18 ms·

Bitcoin mining has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses

59 points by VHRanger 5y ago

tromp 5y ago
> As more of the tokens are mined, the puzzles get harder Difficulty doesn't automatically increase over time. Rather, it has tended to increase for two major reasons: 1) bitcoin price going up, increasing miner competition chasing the higher reward. The reward halvings every 4 years have done little to counter this uptrend. 2) mining efficiency going up. after transitioning from CPUs through GPUs and FPGAs to ASICs, efficiencies have started to level off now.
GranularRecipe 5y ago
A lot of the comments are whataboutism and strawman arguments (big corporations, fossil fuel, military). To de-emotionalise the discussion, it makes sense to separate the two aspects: 1. Is the argument from the linked article factually (and semantically) true? 2. If that is the case, what are the moral and political implications?
keymone 5y ago
energy is a finite resource sold on a market. if bitcoin miners are willing to pay higher price for it - what's your problem? if you want population to pay less for energy - vote for a government that will subsidize that.
kova12 5y ago
Same logic could be applied to just about anything that uses any resource at all.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  Yes, there's a surprising number of people commenting on this thread who are really upset at marshallian scissors - it's funniest thing I've read this week.
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
China sure made the right choice to ban crypto. 0.5% of the world's energy is insane
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Xi is making a lot of good decisions lately. Put a mouthy billionaire in his place--great. Make school equity more advantageous to the poor kids--good. Put some breaks on gambling--fine. I do wish he would keep this citizens wealth in China. I'm tired of seeing his wealthy people buying up our realestate, along with every other nation. We only have so much land. It should be set aside for American citizens. (Lately people. I don't need a lecture of the bad things he has done. I know them, and don't like them.)
- Feeble 5y ago
  You want to know what's insane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_States_military#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Defense%20uses,(23%2C000%20L)%20per%20day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta....
  - baseballdork 5y ago
    So, because the DoD uses a lot of energy, we should be okay with the energy a speculative asset consumes?
    - keymone 5y ago
      you should be ok with market participants paying market price for a finite resource sold on a market.
      - baseballdork 5y ago
        Why? This is not a free market, nor a market price that reflects externalities of generating that energy. I'm not okay with 0.5% of the earth's energy being consumed to produce sha sums for the sole purpose of mining speculative assets.
bamboozled 5y ago
I’m paying to subsidise the fossil fuel industry, I care more about that, I’m just not outages about this.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  You do realize that energy being used to mine crypto is generated in good part by those fossil fuels you care about, right? https://www.govtech.com/news/bitcoin-mining-in-upstate-new-york-is-environmental-concern https://www.govtech.com/news/bitcoin-mining-in-upstate-new-y...
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Apparently it's around 56% renewables-generated electricity. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/07/06/bitcoin-mining-uses-a-higher-mix-of-sustainable-energy-than-any-major-country-or-industry/?sh=31b49e4d4cc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/07/06/bi...
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      Your link is press-release like article. It cites a self-reporting based survey published by the Bitcoin Mining Council, a "voluntary global forum of Bitcoin mining companies and other companies in the Bitcoin industry", that goes so far as to claim Bitcoin is "one of the most sustainable industries globally". This hardly seems like an objective, reputable source whose claims should be accepted at face value.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        The very point of that council, which is brand new, is to give transparency and insight into the energy mix used to mine Bitcoin. You should never take any claim at face value, but it's quite lazy to dismiss their data without backing it up.
        LurkingPenguin 5y ago
jklinger410 5y ago
I'm not paying Bitcoin's energy bill. Bitcoin is paying its own bill, but the electric grid is a marketplace with a finite supply. So the people who own those companies are raising the rates (supply and demand). Electricity, much like housing, should not be a place where regular folks can get priced out of the market by corporations. You just want me to be mad at bitcoin so I don't notice that the system itself is sadistic.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > You just want me to be mad at bitcoin so I don't notice that the system itself is sadistic. More charitably: it’s easier and intellectually lazier to point at a bogeyman than to understand and explain structural issues Same happens in housing wrt furor over gentrification and luxury housing. Blame the rich foreign investors and tech bros instead of the structure of the marketplace and enforced scarcity of the zoning system!
- sumeno 5y ago
  Since the electric grid has a finite supply, you have to eliminate usage somehow. If usage isn’t being eliminated via higher prices maybe we should just get rid of the “currency” that consumes the power of a small country and serves no purpose outside crime and speculation.
Hamuko 5y ago
