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Same flaw as the other ideas - mining is very capital intensive. You can use mining in a demand response capacity, but it's best used when you can run it 98% o
by dgacmu 8y ago
Same flaw as the other ideas - mining is very capital intensive. You can use mining in a demand response capacity, but it's best used when you can run it 98% of the time and shut down during the most expensive 2%. If you look at some of the data from Australia, peak cost per MW can go really high.
It's also an environmental travesty, but that's already the case.
- nukemandan 8y agoRemember that the alternative at the moments is literally pumping that energy into the ground as waste heat. I think that renewable resources otherwise wasted being used for mining instead of that seems like a win-win.
- dgacmu 8y agoIt takes resources - a lot of them, including energy - to build the miners. It's a net loss if you can't run the miners at a sufficient duty cycle. Cheap mining power is about 4c per kwh. A $350 GPU at 200W (hand-waving) takes about 20c/day to operate. At $70/year of power, and maybe a useful life of 3 years, it's actually capital-dominated.
- nukemandan 8y agoTrue- so if you lived in a zone with negative price, then you would throttle your GPUs otherwise and only go full throttle when you literal get paid to use the power. But duty cycle just for that would be low... I would need to look more at the stats. But if full time operation on average over the year was closer to (or less than) $0 for power usage, could you net a profit over the life cycle? I would surely hope so!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]