Aids an Unexpected Revolution in Iceland

174 points by allenleein 8y ago

api 8y ago
One hope I have for the Bitcoin mining bubble is that it will indirectly subsidize improved information systems infrastructure in many remote places as well as improved on-demand chip fabrication services. Once the bubble is gone those things will go to more productive use.
- rublev 8y ago
  The bubble will be gone when the money dries up and that will never happen because there will always be suckers. Also nice username.
- ixtli 8y ago
  I've spoken to people who've been in the community for a long time and they seem to view the blockchain hype as something generated to get banks to underwrite the updating of systems that have barely been maintained since the 80s. (Despite it not being really necessary for like 95% of problems, of course.)
  - api 8y ago
    I doubt it was deliberately engineered as such but it does seem to be having that effect. It's also disrupting international wire transfers and venture capital, two antiquated industries ripe for it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - chx 8y ago
      You must be delusional to think Bitcoin disrupts SWIFT. https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/9184/18775 https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/9184/18775 > SWIFT handles about $5 trillion per day, > SWIFT payment message volumes are usually around 11.5 million per day Now, daily Bitcoin-USD traffic is below a billion https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/trade-volume https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/trade-volume and even at its heyday it was five billion give or take. That's 0.1% of SWIFT. And Bitcoin couldn't handle more than 600k transactions a day even if it tried and these days it's 150-200K https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions which almost reaches 2% of SWIFT... Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives. SEPA has higher volumes but lower values https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/step2-sct/statistics/ https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/step2-sct/statistics/ but even that lower value is a magnitude above Bitcoin -- worldwide. With SCT Inst it even beats the transfer speed of Bitcoin.
      - jchrisa 8y ago
        Agree -- the major players already know their customers, so they are more interested in distributed ledger than blockchain. A distributed database with ACID transactions is a more flexible way to implement this stuff: https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockchain https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockc...
        DeathArrow 8y ago
        Blockchain is a form of distributed ledgers.
      - heptathorp 8y ago
        > Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives. Can you expand on this? What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives?
        chx 8y ago
        > What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives? I am sending you 1 BTC, how much money do you have? Calling a Nakamoto scheme a "cyber"currency is just part of the scam. Money is like USD. So, how much money do you have?
        CamelCaseName 8y ago
        I strongly agree with your GGP comment, but the point of BTC is not money is a bad one. How much money do you have if you receive 1 BTC? Check the spot price after several confirmations (or one to none, depending on your facilities) How much money do you have if you receive $1MM USD? Check DXY in ~3 business days when your deposit clears. Now yes, of course BTC fluctuates in value substantially more than USD, but this is not a problem in BTC, but rather in the existing market conditions. Your comment is akin to saying that USD was not money in the 1930s. Apart from that contention, I completely agree that BTC has not (and in my opinion, will not) disrupted SWIFT.
  - dwild 8y ago
    You are from which countries? It's still pretty hard, long and costly to transfer cash from a bank to another one. In fact at mine, still until recently it took 24 hours just to add someone to send him fund from the same bank. Interac, which is the provider of debit in Canada, recently made a way to transfer cash that many banks decided to add for a cost of 1$ per transaction. It's now widely used and banks use that as an incentive now (2 free transactions a month, amazing!). This is all due to old antiquated technologies used by the banks. They clearly don't want to evolve. Bitcoin at least is universal, simple and works.
    - ixtli 8y ago
      Dunno if you'll see this but I'm from the US. I also haven't had much experience with inter-bank transfers. Most people I know use my bank and its great for international travel.
- acchow 8y ago
  I believe this too. And also improve electricity access in more remote areas (where real estate is cheaper) - especially pushing distributed solar power.
ggg9990 8y ago
What we have with deep learning is the first data center application for lots of compute with high latency. This will enable data centers in locations previously infeasible.
- martinald 8y ago
  Iceland isn't really high latency. In many ways it is perfect for serving Europe and east coast US from one place (if required).
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Iceland also has sovereignty and very favorable geography. (Being surrounded by oceans makes it easy to remain fairly neutral.) If I were the government of Iceland, I would issue a cryptocurrency.
    - criddell 8y ago
      If you are a government, why would you issue a cryptocurrency? Why not issue a more more traditional digital currency with a central ledger?
