12 ms·

And so it begins. In the developed world in particular, we're seeing the move away from fossil-fuel power. This is good but currently relatively expensive. Cr

by cletus 5y ago

And so it begins. In the developed world in particular, we're seeing the move away from fossil-fuel power. This is good but currently relatively expensive. Crypto mining is starting to have very real impact on the ability of other people to live. It is adversely and disproportionately affecting poor people (who pay a greater share of their income for power). And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". What this actually means is that crypto-mining is focused on areas that have hydroelectric power because it's the cheapest, generally. While you might say that's still good, it's starting to raise prices for other people. this has been an issue in towns on the Hudson Valley in New York, for example. Even if you believe the overall impact of crypto-mining is small I guarantee you it's only a matter of time before politicians start using crypto-mining as a convenient whipping boy.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. This is true for bitcoin. It failed at everything it set out to be and yet it is the most mined coin. Truly a waste of energy. There are better projects out there which actually provide value and utility. Monero is an example. It's pretty sad that bitcoin is still number one despite the existence of these projects.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  Monero is a proof of work cryptocurrency. I like PoW, it is the most secure distributed consensus algorithm we have discovered. If Monero was as popular as Bitcoin, it would use something similar to the energy. None of it is a 'waste of energy'.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I agree with you. It's a waste of energy because that energy is being spent mining BTC, a useless coin that isn't anonymous, private, decentralized, fungible, it isn't even an actual currency. It should be spent mining Monero instead which actually does have all of those properties.
    - BoiledCabbage 5y ago
      Oh dear. I don't remember who said that crypto is Lululemon, Amway, multi-level marketing for tech guys, but it's amazing the similarities. In a discussion on Proof of work does not scale, cannot scale, will choke out production in the economy going forward because of its design, a person responds with say "you're right, that product is bad. Don't buy that one instead buy this one". Does this other one solve any of those problems? Nope, but the person hawking it has purchased a lot of product and gets a cut if you buy into it. It's amazing how disingenuous crypto conflict of interest has made any and all discussion about crypto.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        So you think I'm a multi-level marketer? Is it even possible to prove otherwise? I just happen to believe in that project and like to talk about it. Am I supposed to not talk about this stuff? I don't particularly care that energy is being spent on cryptocurrency. What I hate is the fact that energy is being spent on bitcoin in particular. The energy is not supposed to be wasted, it's supposed to buy us something. Namely, a decentralized, private, anonymous, uncensorable, unsanctionable digital cash network. Something that could withstand even the might of the US and China if needed. Bitcoin is not it. At this moment I think Monero is closest to being it. I'm totally open to new ideas.
        coldpie 5y ago
        > I'm totally open to new ideas. Find a better hobby =/ This casino is not worth boiling the world.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them. The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy. China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The very computers we're posting this on? Yet I'm expected to care about BTC energy consumption? No, I refuse to care. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the real problems that no government will lift a finger to solve. That said, I'm totally open to new hobbies.
- brezelgoring 5y ago
  >yet it is the most mined coin Not a surprise when it is the most valuable one, a day of drops and the corresponding surges that come afterwards can set you up for a long time if you're not from the EU/US, it also appreciates faster than a house, which makes it a great asset to hold. Not a surprise it is the most sought after, looking at it from the supply/demand aspect.
paganel 5y ago
> Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". Which is a shit take anyway because that means that non-renewable energy (plus the renewable energy non-consumed by the miners) is now more expensive for everyone else, it's the basic law of supply and demand. And in the process those miners are also making non-renewable energy a more desirable investment because it now returns more money to those who invest in it (because of said increased prices people are now forced to pay for said non-renewable energy).
- cletus 5y ago
  It's sad that this gets downvoted because you're not wrong eg [1][2][3]. [1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bitcoin-mining-soars-in-kazakhstan-following-chinese-ban/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bi... [2]: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-is-now-mining-bitcoin-for-a-utility-company/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...
  - latchkey 5y ago
    China has banned mining. Update cause I'm getting down voted: the point is that the quoted articles are talking about China and are therefore outdated. I'm not referring to what is happening today with regards to the movement of mining. _Some_ miners moved to Kazakhstan, but the truth is, they went global.
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      Did you read any of the articles? China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.
