7 ms·

Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts

33 points by SkyMarshal 5y ago

kindachris 5y ago
https://archive.is/e0npB https://archive.is/e0npB
Closi 5y ago
Because bitcoins are completely decentralised and fungible, there is no real driver to Bitcoin miners paying more for renewable energy, other than the threat of government intervention. I can’t read the full article to see if there is a rebuttal though as it’s behind a paywall.
- mypastself 5y ago
  With bad enough P.R., users could turn away from it. There are incentives and disincentives for miners quite apart from legal issues, regardless of decentralization.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts Some cryptocurrency miners are striking deals with operators of struggling nuclear plants, which are carbon-free and have excess power capacity to spare By Jennifer Hiller - WSJ Bitcoin miners, under fire for their sizable environmental footprint, are forging partnerships with owners of struggling nuclear-power plants with electricity to spare. The matchups have the potential to solve key issues facing each industry, executives and analysts say: Electricity-hungry bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power, while nuclear plants facing competition from cheaper power sources need new customers. Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December. “We are building demand adjacent to the existing nuclear plant,” said Talen Energy President Alex Hernandez, who heads the subsidiary jointly developing the mining project near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining. “Both industry’s challenges are the other industry’s positives,” said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc. Mining bitcoin is an energy-intensive process. To unlock more of the currency, miners must solve mathematical puzzles that become increasingly complex, which means they require more computing power—and electricity. Mining a decade ago required only a person with a PC, but rising bitcoin prices and a limited supply have created a race. The way to boost the odds of figuring out the puzzle is to put more machines to work. “At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure,” said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf. The rise of vast mining operations has fueled criticism from environmentalists and others that growing use of fossil-fuel electricity for cryptocurrency could waste resources and worsen climate change. A tweet from Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk expressing concern over the environmental impact of mining operations briefly caused bitcoin prices to fall in May. Nuclear power, meanwhile, has lost public favor in the wake of accidents such as Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and has struggled to compete economically in the U.S. Nuclear plants provide a steady source of emissions-free power, but like coal-fired power plants, many face a daunting challenge selling their output in wholesale power markets amid stiff competition from wind and solar power—and natural-gas generation, which became cheaper after the fracking boom led to huge new discoveries of the fuel. “They’re still making money because they’re still running, but it’s very hard for them in the current power markets to recover a fair return on their maintenance investments,” said Travis Miller, energy and utilities strategist for Morningstar. Numerous nuclear plants have been retired in the U.S. in recent years, including the Indian Point facility outside of New York City formerly owned by Entergy Corp. With retirements likely to outpace new projects, nuclear is poised to decrease in the U.S. electricity mix in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration. Exelon Corp. EXC -0.83%▲ in June said that it would shut two of three Illinois nuclear plants that failed to sell their electricity during the most recent wholesale power auction for PJM Interconnection, which operates a market serving 13 states and Washington, D.C. That led state lawmakers to approve a bailout this month to keep the plants running. Talen’s Susquehanna plant also had fewer megawatts clear the same PJM auction than the previous one in 2018. The outlook for Talen subsidiary Talen Energy Supply LLC was revised to negative by Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. The upshot will be a decline in auction revenue of $209 million over 2022 and 2023, according to Fitch. Cryptocurrency miners in China are turning off their machines after Beijing warned it would tighten its control over the industry. This has created an opportunity for miners elsewhere, as the power behind crypto becomes less dependent on one place. