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> Do you live next to a power plant? Or even in sight of a power plant? No, because we have a power grid to move this electricity around. Of course I do. There
by emteycz 6y ago
> Do you live next to a power plant? Or even in sight of a power plant? No, because we have a power grid to move this electricity around.
Of course I do. There are solars and wind turbines all around me, not even talking about the natural gas and coal powerplants I can see right out of my window near the edge of the city. And every year there are many gigawatts of electricity from these exact powerplants right next to me that go to waste because it can't be transported nor stored economically. Thankfully now there are some Bitcoin miners paying at least something for some of that waste electricity, so my own electricity can be cheaper.
> Surely you don't think that power plants are being built in the middle of nowhere with absolutely no way to use the electricity
I don't think that's what's happening. Powerplants are built close to human settlements. Even very nasty fossil fuel powered powerplants are right there. Even the nuclear powerplants are very close to major settlements. Surely we would've built them very far away if that was a possibility. Chernobyl was the one exception, because it secretly powered a gigantic radar called Duga.
> However, you can surely agree we'd all be better off if new hydroelectric power was used to take older fossil fuel plants offline rather than performing arbitrary proof-of-work calculations.
I can assure you there isn't a single Bitcoin miner preventing that. The reasons are different - it's not easy to transport or store electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin mining is waste electricity - electricity that can't be put into the grid for profit and would be generated anyways, regardless of Bitcoin. It's not economical to mine Bitcoin with ordinary grid electricity.
> Please don't be facetious. Obviously I have not "forgotten" about China
Why have you tried to compare Iceland's total energy output with Bitcoin energy consumption, then? That doesn't make any sense if you had China in mind.
When I look at wholesale electricity prices, it's 3 times more than you can earn with Bitcoin mining. Please explain to me: Why would powerplants not use electricity for profit if they could? Or are you saying that Bitcoin miners are losing money to mine Bitcoin?
- ncmncm 6y agoBitcoin miners are often, instead, stealing the power used to mine. We are more used to this for Monero coins, where the equipment used is fleets of hijacked PCs, but bitcoin miners using custom equipment are not less clever than Monero miners. People are paying for the power, just not the same people as are getting the bitcoins mined with it. This is easier to arrange in places with more retail corruption, like China, Russia, and Venezuela, than in (say) the US, where corruption is wholesale, concentrated higher up. But mining on US military bases and naval vessels, by contractors, is probably not negligible; or at commercial nuke plants where the marginal cost of generation is negligible and ratepayers have already been robbed to pay for construction. The variety of ways found to steal abstract property has always been very, very large, and bitcoin miners are not a bit shy. We cannot assume the stolen power is all or mostly renewable. For example, we may guess that Venezuelan, Nigerian, and Saudi mining uses power from oil, Russian largely from gas, Chinese from coal. The fraction of bitcoins mined from stolen power may be estimated by comparing the market value of new coins to the retail value of the power that was needed to produce them.
- emteycz 6y agoStolen power is definitely not used to mine Bitcoin in any significant quantities. Bashing Bitcoin for that is like bashing torrent for the same.