      - stcredzero 8y ago
        A cryptocurrency would be less under the control of the government, which could well be a feature.
        allannienhuis 8y ago
        not for the government...
        stcredzero 8y ago
        But perhaps for other governments and other parties. The customers.
harveynick 8y ago
So... bitcoin miners in Iceland aren't using ASICs?
- iaml 8y ago
  Fair question, if you read the article it was written as if it's specifically bitcoin miners who are abandoning GPU farms, but mining bitcoin with gpus was not viable a long time. Is the article misleading, or is it referring to a larger time span?
- wmf 8y ago
  Remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. All Bitcoin mining is done with ASICs but some other cryptos use GPUs. Many industrial-scale miners use both, I guess for diversification.
andrewtbham 8y ago
post-bitcoin? fadishness? Bitcoin "probably won’t be here far into the future" When I am interested in the predictions about the future of bitcoin... my first thought is not to ask a "business development manager at the HS Orka power plant in Iceland" Lol... sales people, in particular, have no credibility about predicting the future... It's always what they are selling.
abhiminator 8y ago
>Island became a magnet for the practice once miners figured out that the place is very cold and that electricity there -- geothermal and hydropower -- costs a lot less ... This is the next big frontier in data center advancement, imo -- submerged/frigid data center installations. Microsoft's already been playing around with a submersible data center under a project codenamed 'Natick,' while piggybacking off of its extreme portability and flexibility in terms of resources toward R&D, and it's just getting started. Google has already announced plans to do the same. [1] It also makes sense from a scale/growth standpoint as 50% of earth's population lives within 2 hour drive from their respective coastlines. [2] [0] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/microsoft-cloud-ocean-project-natick/459318/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/microsoft-cloud-ocean-p... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/18/how-many-people-live-near-the/ http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/18/how-many-people...
- stcredzero 8y ago
  >Island became a magnet for the practice once miners figured out that the place is very cold and that electricity there -- geothermal and hydropower -- costs a lot less ... Issac Arthur speculates that Titan may become a center of cryogenic industry and computing in the late 21st century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0 Given that immigrants tend to settle in places that resemble their home country, I wonder if Titan might develop an ex-pat Icelandic community? (Isolated. Rugged. Cold. Beautiful in a literal otherworldly sense.) If you're going to have a submersible data center, you probably want it to be a partially submersible spar buoy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy This gives you all of the benefits of submersion, but makes access easier. It also makes the installation immune to waves, especially rogue waves. So what else involves mooring lots of spar buoys off shore? Offshore wind farms.
  - ythn 8y ago
    > Issac Arthur speculates that Titan may become a center of cryogenic industry and computing in the late 21st century. More like the late 31st century
DINKDINK 8y ago
>Bitcoin “probably won’t be here far into the future” said Johann Snorri Sigurbergsson Seeing as this guy -- who could make reams of money[1] if he's an accurate price predictor by shorting bitcoin by buying deep, out-of-the-money puts -- isn't rich by doing so, indicates he's inept at making price predictions. https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ [1] If bitcoin's price catastrophically collapses, a put option would yield ~1,000X / 100000% returns.
- microtherion 8y ago
  "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
  - naveen99 8y ago
    Only if you are leveraged.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - DINKDINK 8y ago
    That's not how options work and it's precisely why options exist: to purchase value in domains which are extraordinarily rare without the delta exposure of leveraged spot-shorting. The premium:payout ratio of such a trade requires him to be right only once in 5-10 years for him to walk away profitable.
    - microtherion 8y ago
      He'd have to be right… against a solvent counterparty. What big, reputable players are selling Bitcoin put options at the moment? As of last fall, the market seemed to have been extremely immature: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-possible-trade-bitcoin-options.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-po...
ksec 8y ago
I have been wondering, why hasn't Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon built DC in Iceland? To avoid the risk of volcanic eruption?
- opportune 8y ago
  The main reason is latency - makes more sense to build a datacenter in the UK or Northeast North America as that would reduce the average latency for more people. The domestic need for a massive datacenter is also rather small.
  - ksec 8y ago
    Apple, Facebook , and Microsoft are all building or had Massive Datacenter, at least one or two somewhere in EU and US. Likly for Storage and other non latency sensitive application. But none of them choose Iceland, where Electricity is clean and cheap.
    - krn 8y ago