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi “We find ourselves in a place where the power markets continue to be oversupplied, and in general with a few exceptions, pretty weak,” said Mr. Hernandez, Talen’s president. The company sees the bitcoin facility as key in building out a carbon-free digital infrastructure business, he added. It also plans a data center next to Susquehanna, and on Tuesday said it had secured another $175 million in capital for the projects. While more nuclear-bitcoin tie-ups are expected, they aren’t likely to be large enough or happen quickly enough to save nuclear plants teetering on the edge of closure, said Bill Dugan, a director at Customized Energy Solutions, an energy advisory firm. “It would have to be a lot of them aggregated together,” Mr. Dugan said. For bitcoin miners, the partnerships allow them to promote projects as having an environmentally friendly source of power. “That was a big differentiator for us,” said Maxim Serezhin, chief executive at Standard Power, which is building a nuclear-powered bitcoin-mining facility at a former paper mill in Coshocton, Ohio. Standard Power’s formal name is 500 N 4th Street LLC. Energy Harbor declined to comment and referred questions to Mr. Serezhin. The Compass Mining deal with startup Oklo doesn’t include a set price for power, but Whit Gibbs, chief executive of Compass, said he is confident that the companies will agree on a price that allows for profitable cryptocurrency mining. Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and chief executive at Oklo, said he had received inquiries from other bitcoin miners interested in the company’s 1.5-megawatt project using small modular reactors. It still needs federal approval, however, and isn’t likely to happen until sometime between 2023 and 2025, he said. In Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez has been touting his hometown as a destination for cryptocurrency miners, exchanges and investment firms. Part of his pitch includes the nearby nuclear-power plant owned by Florida Power & Light Co., a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc. NEE -0.70%▲ Many environmental, social and governance, or ESG, concerns about bitcoin mining “come from the fact that a lot of the mining was being done in coal-producing countries,” said Mr. Suarez. Talks with Florida Power & Light officials have included whether mining facilities might be located near the nuclear plant, and challenges such as the lack of cheap land to build big warehouses for mining gear, Mr. Suarez said. Florida Power & Light declined to comment on the discussions, but spokesman Bill Orlove said South Florida has become a relocation destination for the tech industry. “We look forward to supporting the continued innovation and growth those companies bring,” Mr. Orlove said.
  - bluecalm 5y ago
    That sounds like a recipe for a funding disaster. The chances that cryptocurrency fad, especially PoW based is remotely as profitable or even operational in 20 years must be in low single digits if even that.
- imglorp 5y ago
  Global government intervention disincentivizing fossil plants for everyone would be a net positive. And if the miners are subsidizing the sustainable power industry, that would also be a net positive for everyone as the state of the art advances to keep up.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > sustainable power industry I've not heard that nuclear fission is particularly sustainable. Clean, relative to fossil fuels, yes. But sustainable? Does that word even make sense to use in referring to nuclear power, outside the technical sense of "self-sustaining fission reaction"?
mgh2 5y ago
Don't be surprised when human greed causes another disaster like Chernobyl
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  I certainly won’t be, but I think disasters where entire communities become unlivable because of groundwater or water supply pollution are more likely. Maybe there’s a slowly developing disaster in progress.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Burning fossil fuels is a disaster far greater than Chernobyl.
TheDudeMan 5y ago
Good. Fission industry needs any boost it can get.
- freeflight 5y ago
  The fission industry has seen literally whole decades of massive boosts.
  - TheDudeMan 5y ago
    Are you saying it doesn't still need more?
    - freeflight 5y ago
      Yes, that's what I'm saying. Some of the largest economies on this planet have poured massive resources into fission for literally decades. Whatever we might discover/improve, we already did, anything past that seems to have quite diminishing returns. Particularly compared to other technological fields that didn't even get remotely the same levels of funding and time investment. Which means there's much more potential there for actually innovative breakthroughs. Case in point: Grid-scale storage was for the longest time a field that saw barely any attention, it's quite underdeveloped. As the common consensus was that fission will deliver all the electricity we would ever need. Now we have plenty of renewables, but we lack the storage to fully utilize them. Which means if we get grid-storage right, we have already solved a very big part of the problem.
pixelgeek 5y ago
It just seems that bitcoin miners are starting to sound like Bond villains.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Exactly what the IMF, World Bank and BIS want you to think. Agustín Carstens is the real Bond villain.
  - pixelgeek 5y ago
    Well he has the name for it. It just seems that the next step is going to be for bitcoin miners to start building a Dyson Sphere even though it will kill the rest of the planet off.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