>Cheap electricity in places such as Texas is expected to make the US a leading refuge for crypto miners. It's a good thing I don't live in Texas, because otherwise I might be worried considering how shitty and unreliable ERCOT is already without widespread mining.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  I think crypto mining is dumb, but it might actually help the ERCOT situation when combined with demand-response electricity pricing. Miners are gonna throttle back mining if electricity costs more than the mining output and they’ll mine when electricity cheap, supporting the price which helps the fiscal solvency of electricity producers.
- paulgb 5y ago
  Bitcoin miners may actually make ERCOT more reliable, since they pre-buy a steady stream of electricity and can sell it back (or be paid to use less) during crises like their snow storm[1]. I still think the negative externalities of Bitcoin mining outweigh the positive ones, though. (Full disclosure, I'm short a company mentioned in that article) [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/08/bitcoin-mining-texas-electricity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/08/bitcoin...
temp8964 5y ago
> In the United States, crypto mining could cost residential and business ratepayers $1 billion a year, the researchers estimate. Is $1 billion a year across the whole country a significant number?
- mitchellst 5y ago
  It's a good question without an obvious answer. Best reasons to think it might be. 1) It's not evenly distributed over 330M residents. It's concentrated in certain areas, and we don't have a single nationwide electricity market where supply and demand operate. So it is concentrated in places like Upstate New York and Texas. Spread over few people. 2) It's priced into a daily necessity for people. The poor are the ones with difficulty paying electricity bills, so while $5 or $20 or $50 on an energy bill may not sound like a lot to some people, it depends on your economic situation. So, it's regressive. 3) Crypto mining is a growth sector. The figure is $1B now. Crypto is still growing and we still haven't seen the full effect of bans in China, which are fairly new. True, US power infrastructure is growing... but so is uptake of electric vehicles. (Another keen interest of the professional class.) So we have a question of whether supply can keep up with demand, with the solvency of working class families hanging in the balance while that supply/demand problem works itself out. Maybe it'll be fine. Or maybe crypto warms the planet and hurts poor people in service of a neat intellectual toy and speculative asset for the Silicon Valley / Wall Street set.
  - MrRadar 5y ago
    Would anyone who downvoted this comment please write why you did? It seems well-reasoned, factually correct, and does not violate any of the HN guidelines.
    - helen___keller 5y ago
      I thought it was a good comment except for the inflammatory zinger at the end: > a neat intellectual toy and speculative asset for the Silicon Valley / Wall Street set. For those in silicon valley or wall street this is probably a downvote. And for those who are fans of bitcoin it is definitely a downvote.
MereInterest 5y ago
When chain letters (e.g. the Send a Time pyramid scheme) caused impact to the postal system beyond what the system was designed to handle, to the detriment of the intended users of the system, chain letters were banned. Now, Bitcoin serves as a similar, though obfuscated, pyramid scheme that is detrimental to intended usage of the power system for productiviry or enjoyment. I see no reason not to apply the same solution.
- echopurity 5y ago
  People on HN really think bitcoin is a chain letter. And they shadow ban people who disagree.
- kloch 5y ago
  I don't think it's reasonable to compare cryptocurrencies to chain letters. Chain letters' sole purpose is to enrich early adopters at the expense of later participants. While early adopters of cryptocurrencies frequently do reap windfall gains, it is not necessarily at the expense of later users as it is with chain letters. The early adopter benefits for cryptocurrencies are no different than early investors in a business that goes on to produce a popular and successful product. Unlike chain letters cryptocurrencies provide a useful utility of a medium of exchange coupled with consensus based algorithmic scarcity. This is an attractive alternative to centrally planned fiat currencies that are persistently and intentionally debased over time. Whether the power usage is worth the utilitarian benefits to societey is certainly a valid debate and hopefully will lead to more efficient protocols.
  - VHRanger 5y ago
    Crypto is not being used in any meaningful quantity for anything except speculation and crime. While some crypto may be at some point in the future a decent medium of exchange, at this point they're all deflationary and inefficient, leading only to uses in marketing stunts (Tesla, El Salvador, etc.)
    - TotHake 5y ago
aazaa 5y ago
> In Upstate New York, where a quarter of US crypto mining takes place, the researchers find that electricity rates have gone up in response to rising demand. Their study demonstrates that because of bitcoin mining’s power usage, households paid an additional $165 million a year in energy costs, while businesses paid an extra $79 million. In China, where more than two-thirds of the world’s crypto mining took place over the past decade, electricity rates are set by the government and inflexible to demand. Crypto miners there were crowding other industries out of the market and forcing electricity to be rationed, the research suggests. So correlation implies causation? I'm not sure if the study is just flawed or the article is doing an especially bad job of explaining it. I won't be reading the paper because of this: > Benetton and Compiani received financial support from Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative. Ripple Labs supports the cryptocurrency XRP. XRP is a scam run by Ripple labs. The company routinely mis-states the utility of XRP.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- blackbear_ 5y ago