      Iceland has no direct optic cable connection with the US[1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73ekox/map_of_underwater_cables_that_supply_the_worlds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73ekox/map_of_unde...
      - ksec 8y ago
        arh. thx
  - paxy 8y ago
    Yup, all major tech companies have data centers in Dublin, mainly because the government has made it very easy and attractive to do so.
roryisok 8y ago
Stuff like this worries me. We should be doing everything we can to curb the energy and heat we produce and instead we're using vast amounts of energy to basically waste trillions of CPU cycles so that we can produce digital money that might never actually be worth anything. It's just about the most pointless use of planetary resources I can think of
- henryw 8y ago
  I also wonder why are humans wasting resource like this. Like all this compute power could be used towards curing cancer or something.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    People as a group are selfish and short sighted, prone to maximizing personal gain. Individuals can be self sacrificing and possess a long view, but there will be a thousand others willing to work the system to death in their place. More specifically, there are almost limitless rationales to be employed if you stand to gain from turning entropy into personal wealth. “This compute power was never going to be used to cure cancer anyway...” that kind of thing. More pernicious are people who cloak themselves in ideology or Utopianism somthst they convince themselves that this waste of resources is a good thing. Some may even believe it, but most just don’t care and are too busy finding greater fools so they can make money.
    - Applejinx 8y ago
      Bitcoin is created through the use of exponentially increasing amounts of energy (I daresay there's a 'crash' scenario where it doesn't expand that way and also doesn't retain value as currently expected). Bitcoin is VALUED in a way similar to the stock market, where people collectively decide it's super good and useful because they're invested into the system. This process is exploitable, and is purely social engineering. If it gets too big to fail, we're all in bad trouble, but we were already in trouble from many other things that have financially become too big to fail.
  - ozmbie 8y ago
masonicb00m 8y ago
“After devouring nearly as much energy as all of Iceland’s households combined, Bitcoin miners may be about to return something to the community that’s housed them.” Implication is that the miners do nothing for Iceland? Seems unlikely. They’re probably incorporated businesses paying taxes and injecting wealth into local economy through payroll and other expenses. Why is Bloomberg anti-bitcoin?
- allenz 8y ago
  Profitability is not the same as social value. See also media critiques of high-frequency trading.
- chris_mc 8y ago
  >Why is Bloomberg anti-bitcoin? Maybe this? https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-costs/ https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...
- mihaifm 8y ago
  They're probably not against bitcoin, crytocurrency is a controversial topic these days and they just leverage on that.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  "They’re probably incorporated businesses paying taxes and injecting wealth into local economy through payroll and other expenses." What evidence do you have of this? In other areas where this happens, like up by the hydroelectric dam in Washington State, this very much does not happen, and in fact, many mining operations are illegally attaching to the grid. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mansilladev 8y ago
So.. the article concludes that they're "Building Knowledge" on how to maintain data centers housing racks of servers and ASICs doing mining/blockchain work? I wonder if the same argument could be made for the adult content industry, that, for better or worse, has been pushing the barriers of compute and bandwidth since the dawn of the dotcom era.
glenneroo 8y ago
Well if they hope to succeed, they better start the long process of laying down some more fiber connections to the rest of the world. They have to go through Greenland or Europe to get the US. https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
jasonkester 8y ago
I liked this analysis of the situation from when the Bitcoin Miners came to Washington State for the same reason: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1000966967056941056 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1000966967056941056 "We are going to place a point-of-presence for an intrinsically global network, hardware and a skeleton crew, in your geographic territory for as long as you're the dumbest power provider in the world." "..." "If you're not that dumb say so, I have a list."
throwawayqdhd 8y ago
> Iceland estimates the industry will consume more than 100 megawatts by the end of the year. All this energy wasted mining a virtual currency that no one uses. We have to ask ourselves: is Bitcoin mining really the best use of our resources? Is it worth adding to our already engorged carbon footprints?
- nielsole 8y ago
  Isn't that the benefit of Iceland - That there is no (or significantly) carbon footprint?
koosnel 8y ago
"looking past the faddishness of cryptocurrencies". Bitcoin is an excellent proof of concept for blockchains but I sold mine some time ago because of the ethical issue I have with Bitcoin mining consuming so much power. Some of the newer coins are much more efficient in terms of consuming power. To refer to cryptocurrencies in general as a fad though is very naive and sounds more like central bank desperation.