I'd give them all the nuclear power they want. In one very short and intensely hot burst.
A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
It is interesting; both in title and content. Environmental criticism is not exactly that new, but happens to coincide governments realizing that it may be a little hard to contain. Environmentalism is an easy reason to give for shutting it down. Some will even cheer it.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I've been a huge crypto skeptic for a while now, but I've actually changed my tune a bit in that I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system, given how generally insane settlement procedures are today. But long term, proof-of-work is a definite dead end. I'm not sure if Bitcoin will eventually collapse, or of it will find a way to transition to some other proof mechanism before it does so, but proof-of-work is fundamentally not viable. By design the amount of energy required to keep the network secure increases as the value of the network grows - that's the exact opposite of most endeavors, where growth gets you economies of scale which greatly reduce per-item costs. So the only options are either that BTC has a relative ceiling on it's total value, or it eventually takes up a majority of worldwide energy use. I'm guessing the wheels will come off before the latter occurs.
- trident5000 5y ago
  I think thats a pretty big assumption. What about rooftop solar?...if excess energy was used to mine btc. You would have incentive for solar adoption and the most fair and distributed system possible. Not saying this is how it goes but there's possibilities out there that can make sense. Also has anyone actually looked at the btc energy usage as a percentage of global energy usage? Its a pimple and that rate does not increase with userbase it increases with coin value which will hit a plateau.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Rooftop solar, nuclear, coal, oil, hydro - literally NONE of this matters. The whole thing about proof-of-work is that it serves as a way to prove that a particular miner spent some amount of money (in the form of energy costs) validating a transaction. As the value of Bitcoin increases, then, it means there is more incentive to throw energy at the problem, because the reward you get for mining (or, for that matter, for a chain attack) is worth more. There is no way to get out of the proof-of-work problem by deploying cheaper or more abundant forms of energy, because, again by design, it just means that any miner would need to use more of that cheaper form of energy to validate a transaction.
enteeentee 5y ago
Reminder, the waste from bitcoin miners is also about hardware churn, not just energy.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable. More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source that costs more than a clean renewable? What about factoring in the costs of the waste and decommissioning of nuclear power plants?
  - Manuel_D 5y ago
    You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... And the huge win provided by nuclear power is it's geographic independence and consistent output. Nuclear plants work regardless of wind speed, and give the same output in the Arctic circle as they do at the equator. And this output is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate with weather or day/night cycles. This eliminates the need for storage, which is something we don't currently have the capability to build at any substantial scale. That's what people don't realize when they compare costs of nuclear vs solar + wind. The reality is it's costs of nuclear vs. costs of solar + wind + thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy from rural areas to population centers + massive amounts of grid storage to accommodate intermittent generation.
drumhead 5y ago
Bitcoin seems to be a virus slowly consuming the resources of the planet and excreting nothing in return.
- freeflight 5y ago
  That's not Bitcoin but just humans in general.
RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
So I've been lazy about this, but I've been intending to do an economic of the system I've had installed for some time. In short, a 8kh with 24kwh battery backup leaves me with plenty of overage to send back to the grid where I live. I get about .1/ kwh I send back to the grid (I don't but this require more detail on why), and I would get .2-.6 /kwh if I run an antminer s9. I would need 6 to match the total demand I have at peak generation and the additional cost would be ~3k (32k for the whole solar system, so total 35kish). Only doing bitcoin on my surplus angry pixies would basically cover the cost of the solar loan, the power bill, and maybe some extra. Basically, through a combination of subsidies, geography, and credit score, if you've got the technical know-how, in my region one could effectively not have a power bill through a combination of solar and bitcoin mining.
- flatiron 5y ago
  I took a boat ride yesterday and on the dock I asked my friend if they pay a flat rate for electricity or per kwh. He said a flat rate. Which obviously I joked we should mine Bitcoin on his boat. But I really wonder if we would get caught doing it.