  > So correlation implies causation? Well, would you argue that people started mining bitcoins because energy became more expensive? The other direction looks more plausible, especially if you consider basic economic theory: as demand goes up, prices also go up.
  - hervature 5y ago
    Not knowing which direction of the causation what “correlation does not mean causation” means. It means there are possible confounders. A simple one here being a policy change at the federal level like reduced subsidies. So all the states that had cheap power (and hence attracted mining) had to raise prices. Of course, the supply-demand mechanism is a pretty strong argument though.
    - blackbear_ 5y ago
      Yes, that is a very good point.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
It's interesting that now that there are proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies the "cryptocurrencies are polluting the planet" is now becoming "Bitcoin is polluting the planet". What I'm wondering is if Bitcoin itself could one day switch to proof-of-stake? Is this something the Bitcoin community may consider if proof-of-stakes turns out to work and be secure? Is this something that is even remotely possible?
- wyager 5y ago
  We already know proof of stake has weaker security properties than proof of work, such as its vulnerability to “grinding” attacks.
- ajkdhcb2 5y ago
  There is strong consensus among bitcoin developers that PoS is inherently inappropriate and insecure.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Not a chance. Bitcoin proponents see Proof of Work as essential for security and the highest degree of decentralization.
coralreef 5y ago
Price of food, fuel, lumber, metals, stocks, houses, rents, electronics, etc. all goes up: increased demand, supply chain issues, increased money supply/inflation. Price of electricity goes up: Bitcoin's fault?
ynniv 5y ago
"While the residential and small business rates are among the five most expensive in the country, the industrial rate is much lower, ranking right in the middle among the states." There's an obvious solution here. Residential rates went up 10% because the local utility has a simplistic demand pricing program that allows cheap industrial demand to drive up expensive residential rates.
wyager 5y ago
Long-term, Bitcoin is reducing everyone’s electric bill by smoothing out the bathtub curve and making it economical to overprovision energy sources. Bitcoin mining can easily turn on and off as the price of energy fluctuates, so all of a sudden we have the ability to use energy sources like solar which need to be overprovisioned to ensure that e.g. bad weather doesn’t reduce grid capacity too much. Bitcoin mining just turns off if it’s cloudy. We also all of a sudden have the ability to economically use energy sources which can’t be spun up and down rapidly, like geothermal. You just leave the turbines running all the time and if you have a surplus you fire up the Bitcoin miners.
- reginold 5y ago
  Got sources? Curious to read about it. Is this a future effect or already happening?
  - wyager 5y ago
    This is my own analysis. I used to do some work in power markets (FTRs) so I’m reasonably familiar with the domain. I have heard other people say similar things so I’m sure there’s some content out there. I expect this to take place over quite a long time - on the scale of decades. Power is super capital intensive and super regulated so it takes forever for things like this to work. If you ever see a nuclear power plant being built with a Bitcoin mine being constructed alongside it, you can be confident that the effect is in full force.
- StefanWestfal 5y ago
  Would it make it cheaper? I understood that the initial investment is the main cost factor for renewable energy sources. The full load hours for on-shore wind in Germany are about 40% of the total hours per year. You would then need 2.5x the amount of windmills to reach 100% This does not count for the fact that thier production is somewhat related (i.e. low wind speeds on all Europ) so you would need an even higher factor. And of course the investment to get to 100% renewables in the energy mix. To compensate for that the electricity would need to rise I think?
dogman144 5y ago
Regarding Upstate NY, the externalities to consider from mining are a lot more than the very narrow take this article provides (electricity costs go up!). I get that the article is about electricity, and not the industry's general impact on a region when it comes in. That said, who has been to the North Country lately, i.e. really deep up there where these mines are? For those unaware, the jobs are basically: - Dannemora prison - One or two small colleges - light tourism: the seasonal jobs around Lake Placid, niche interest in the 1,000 islands, - some logging, but most of that area is a state park - Closer, but not in commuting distance: Ft Drum, a dying dairy industry closer to Utica It remains to be seen how many jobs come from an industry growing up there. But reading this, from Booth of all places, is sort of like saying electric costs have gone up in the Rust Belt because the first new industry in decades is moved there. NY fought tooth and nail to get Ft. Drum into Watertown/North Country in the 80's for a very good reason - that area is dying. This is also putting aside that these mines are in dilapidated power plants (fighting the extensive rural (?) blight up there) and pulling ~green energy from the St. Lawrence.