174 points by allenleein 8y ago

api 8y ago

One hope I have for the Bitcoin mining bubble is that it will indirectly subsidize improved information systems infrastructure in many remote places as well as improved on-demand chip fabrication services. Once the bubble is gone those things will go to more productive use.

rublev 8y ago
The bubble will be gone when the money dries up and that will never happen because there will always be suckers. Also nice username.
ixtli 8y ago
I've spoken to people who've been in the community for a long time and they seem to view the blockchain hype as something generated to get banks to underwrite the updating of systems that have barely been maintained since the 80s. (Despite it not being really necessary for like 95% of problems, of course.)
- api 8y ago
  I doubt it was deliberately engineered as such but it does seem to be having that effect. It's also disrupting international wire transfers and venture capital, two antiquated industries ripe for it.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - chx 8y ago
    You must be delusional to think Bitcoin disrupts SWIFT. https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/9184/18775 https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/9184/18775 > SWIFT handles about $5 trillion per day, > SWIFT payment message volumes are usually around 11.5 million per day Now, daily Bitcoin-USD traffic is below a billion https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/trade-volume https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/trade-volume and even at its heyday it was five billion give or take. That's 0.1% of SWIFT. And Bitcoin couldn't handle more than 600k transactions a day even if it tried and these days it's 150-200K https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions which almost reaches 2% of SWIFT... Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives. SEPA has higher volumes but lower values https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/step2-sct/statistics/ https://www.ebaclearing.eu/services/step2-sct/statistics/ but even that lower value is a magnitude above Bitcoin -- worldwide. With SCT Inst it even beats the transfer speed of Bitcoin.
    - jchrisa 8y ago
      Agree -- the major players already know their customers, so they are more interested in distributed ledger than blockchain. A distributed database with ACID transactions is a more flexible way to implement this stuff: https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockchain https://blog.fauna.com/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockc...
      - DeathArrow 8y ago
        Blockchain is a form of distributed ledgers.
    - heptathorp 8y ago
      > Also, it's unusable for legit business transfers since you absolutely have no idea how much money the other ennd receives. Can you expand on this? What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives?
      - chx 8y ago
        > What do you mean you don't know how much the other end receives? I am sending you 1 BTC, how much money do you have? Calling a Nakamoto scheme a "cyber"currency is just part of the scam. Money is like USD. So, how much money do you have?
        CamelCaseName 8y ago
        I strongly agree with your GGP comment, but the point of BTC is not money is a bad one. How much money do you have if you receive 1 BTC? Check the spot price after several confirmations (or one to none, depending on your facilities) How much money do you have if you receive $1MM USD? Check DXY in ~3 business days when your deposit clears. Now yes, of course BTC fluctuates in value substantially more than USD, but this is not a problem in BTC, but rather in the existing market conditions. Your comment is akin to saying that USD was not money in the 1930s. Apart from that contention, I completely agree that BTC has not (and in my opinion, will not) disrupted SWIFT.
- dwild 8y ago
  You are from which countries? It's still pretty hard, long and costly to transfer cash from a bank to another one. In fact at mine, still until recently it took 24 hours just to add someone to send him fund from the same bank. Interac, which is the provider of debit in Canada, recently made a way to transfer cash that many banks decided to add for a cost of 1$ per transaction. It's now widely used and banks use that as an incentive now (2 free transactions a month, amazing!). This is all due to old antiquated technologies used by the banks. They clearly don't want to evolve. Bitcoin at least is universal, simple and works.
  - ixtli 8y ago
    Dunno if you'll see this but I'm from the US. I also haven't had much experience with inter-bank transfers. Most people I know use my bank and its great for international travel.
acchow 8y ago
I believe this too. And also improve electricity access in more remote areas (where real estate is cheaper) - especially pushing distributed solar power.

ggg9990 8y ago

What we have with deep learning is the first data center application for lots of compute with high latency. This will enable data centers in locations previously infeasible.

martinald 8y ago
Iceland isn't really high latency. In many ways it is perfect for serving Europe and east coast US from one place (if required).
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Iceland also has sovereignty and very favorable geography. (Being surrounded by oceans makes it easy to remain fairly neutral.) If I were the government of Iceland, I would issue a cryptocurrency.
  - criddell 8y ago
    If you are a government, why would you issue a cryptocurrency? Why not issue a more more traditional digital currency with a central ledger?
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      A cryptocurrency would be less under the control of the government, which could well be a feature.
      - allannienhuis 8y ago
        not for the government...
        stcredzero 8y ago
        But perhaps for other governments and other parties. The customers.