33 points by SkyMarshal 5y ago

https://archive.is/e0npB https://archive.is/e0npB

Because bitcoins are completely decentralised and fungible, there is no real driver to Bitcoin miners paying more for renewable energy, other than the threat of government intervention. I can’t read the full article to see if there is a rebuttal though as it’s behind a paywall.

mypastself 5y ago
With bad enough P.R., users could turn away from it. There are incentives and disincentives for miners quite apart from legal issues, regardless of decentralization.
jerry1979 5y ago
Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts Some cryptocurrency miners are striking deals with operators of struggling nuclear plants, which are carbon-free and have excess power capacity to spare By Jennifer Hiller - WSJ Bitcoin miners, under fire for their sizable environmental footprint, are forging partnerships with owners of struggling nuclear-power plants with electricity to spare. The matchups have the potential to solve key issues facing each industry, executives and analysts say: Electricity-hungry bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power, while nuclear plants facing competition from cheaper power sources need new customers. Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December. “We are building demand adjacent to the existing nuclear plant,” said Talen Energy President Alex Hernandez, who heads the subsidiary jointly developing the mining project near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station. New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining. “Both industry’s challenges are the other industry’s positives,” said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc. Mining bitcoin is an energy-intensive process. To unlock more of the currency, miners must solve mathematical puzzles that become increasingly complex, which means they require more computing power—and electricity. Mining a decade ago required only a person with a PC, but rising bitcoin prices and a limited supply have created a race. The way to boost the odds of figuring out the puzzle is to put more machines to work. “At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure,” said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf. The rise of vast mining operations has fueled criticism from environmentalists and others that growing use of fossil-fuel electricity for cryptocurrency could waste resources and worsen climate change. A tweet from Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk expressing concern over the environmental impact of mining operations briefly caused bitcoin prices to fall in May. Nuclear power, meanwhile, has lost public favor in the wake of accidents such as Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and has struggled to compete economically in the U.S. Nuclear plants provide a steady source of emissions-free power, but like coal-fired power plants, many face a daunting challenge selling their output in wholesale power markets amid stiff competition from wind and solar power—and natural-gas generation, which became cheaper after the fracking boom led to huge new discoveries of the fuel. “They’re still making money because they’re still running, but it’s very hard for them in the current power markets to recover a fair return on their maintenance investments,” said Travis Miller, energy and utilities strategist for Morningstar. Numerous nuclear plants have been retired in the U.S. in recent years, including the Indian Point facility outside of New York City formerly owned by Entergy Corp. With retirements likely to outpace new projects, nuclear is poised to decrease in the U.S. electricity mix in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration. Exelon Corp. EXC -0.83%▲ in June said that it would shut two of three Illinois nuclear plants that failed to sell their electricity during the most recent wholesale power auction for PJM Interconnection, which operates a market serving 13 states and Washington, D.C. That led state lawmakers to approve a bailout this month to keep the plants running. Talen’s Susquehanna plant also had fewer megawatts clear the same PJM auction than the previous one in 2018. The outlook for Talen subsidiary Talen Energy Supply LLC was revised to negative by Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. The upshot will be a decline in auction revenue of $209 million over 2022 and 2023, according to Fitch. Cryptocurrency miners in China are turning off their machines after Beijing warned it would tighten its control over the industry. This has created an opportunity for miners elsewhere, as the power behind crypto becomes less dependent on one place. Photo illustration: Sharon Shi “We find ourselves in a place where the power markets continue to be oversupplied, and in general with a few exceptions, pretty weak,” said Mr. Hernandez, Talen’s president. The company sees the bitcoin facility as key in building out a carbon-free digital infrastructure business, he added. It also plans a data center next to Susquehanna, and on Tuesday said it had secured another $175 million in capital for the projects. While more nuclear-bitcoin tie-ups are expected, they aren’t likely to be large enough or happen quickly enough to save nuclear plants teetering on the edge of closure, said Bill Dugan, a director at Customized Energy Solutions, an energy advisory firm. “It would have to be a lot of them aggregated together,” Mr. Dugan said. For bitcoin miners, the partnerships allow them to promote projects as having an environmentally friendly source of power. “That was a big differentiator for us,” said Maxim Serezhin, chief executive at Standard Power, which is building a nuclear-powered bitcoin-mining facility at a former paper mill in Coshocton, Ohio. Standard Power’s formal name is 500 N 4th Street LLC. Energy Harbor declined to comment and referred questions to Mr. Serezhin. The Compass Mining deal with startup Oklo doesn’t include a set price for power, but Whit Gibbs, chief executive of Compass, said he is confident that the companies will agree on a price that allows for profitable cryptocurrency mining. Jacob DeWitte, co-founder and chief executive at Oklo, said he had received inquiries from other bitcoin miners interested in the company’s 1.5-megawatt project using small modular reactors. It still needs federal approval, however, and isn’t likely to happen until sometime between 2023 and 2025, he said. In Miami, Mayor Francis Suarez has been touting his hometown as a destination for cryptocurrency miners, exchanges and investment firms. Part of his pitch includes the nearby nuclear-power plant owned by Florida Power & Light Co., a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc. NEE -0.70%▲ Many environmental, social and governance, or ESG, concerns about bitcoin mining “come from the fact that a lot of the mining was being done in coal-producing countries,” said Mr. Suarez. Talks with Florida Power & Light officials have included whether mining facilities might be located near the nuclear plant, and challenges such as the lack of cheap land to build big warehouses for mining gear, Mr. Suarez said. Florida Power & Light declined to comment on the discussions, but spokesman Bill Orlove said South Florida has become a relocation destination for the tech industry. “We look forward to supporting the continued innovation and growth those companies bring,” Mr. Orlove said.
- bluecalm 5y ago
  That sounds like a recipe for a funding disaster. The chances that cryptocurrency fad, especially PoW based is remotely as profitable or even operational in 20 years must be in low single digits if even that.
imglorp 5y ago
Global government intervention disincentivizing fossil plants for everyone would be a net positive. And if the miners are subsidizing the sustainable power industry, that would also be a net positive for everyone as the state of the art advances to keep up.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > sustainable power industry I've not heard that nuclear fission is particularly sustainable. Clean, relative to fossil fuels, yes. But sustainable? Does that word even make sense to use in referring to nuclear power, outside the technical sense of "self-sustaining fission reaction"?