59 points by VHRanger 5y ago

> As more of the tokens are mined, the puzzles get harder Difficulty doesn't automatically increase over time. Rather, it has tended to increase for two major reasons: 1) bitcoin price going up, increasing miner competition chasing the higher reward. The reward halvings every 4 years have done little to counter this uptrend. 2) mining efficiency going up. after transitioning from CPUs through GPUs and FPGAs to ASICs, efficiencies have started to level off now.

GranularRecipe 5y ago

A lot of the comments are whataboutism and strawman arguments (big corporations, fossil fuel, military). To de-emotionalise the discussion, it makes sense to separate the two aspects: 1. Is the argument from the linked article factually (and semantically) true? 2. If that is the case, what are the moral and political implications?

keymone 5y ago

energy is a finite resource sold on a market. if bitcoin miners are willing to pay higher price for it - what's your problem? if you want population to pay less for energy - vote for a government that will subsidize that.

kova12 5y ago

Same logic could be applied to just about anything that uses any resource at all.

rsj_hn 5y ago
Yes, there's a surprising number of people commenting on this thread who are really upset at marshallian scissors - it's funniest thing I've read this week.

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

China sure made the right choice to ban crypto. 0.5% of the world's energy is insane

hellbannedguy 5y ago
Xi is making a lot of good decisions lately. Put a mouthy billionaire in his place--great. Make school equity more advantageous to the poor kids--good. Put some breaks on gambling--fine. I do wish he would keep this citizens wealth in China. I'm tired of seeing his wealthy people buying up our realestate, along with every other nation. We only have so much land. It should be set aside for American citizens. (Lately people. I don't need a lecture of the bad things he has done. I know them, and don't like them.)
Feeble 5y ago
You want to know what's insane? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_States_military#:~:text=The%20Department%20of%20Defense%20uses,(23%2C000%20L)%20per%20day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_usage_of_the_United_Sta....
- baseballdork 5y ago
  So, because the DoD uses a lot of energy, we should be okay with the energy a speculative asset consumes?
  - keymone 5y ago
    you should be ok with market participants paying market price for a finite resource sold on a market.
    - baseballdork 5y ago
      Why? This is not a free market, nor a market price that reflects externalities of generating that energy. I'm not okay with 0.5% of the earth's energy being consumed to produce sha sums for the sole purpose of mining speculative assets.

