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Overinstallation of renewable production is likely one of the lowest cost ways to hit carbon reduction goals. But costs routinely go negative already, even in t
by sauwan 5y ago
Overinstallation of renewable production is likely one of the lowest cost ways to hit carbon reduction goals. But costs routinely go negative already, even in the midwest, largely because of the renewable tax production credits where producers still make money even selling at a loss.
This problem will only get worse, so finding productive use cases for this capacity is great.
While I think bitcoin makes some sense, I personally think the new coin Chia could make even more sense. "Farming" (aka mining) chia is very energy lite - but it does require "plotting" which is more energy intensive. If plotters run during the inexpensive energy periods and low cost farming is the only thing that runs during the peak energy cost periods, then the network wouldn't see huge fluctuations in mining and leave more vulnerable during periods of low mining and high energy costs.
- stopBurncoins 5y agoGreat, the hard disk shortage a few years back was not enough, the current gpu one is not even done, and now we will not be able to buy ssd/hd anymore thanks to proof of space How is it possible to frame those systems as green? It's power that goes away to computation It's hard disks that nobody uses and that sit there, eating power All those things have not only the energy cost, but also the environmental, production costs associated, and the damage done to countless companies that can't get the hardware anymore
- sauwan 5y agoSmall drives will probably not see much of a shortage. If you're looking for a 10+tb drive you might run into some issues in the short term. Things are not either "green" or "not green". Something can be "more green", and just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't go down that route instead. The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrencies are not going away. You can choose to be angry and resentful of that, or we can try to find ways to minimize the impact they have overall. Hard drives use a fraction of the power that a CPU/GPU/ASIC uses, and there is just as much production energy and waste involved in those as in hard drives. The world is not black and white.
- phpnode 5y agocryptocurrencies could easily go away. They have almost no adoption and the US or EU could look at just how much power and wealth is being controlled by Russia and China, how they're used for money laundering, or how Iran and so on use them to work around sanctions and just decide to ban them. It would be trivial.