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Bitcoin gave a shuttered coal plant a second life
- iaw 5y ago> Greenidge also said that the company plans to replicate its vertically integrated model — cryptocurrency mining at the source of energy production — at other power plants, with a goal of at least 500 megawatts of combined mining capacity by 2025. This seems abjectly horrible from an environmental perspective.
- MrMan 5y agoI called this on HN and got of course downvoted
- elite_hackers3 5y agoIt’s HN… I wouldn’t expect anything less
- elite_hackers4 5y agoIt’s HN. I wouldn’t expect anything less..
- pmlnr 5y agoThe title makes it sound like it's a good thing. It's not.
- andylei 5y agothe article is about how it's a bad thing: > There’s just one problem: If it weren’t for Bitcoin, there would almost certainly be no reason to run the power plant in Dresden at all. Without the revenue from mining, Greenidge would have no reason to spew hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the plant’s stacks, discharge hundreds of billions of gallons of hot water into a nearby trout stream, or pipe in and burn billions of cubic feet of fracked natural gas.
- ece 5y agoBitcoin: exploiting the dirtiest power sources since 2021.
- bananapub 5y agothe level of damage from bitcoin is...quite astonishing. even if every single cycle was powered by renewable energy, in a world with any remaining fossil fuel power it is displacing more worthwhile loads and so directly causing emissions. I used to think it was just a stupid idea but it's now far far beyond that. let's see how long before someone posts a defence by comparing it to the power use of banks (!?!).
- ChemSpider 5y agoBut the core problem is that dirty electricity is not (yet!) taxed for its CO2 emission. If the same plant would be used to power a data center for Netflix streaming it would be equally bad.
- thatfrenchguy 5y agoNo, really, the core problem is that bitcoin has negative value for society.
- gtt 5y agoIt is really useful for some applications, and I think it is especially useful for keeping fiat money in check. Now, I can deflect from fiat (at some costs, obviously).
- asdff 5y agowhy not invest in a commodity to hedge against fiat? You know, something real and economically useful...
- cool_dude85 5y agoOh, and depend on the GOVERNMENT to protect my commodities contracts with fiat courts of law, or my physical commodities with their jackbooted thugs?
- gtt 5y agoHarder to store, transfer, many commodities are perishable, bulky, heavy, etc.
- asdff 5y agoWhen you buy commodities for investment they aren't exactly shipping trucks of corn to your house
- splitrocket 5y agoBurning coal causes cancer. A lot of cancer. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reliance-on-coal-linked-with-lung-cancer-incidence/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reliance-...
- arcticbull 5y agoBurning coal also produces a ton of radioactive waste. [1] [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
- makomk 5y agoDepends on your definition of "radioactive waste". From the figures I've seen, coal fly ash is pretty similar to say granite in terms of overall activity and isotopic composition. It doesn't seem to enhance the concentration to the same worrying levels that say rare earth mining does, probably because the radioisotopes and all the other unwanted non-carbon trash is heavily diluted by all the carbon.
- jnwatson 5y agoYou don't inhale granite.
- edavison1 5y agoI'm sure you know this because you read the article (lol) but the plant was shuttered due to lack of energy demand. So it isn't a question of coal vs. bitcoin, it's a question of beautiful lake frontage vs. bitcoin.
- briffle 5y agoIt was converted to natural gas a few years ago. Its quite an editorialized title.
- arcticbull 5y ago
- w0mbat 5y agoCoal causes more radioactive contamination of the environment than nuclear, in addition to increasing CO2 and acid rain. The fact that it encourages damaging changes like the one in the article is another reason why Bitcoin needs to be banned.
- jan_Inkepa 5y agoHow is that relevant to the article? The article states that the power plant was converted to run on gas.
- arcticbull 5y agoOk, so CO2 emissions, and melting the ice caps. Everything else the parent said applies.
- elite_hackers4 5y agoAre you really that stupid?
- RichardHeart 5y agoProof of stake solves this. Proof of work is basically proof of stake in foreign mining hardware and electricity bills. You've heard of small POW chains getting attacked (vechain, ethereum classic) but have you heard of any POS chains having such problems? Caveat: Crypto founder.
- Apocryphon 5y agoDo you know the timeframe for moving ethereum to POS?
- arcticbull 5y ago6 months away at all times :) Jokes aside, I think the current ETA is Q3. I've got it marked in my calendar as "graphics card availability day."