bamboozled 5y ago

I’m paying to subsidise the fossil fuel industry, I care more about that, I’m just not outages about this.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
You do realize that energy being used to mine crypto is generated in good part by those fossil fuels you care about, right? https://www.govtech.com/news/bitcoin-mining-in-upstate-new-york-is-environmental-concern https://www.govtech.com/news/bitcoin-mining-in-upstate-new-y...
- BLKNSLVR 5y ago
  Apparently it's around 56% renewables-generated electricity. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/07/06/bitcoin-mining-uses-a-higher-mix-of-sustainable-energy-than-any-major-country-or-industry/?sh=31b49e4d4cc9 https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/07/06/bi...
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    Your link is press-release like article. It cites a self-reporting based survey published by the Bitcoin Mining Council, a "voluntary global forum of Bitcoin mining companies and other companies in the Bitcoin industry", that goes so far as to claim Bitcoin is "one of the most sustainable industries globally". This hardly seems like an objective, reputable source whose claims should be accepted at face value.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      The very point of that council, which is brand new, is to give transparency and insight into the energy mix used to mine Bitcoin. You should never take any claim at face value, but it's quite lazy to dismiss their data without backing it up.
      - LurkingPenguin 5y ago

jklinger410 5y ago

I'm not paying Bitcoin's energy bill. Bitcoin is paying its own bill, but the electric grid is a marketplace with a finite supply. So the people who own those companies are raising the rates (supply and demand). Electricity, much like housing, should not be a place where regular folks can get priced out of the market by corporations. You just want me to be mad at bitcoin so I don't notice that the system itself is sadistic.

helen___keller 5y ago
> You just want me to be mad at bitcoin so I don't notice that the system itself is sadistic. More charitably: it’s easier and intellectually lazier to point at a bogeyman than to understand and explain structural issues Same happens in housing wrt furor over gentrification and luxury housing. Blame the rich foreign investors and tech bros instead of the structure of the marketplace and enforced scarcity of the zoning system!
sumeno 5y ago
Since the electric grid has a finite supply, you have to eliminate usage somehow. If usage isn’t being eliminated via higher prices maybe we should just get rid of the “currency” that consumes the power of a small country and serves no purpose outside crime and speculation.

Hamuko 5y ago

>Cheap electricity in places such as Texas is expected to make the US a leading refuge for crypto miners. It's a good thing I don't live in Texas, because otherwise I might be worried considering how shitty and unreliable ERCOT is already without widespread mining.

Robotbeat 5y ago
I think crypto mining is dumb, but it might actually help the ERCOT situation when combined with demand-response electricity pricing. Miners are gonna throttle back mining if electricity costs more than the mining output and they’ll mine when electricity cheap, supporting the price which helps the fiscal solvency of electricity producers.
paulgb 5y ago
Bitcoin miners may actually make ERCOT more reliable, since they pre-buy a steady stream of electricity and can sell it back (or be paid to use less) during crises like their snow storm[1]. I still think the negative externalities of Bitcoin mining outweigh the positive ones, though. (Full disclosure, I'm short a company mentioned in that article) [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/08/bitcoin-mining-texas-electricity/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/08/bitcoin...

temp8964 5y ago

> In the United States, crypto mining could cost residential and business ratepayers $1 billion a year, the researchers estimate. Is $1 billion a year across the whole country a significant number?