harveynick 8y ago

So... bitcoin miners in Iceland aren't using ASICs?

iaml 8y ago
Fair question, if you read the article it was written as if it's specifically bitcoin miners who are abandoning GPU farms, but mining bitcoin with gpus was not viable a long time. Is the article misleading, or is it referring to a larger time span?
wmf 8y ago
Remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. All Bitcoin mining is done with ASICs but some other cryptos use GPUs. Many industrial-scale miners use both, I guess for diversification.

andrewtbham 8y ago

post-bitcoin? fadishness? Bitcoin "probably won’t be here far into the future" When I am interested in the predictions about the future of bitcoin... my first thought is not to ask a "business development manager at the HS Orka power plant in Iceland" Lol... sales people, in particular, have no credibility about predicting the future... It's always what they are selling.

abhiminator 8y ago

>Island became a magnet for the practice once miners figured out that the place is very cold and that electricity there -- geothermal and hydropower -- costs a lot less ... This is the next big frontier in data center advancement, imo -- submerged/frigid data center installations. Microsoft's already been playing around with a submersible data center under a project codenamed 'Natick,' while piggybacking off of its extreme portability and flexibility in terms of resources toward R&D, and it's just getting started. Google has already announced plans to do the same. [1] It also makes sense from a scale/growth standpoint as 50% of earth's population lives within 2 hour drive from their respective coastlines. [2] [0] https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ https://natick.research.microsoft.com/ [1] https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/microsoft-cloud-ocean-project-natick/459318/ https://www.citylab.com/life/2016/02/microsoft-cloud-ocean-p... [2] http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/18/how-many-people-live-near-the/ http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/10/18/how-many-people...

stcredzero 8y ago
>Island became a magnet for the practice once miners figured out that the place is very cold and that electricity there -- geothermal and hydropower -- costs a lot less ... Issac Arthur speculates that Titan may become a center of cryogenic industry and computing in the late 21st century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdpRxGjtCo0 Given that immigrants tend to settle in places that resemble their home country, I wonder if Titan might develop an ex-pat Icelandic community? (Isolated. Rugged. Cold. Beautiful in a literal otherworldly sense.) If you're going to have a submersible data center, you probably want it to be a partially submersible spar buoy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spar_buoy This gives you all of the benefits of submersion, but makes access easier. It also makes the installation immune to waves, especially rogue waves. So what else involves mooring lots of spar buoys off shore? Offshore wind farms.
- ythn 8y ago
  > Issac Arthur speculates that Titan may become a center of cryogenic industry and computing in the late 21st century. More like the late 31st century

DINKDINK 8y ago

>Bitcoin “probably won’t be here far into the future” said Johann Snorri Sigurbergsson Seeing as this guy -- who could make reams of money[1] if he's an accurate price predictor by shorting bitcoin by buying deep, out-of-the-money puts -- isn't rich by doing so, indicates he's inept at making price predictions. https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/ [1] If bitcoin's price catastrophically collapses, a put option would yield ~1,000X / 100000% returns.

microtherion 8y ago
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
- naveen99 8y ago
  Only if you are leveraged.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- DINKDINK 8y ago
  That's not how options work and it's precisely why options exist: to purchase value in domains which are extraordinarily rare without the delta exposure of leveraged spot-shorting. The premium:payout ratio of such a trade requires him to be right only once in 5-10 years for him to walk away profitable.
  - microtherion 8y ago
    He'd have to be right… against a solvent counterparty. What big, reputable players are selling Bitcoin put options at the moment? As of last fall, the market seemed to have been extremely immature: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-possible-trade-bitcoin-options.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/033115/it-po...

ksec 8y ago

I have been wondering, why hasn't Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon built DC in Iceland? To avoid the risk of volcanic eruption?

opportune 8y ago
The main reason is latency - makes more sense to build a datacenter in the UK or Northeast North America as that would reduce the average latency for more people. The domestic need for a massive datacenter is also rather small.
- ksec 8y ago
  Apple, Facebook , and Microsoft are all building or had Massive Datacenter, at least one or two somewhere in EU and US. Likly for Storage and other non latency sensitive application. But none of them choose Iceland, where Electricity is clean and cheap.
  - krn 8y ago
    Iceland has no direct optic cable connection with the US[1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73ekox/map_of_underwater_cables_that_supply_the_worlds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/73ekox/map_of_unde...
    - ksec 8y ago
      arh. thx
- paxy 8y ago
  Yup, all major tech companies have data centers in Dublin, mainly because the government has made it very easy and attractive to do so.