- dehrmann 5y agoBut people want Bitcoin. I'm not sure what a proof-of-stake migration would look like, especially with how much miners have invested in hardware. One of the things about the current boom in cryptocurrency prices is that the underlying technology is irrelevant for most speculators, as long as the ledger is secure. So yes, there's a technical solution for this, but Bitcoin is still popular.
- the_lonely_road 5y agoThis...this can’t be real right? You are telling me that we brought a closed coal plant back online and we did it to mine Bitcoin? I have not felt this defeated in a long ducking time.
- the_lonely_road 5y agoOkay the title is little bit bullshit. The plant was converted to natural gas and is no longer a coal plant. It’s still not great news which is likely why they went with the clickbait title but not as bad as expected. Actually if anything I think the author hurt their cause with that title because now I just feel relieved when I probably would of still been upset about hearing that we brought a natural gas plant online for the sole purpose of mining Bitcoin.
- boringg 5y agoBitcoin is the worst - super fascinating in its infancy and early days. Devastating at mass consumption levels.
- nimos 5y agoI wonder if there could be an "excess power coin" that could only be mined when there was an excess of green energy. I suppose the utilities would have to be in on it to validate power delivery. Even then can't think of a way you could prove a certain block was mined with a specific allotment of energy...
- mshumi 5y agoWe could easily solve this BTC problem by hard forking to a pure proof of stake consensus protocol for BTC. Same security and decentralization guarantees. No environmental harm, and far more scalable so you can actually buy coffee with it. Ofc that's against the best interests of miners and BTC core devs.
- bingbong70 5y agoThe counterargument is people consider fiat proof of stake and don't want to introduce the problems that come with it (like centralization) into btc. I expect a fork like that would go right into the garbage as far as price action is concerned once the risks are understood but you are welcome to try.
- xiphias2 5y ago''Greenidge Generation, a former coal power plant that converted to natural gas and began a Bitcoin mining operation, is positioning itself as part of the clean energy future.'' I know that it's against HN to say that people didn't read the article, but it's relevant, as it's clickbait: the power plant is converted to natural gas, which is still debatable/controversial, but it's not burning coal, as all other commenters wrote. The sad part is actually that the article is interesting, and a lot of work went into it, and then the ,,main editor'' probably gave it a clickbait title. I have seen this myself when my girlfriend was interviewed for a magazine.
- scotty79 5y agoMaybe this will force governments to adjust taxation of energy generation to reflect its environmental impact.
- bananapub 5y agothat's not enough - until there is zero carbon emissions from power generation, bitcoin is creating additional carbon output by displacing something more useful. if someone wants to mine bitcoin on an island with their own solar or tidal capacity, ok, I guess, but that's not the case anywhere afaik.
- scotty79 5y agoBut sufficiently large tax on dirty energy could push out bitcoin out of fossil fuel energy and force it to invest into renewable energy sources. And there's a lot of non-useful energy usage that is happening because fossil fuel energy is too cheap. Like heating pools and outdoor hot tubs or heating or cooling houses instead of properly insulating them. I'd say that harsh tax on fossil fuels could do way more to limit carbon footprint and accelerate movement toward renewables than any one measure such as banning bitcoin mining. Inform the market of the true cost and let it find the best solution.
- bananapub 5y agoa greenhouse gas tax isn't enough by itself - bitcoin's price may just rise high enough to justify (to bitcoin fans) mining even with the tax. the purpose of the tax isn't to change the economics of bitcoin, it is to slash emissions since no amount of bitcoin justifies further damage to the climate. it needs to be banned (and other similar things) until the grid is ~100% greenhouse emission free.
- scotty79 5y agoBitcoin price is not related at all with energy prices or fossil energy tax. If price of energy is high enough bitcoin mining will not be profitable for so many people and number of miners and their energy usage will scale down to the point where average reward for each miner covers energy cost. But you don't want miners to disappear. You want them to use the money they got from financial markets to build their own renewable energy generation capacity vastly exceeding what people now build for ordinary use. Same way they bought coal power plant they'd build a solar or wind farm and sell energy to the grid when price of energy is higher than mining reward.
- boringg 5y agoWould be funny (not actually funny, more darkly depressing) if coal generators were in fact a lot of the buyers of bitcoin in that they not only make money on their bitcoin holdings but also on the revenue from their coal generation facilities. Making money on both sides!