mitchellst 5y ago
It's a good question without an obvious answer. Best reasons to think it might be. 1) It's not evenly distributed over 330M residents. It's concentrated in certain areas, and we don't have a single nationwide electricity market where supply and demand operate. So it is concentrated in places like Upstate New York and Texas. Spread over few people. 2) It's priced into a daily necessity for people. The poor are the ones with difficulty paying electricity bills, so while $5 or $20 or $50 on an energy bill may not sound like a lot to some people, it depends on your economic situation. So, it's regressive. 3) Crypto mining is a growth sector. The figure is $1B now. Crypto is still growing and we still haven't seen the full effect of bans in China, which are fairly new. True, US power infrastructure is growing... but so is uptake of electric vehicles. (Another keen interest of the professional class.) So we have a question of whether supply can keep up with demand, with the solvency of working class families hanging in the balance while that supply/demand problem works itself out. Maybe it'll be fine. Or maybe crypto warms the planet and hurts poor people in service of a neat intellectual toy and speculative asset for the Silicon Valley / Wall Street set.
- MrRadar 5y ago
  Would anyone who downvoted this comment please write why you did? It seems well-reasoned, factually correct, and does not violate any of the HN guidelines.
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    I thought it was a good comment except for the inflammatory zinger at the end: > a neat intellectual toy and speculative asset for the Silicon Valley / Wall Street set. For those in silicon valley or wall street this is probably a downvote. And for those who are fans of bitcoin it is definitely a downvote.

MereInterest 5y ago

When chain letters (e.g. the Send a Time pyramid scheme) caused impact to the postal system beyond what the system was designed to handle, to the detriment of the intended users of the system, chain letters were banned. Now, Bitcoin serves as a similar, though obfuscated, pyramid scheme that is detrimental to intended usage of the power system for productiviry or enjoyment. I see no reason not to apply the same solution.

echopurity 5y ago
People on HN really think bitcoin is a chain letter. And they shadow ban people who disagree.
kloch 5y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to compare cryptocurrencies to chain letters. Chain letters' sole purpose is to enrich early adopters at the expense of later participants. While early adopters of cryptocurrencies frequently do reap windfall gains, it is not necessarily at the expense of later users as it is with chain letters. The early adopter benefits for cryptocurrencies are no different than early investors in a business that goes on to produce a popular and successful product. Unlike chain letters cryptocurrencies provide a useful utility of a medium of exchange coupled with consensus based algorithmic scarcity. This is an attractive alternative to centrally planned fiat currencies that are persistently and intentionally debased over time. Whether the power usage is worth the utilitarian benefits to societey is certainly a valid debate and hopefully will lead to more efficient protocols.
- VHRanger 5y ago
  Crypto is not being used in any meaningful quantity for anything except speculation and crime. While some crypto may be at some point in the future a decent medium of exchange, at this point they're all deflationary and inefficient, leading only to uses in marketing stunts (Tesla, El Salvador, etc.)
  - TotHake 5y ago

aazaa 5y ago

> In Upstate New York, where a quarter of US crypto mining takes place, the researchers find that electricity rates have gone up in response to rising demand. Their study demonstrates that because of bitcoin mining’s power usage, households paid an additional $165 million a year in energy costs, while businesses paid an extra $79 million. In China, where more than two-thirds of the world’s crypto mining took place over the past decade, electricity rates are set by the government and inflexible to demand. Crypto miners there were crowding other industries out of the market and forcing electricity to be rationed, the research suggests. So correlation implies causation? I'm not sure if the study is just flawed or the article is doing an especially bad job of explaining it. I won't be reading the paper because of this: > Benetton and Compiani received financial support from Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative. Ripple Labs supports the cryptocurrency XRP. XRP is a scam run by Ripple labs. The company routinely mis-states the utility of XRP.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
blackbear_ 5y ago
> So correlation implies causation? Well, would you argue that people started mining bitcoins because energy became more expensive? The other direction looks more plausible, especially if you consider basic economic theory: as demand goes up, prices also go up.
- hervature 5y ago
  Not knowing which direction of the causation what “correlation does not mean causation” means. It means there are possible confounders. A simple one here being a policy change at the federal level like reduced subsidies. So all the states that had cheap power (and hence attracted mining) had to raise prices. Of course, the supply-demand mechanism is a pretty strong argument though.
  - blackbear_ 5y ago
    Yes, that is a very good point.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