mgh2 5y ago

Don't be surprised when human greed causes another disaster like Chernobyl

alphabettsy 5y ago
I certainly won’t be, but I think disasters where entire communities become unlivable because of groundwater or water supply pollution are more likely. Maybe there’s a slowly developing disaster in progress.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Burning fossil fuels is a disaster far greater than Chernobyl.

TheDudeMan 5y ago

Good. Fission industry needs any boost it can get.

freeflight 5y ago
The fission industry has seen literally whole decades of massive boosts.
- TheDudeMan 5y ago
  Are you saying it doesn't still need more?
  - freeflight 5y ago
    Yes, that's what I'm saying. Some of the largest economies on this planet have poured massive resources into fission for literally decades. Whatever we might discover/improve, we already did, anything past that seems to have quite diminishing returns. Particularly compared to other technological fields that didn't even get remotely the same levels of funding and time investment. Which means there's much more potential there for actually innovative breakthroughs. Case in point: Grid-scale storage was for the longest time a field that saw barely any attention, it's quite underdeveloped. As the common consensus was that fission will deliver all the electricity we would ever need. Now we have plenty of renewables, but we lack the storage to fully utilize them. Which means if we get grid-storage right, we have already solved a very big part of the problem.

pixelgeek 5y ago

It just seems that bitcoin miners are starting to sound like Bond villains.

randomhodler84 5y ago
Exactly what the IMF, World Bank and BIS want you to think. Agustín Carstens is the real Bond villain.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  Well he has the name for it. It just seems that the next step is going to be for bitcoin miners to start building a Dyson Sphere even though it will kill the rest of the planet off.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

I'd give them all the nuclear power they want. In one very short and intensely hot burst.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago

It is interesting; both in title and content. Environmental criticism is not exactly that new, but happens to coincide governments realizing that it may be a little hard to contain. Environmentalism is an easy reason to give for shutting it down. Some will even cheer it.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

I've been a huge crypto skeptic for a while now, but I've actually changed my tune a bit in that I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system, given how generally insane settlement procedures are today. But long term, proof-of-work is a definite dead end. I'm not sure if Bitcoin will eventually collapse, or of it will find a way to transition to some other proof mechanism before it does so, but proof-of-work is fundamentally not viable. By design the amount of energy required to keep the network secure increases as the value of the network grows - that's the exact opposite of most endeavors, where growth gets you economies of scale which greatly reduce per-item costs. So the only options are either that BTC has a relative ceiling on it's total value, or it eventually takes up a majority of worldwide energy use. I'm guessing the wheels will come off before the latter occurs.

trident5000 5y ago
I think thats a pretty big assumption. What about rooftop solar?...if excess energy was used to mine btc. You would have incentive for solar adoption and the most fair and distributed system possible. Not saying this is how it goes but there's possibilities out there that can make sense. Also has anyone actually looked at the btc energy usage as a percentage of global energy usage? Its a pimple and that rate does not increase with userbase it increases with coin value which will hit a plateau.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Rooftop solar, nuclear, coal, oil, hydro - literally NONE of this matters. The whole thing about proof-of-work is that it serves as a way to prove that a particular miner spent some amount of money (in the form of energy costs) validating a transaction. As the value of Bitcoin increases, then, it means there is more incentive to throw energy at the problem, because the reward you get for mining (or, for that matter, for a chain attack) is worth more. There is no way to get out of the proof-of-work problem by deploying cheaper or more abundant forms of energy, because, again by design, it just means that any miner would need to use more of that cheaper form of energy to validate a transaction.

enteeentee 5y ago

Reminder, the waste from bitcoin miners is also about hardware churn, not just energy.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity. Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.

cratermoon 5y ago
Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable. More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source that costs more than a clean renewable? What about factoring in the costs of the waste and decommissioning of nuclear power plants?
- Manuel_D 5y ago
  You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter7.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5... Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-seawater-extraction-makes-nuclear-power-completely-renewable/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s... And the huge win provided by nuclear power is it's geographic independence and consistent output. Nuclear plants work regardless of wind speed, and give the same output in the Arctic circle as they do at the equator. And this output is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate with weather or day/night cycles. This eliminates the need for storage, which is something we don't currently have the capability to build at any substantial scale. That's what people don't realize when they compare costs of nuclear vs solar + wind. The reality is it's costs of nuclear vs. costs of solar + wind + thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy from rural areas to population centers + massive amounts of grid storage to accommodate intermittent generation.

drumhead 5y ago

Bitcoin seems to be a virus slowly consuming the resources of the planet and excreting nothing in return.

freeflight 5y ago
That's not Bitcoin but just humans in general.

RosanaAnaDana 5y ago

So I've been lazy about this, but I've been intending to do an economic of the system I've had installed for some time. In short, a 8kh with 24kwh battery backup leaves me with plenty of overage to send back to the grid where I live. I get about .1/ kwh I send back to the grid (I don't but this require more detail on why), and I would get .2-.6 /kwh if I run an antminer s9. I would need 6 to match the total demand I have at peak generation and the additional cost would be ~3k (32k for the whole solar system, so total 35kish). Only doing bitcoin on my surplus angry pixies would basically cover the cost of the solar loan, the power bill, and maybe some extra. Basically, through a combination of subsidies, geography, and credit score, if you've got the technical know-how, in my region one could effectively not have a power bill through a combination of solar and bitcoin mining.

flatiron 5y ago
I took a boat ride yesterday and on the dock I asked my friend if they pay a flat rate for electricity or per kwh. He said a flat rate. Which obviously I joked we should mine Bitcoin on his boat. But I really wonder if we would get caught doing it.