roryisok 8y ago

Stuff like this worries me. We should be doing everything we can to curb the energy and heat we produce and instead we're using vast amounts of energy to basically waste trillions of CPU cycles so that we can produce digital money that might never actually be worth anything. It's just about the most pointless use of planetary resources I can think of

henryw 8y ago
I also wonder why are humans wasting resource like this. Like all this compute power could be used towards curing cancer or something.
- GW150914 8y ago
  People as a group are selfish and short sighted, prone to maximizing personal gain. Individuals can be self sacrificing and possess a long view, but there will be a thousand others willing to work the system to death in their place. More specifically, there are almost limitless rationales to be employed if you stand to gain from turning entropy into personal wealth. “This compute power was never going to be used to cure cancer anyway...” that kind of thing. More pernicious are people who cloak themselves in ideology or Utopianism somthst they convince themselves that this waste of resources is a good thing. Some may even believe it, but most just don’t care and are too busy finding greater fools so they can make money.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    Bitcoin is created through the use of exponentially increasing amounts of energy (I daresay there's a 'crash' scenario where it doesn't expand that way and also doesn't retain value as currently expected). Bitcoin is VALUED in a way similar to the stock market, where people collectively decide it's super good and useful because they're invested into the system. This process is exploitable, and is purely social engineering. If it gets too big to fail, we're all in bad trouble, but we were already in trouble from many other things that have financially become too big to fail.
- ozmbie 8y ago

masonicb00m 8y ago

“After devouring nearly as much energy as all of Iceland’s households combined, Bitcoin miners may be about to return something to the community that’s housed them.” Implication is that the miners do nothing for Iceland? Seems unlikely. They’re probably incorporated businesses paying taxes and injecting wealth into local economy through payroll and other expenses. Why is Bloomberg anti-bitcoin?

allenz 8y ago
Profitability is not the same as social value. See also media critiques of high-frequency trading.
chris_mc 8y ago
>Why is Bloomberg anti-bitcoin? Maybe this? https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-costs/ https://qz.com/84961/this-is-how-much-a-bloomberg-terminal-c...
mihaifm 8y ago
They're probably not against bitcoin, crytocurrency is a controversial topic these days and they just leverage on that.
s73v3r_ 8y ago
"They’re probably incorporated businesses paying taxes and injecting wealth into local economy through payroll and other expenses." What evidence do you have of this? In other areas where this happens, like up by the hydroelectric dam in Washington State, this very much does not happen, and in fact, many mining operations are illegally attaching to the grid. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...

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mansilladev 8y ago

So.. the article concludes that they're "Building Knowledge" on how to maintain data centers housing racks of servers and ASICs doing mining/blockchain work? I wonder if the same argument could be made for the adult content industry, that, for better or worse, has been pushing the barriers of compute and bandwidth since the dawn of the dotcom era.

glenneroo 8y ago

Well if they hope to succeed, they better start the long process of laying down some more fiber connections to the rest of the world. They have to go through Greenland or Europe to get the US. https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

jasonkester 8y ago

I liked this analysis of the situation from when the Bitcoin Miners came to Washington State for the same reason: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1000966967056941056 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1000966967056941056 "We are going to place a point-of-presence for an intrinsically global network, hardware and a skeleton crew, in your geographic territory for as long as you're the dumbest power provider in the world." "..." "If you're not that dumb say so, I have a list."

throwawayqdhd 8y ago

> Iceland estimates the industry will consume more than 100 megawatts by the end of the year. All this energy wasted mining a virtual currency that no one uses. We have to ask ourselves: is Bitcoin mining really the best use of our resources? Is it worth adding to our already engorged carbon footprints?

nielsole 8y ago
Isn't that the benefit of Iceland - That there is no (or significantly) carbon footprint?

koosnel 8y ago

"looking past the faddishness of cryptocurrencies". Bitcoin is an excellent proof of concept for blockchains but I sold mine some time ago because of the ethical issue I have with Bitcoin mining consuming so much power. Some of the newer coins are much more efficient in terms of consuming power. To refer to cryptocurrencies in general as a fad though is very naive and sounds more like central bank desperation.