It's interesting that now that there are proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies the "cryptocurrencies are polluting the planet" is now becoming "Bitcoin is polluting the planet". What I'm wondering is if Bitcoin itself could one day switch to proof-of-stake? Is this something the Bitcoin community may consider if proof-of-stakes turns out to work and be secure? Is this something that is even remotely possible?

wyager 5y ago
We already know proof of stake has weaker security properties than proof of work, such as its vulnerability to “grinding” attacks.
ajkdhcb2 5y ago
There is strong consensus among bitcoin developers that PoS is inherently inappropriate and insecure.
fleddr 5y ago
Not a chance. Bitcoin proponents see Proof of Work as essential for security and the highest degree of decentralization.

coralreef 5y ago

Price of food, fuel, lumber, metals, stocks, houses, rents, electronics, etc. all goes up: increased demand, supply chain issues, increased money supply/inflation. Price of electricity goes up: Bitcoin's fault?

ynniv 5y ago

"While the residential and small business rates are among the five most expensive in the country, the industrial rate is much lower, ranking right in the middle among the states." There's an obvious solution here. Residential rates went up 10% because the local utility has a simplistic demand pricing program that allows cheap industrial demand to drive up expensive residential rates.

wyager 5y ago

Long-term, Bitcoin is reducing everyone’s electric bill by smoothing out the bathtub curve and making it economical to overprovision energy sources. Bitcoin mining can easily turn on and off as the price of energy fluctuates, so all of a sudden we have the ability to use energy sources like solar which need to be overprovisioned to ensure that e.g. bad weather doesn’t reduce grid capacity too much. Bitcoin mining just turns off if it’s cloudy. We also all of a sudden have the ability to economically use energy sources which can’t be spun up and down rapidly, like geothermal. You just leave the turbines running all the time and if you have a surplus you fire up the Bitcoin miners.

reginold 5y ago
Got sources? Curious to read about it. Is this a future effect or already happening?
- wyager 5y ago
  This is my own analysis. I used to do some work in power markets (FTRs) so I’m reasonably familiar with the domain. I have heard other people say similar things so I’m sure there’s some content out there. I expect this to take place over quite a long time - on the scale of decades. Power is super capital intensive and super regulated so it takes forever for things like this to work. If you ever see a nuclear power plant being built with a Bitcoin mine being constructed alongside it, you can be confident that the effect is in full force.
StefanWestfal 5y ago
Would it make it cheaper? I understood that the initial investment is the main cost factor for renewable energy sources. The full load hours for on-shore wind in Germany are about 40% of the total hours per year. You would then need 2.5x the amount of windmills to reach 100% This does not count for the fact that thier production is somewhat related (i.e. low wind speeds on all Europ) so you would need an even higher factor. And of course the investment to get to 100% renewables in the energy mix. To compensate for that the electricity would need to rise I think?

dogman144 5y ago

Regarding Upstate NY, the externalities to consider from mining are a lot more than the very narrow take this article provides (electricity costs go up!). I get that the article is about electricity, and not the industry's general impact on a region when it comes in. That said, who has been to the North Country lately, i.e. really deep up there where these mines are? For those unaware, the jobs are basically: - Dannemora prison - One or two small colleges - light tourism: the seasonal jobs around Lake Placid, niche interest in the 1,000 islands, - some logging, but most of that area is a state park - Closer, but not in commuting distance: Ft Drum, a dying dairy industry closer to Utica It remains to be seen how many jobs come from an industry growing up there. But reading this, from Booth of all places, is sort of like saying electric costs have gone up in the Rust Belt because the first new industry in decades is moved there. NY fought tooth and nail to get Ft. Drum into Watertown/North Country in the 80's for a very good reason - that area is dying. This is also putting aside that these mines are in dilapidated power plants (fighting the extensive rural (?) blight up there) and pulling ~green energy from the St. Lawrence.