      - latchkey 5y ago
        Apparently you didn't fully read the article. The shortages aren't the miners, it is the fact that 3 plants shut down... "On October 15, the national grid operator, KEGOC, announced electricity rationing after three major coal-fired power plants shut down. KEGOC did not directly blame miners, but it used language similar to the energy minister’s and said it was cutting off customers who “over-consume.”"
Nextgrid 5y ago
Taxation could be a solution though, with rebates for low-income people and individuals. This means that the disadvantaged still get access to cheap power, where as crypto miners have to pay the (taxed) price which makes their operation less profitable.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  It's not uncommon for poor people to not have spare money to float some taxes to the government for up to 12 months until they can get their rebate at tax time. That's assuming that the rebate is easy enough to get for 100% of those eligible to claim it. This seems strictly worse than just taxing "mined" bitcoins more harshly.
FriedrichN 5y ago
Even if it did use mostly renewable energy, which I doubt (I've heard some buy old coal fired plants to run their mining operations), it's still energy that could have been used for something useful. It takes away power for real enterprises and people that use it for their daily living.
_fat_santa 5y ago
An important distinction here, this really only applies to PoW (proof of work) tokens. The original philosophy for Bitcoin being proof of work is that you had to give up something (electricity) to produce it. Your comment is very true for Bitcoin and other PoW tokens but that will soon be in the rearview mirror as more and more coins either come out as PoS (proof of stake) or migrate to it (in the case of Ethereum), even Bitcoin is taking about migrating to a PoS model. Crypto will evolve past this.
- cletus 5y ago
  This has been a popular defense for several years now. For awhile I too bought into it. But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack. The best evidence for this is that PoS hasn't happened despite years of talk about it.
  - dlubarov 5y ago
    > But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack. At this point PoS is quite prevalent among modern blockchains (Cosmos, Solana, NEAR, Algorand, Polygon, Cardano, ...). As far as I know, there have been no successful attacks based on PoS's theoretical weaknesses, like its reliance on weak subjectivity. Some PoS networks like NXT have been in production for nearly a decade now. Isn't that fairly strong evidence that PoS works fine in practice?
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      There have been several consensus failures from PoS, including the recent outage of Solana. One just needs to look at the Steem/Hive 'takeover' by Sun to see how political wars can form and threaten the security model in PoS world. Contrast with bcash incident of 2017. A few years ago, I saw a Hybrid PoS/Work chain (a satoshi-client derivative coin) being attacked in real time, and totally hijacked. Ultimately it was a bug in the PoS logic that enabled it. I am very apprehensive about PoS even providing a fragment of the security. Chain takeovers are a real threat in PoS world. The attacker needs very little physical resources -- just know the right stakeholders. PoW need resources. PoW is trivial to verify and test. PoS advocates like to gloss over all the real world failures. You may notice that during the China ban, Bitcoin worked pretty much as expected (with some slight block delays until difficulty adjusted). PoW works. The other metric to observe is how many chain reorg's occur due to PoS. This is practically a non-event in large PoW chains like Bitcoin, today. In Turing complete chains like EVM chains, it might not be possible to reorder transactions with no-loss during reorgs as transactions are state dependent. PoS potentially destroys finality.
adventured 5y ago
> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. Whenever you sell it, if you generated a profit on that sale, you are going to pay taxes on it (at least in the US). That's a real value for society. Can it ever be enough to offset the added squeeze on the electricity grid (which we really don't need right now, with EVs coming on and our grid in serious need of upgrade/expansion)? Someone will have to do the math on that.
- lottin 5y ago
  No. Your profit from trading bitcoins is someone else's loss. The amount wealth in society remains unchanged, only it's allocated differently. Total value added = zero. A tax on profits doesn't add any value either, it's just an additional re-allocation of the same wealth.
  - trevyn 5y ago
    That’s not strictly true; some forms of capital allocation increase future productivity (and therefore future wealth) at a greater rate than others.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  Crypto transactions cannot create or destroy fiat currency. If you buy and hold cryptocurrency, at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones. So if you make money by selling some cryptocoin, that is _entirely_ because someone else purchased it at a greater price than you did. Their expectation is that someone else will later buy it at a greater price from them, and that person will be buying it on the hope that someone will pay yet more again. No actual cashflows appear anywhere in this process. What happens when there isn't a new Greater Fool?
  - trevyn 5y ago
    The value of fiat could go to zero.
  - ilammy 5y ago
Fiahil 5y ago
I'm a bit of a crypto enthusiast, but I generally agree that crypto-mining suck too much power out of the grid for it's current utility level. However, your comment is a bit short-sighted and doesn't account for the switch of Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake algorithms that is currently happening. PoS use A LOT less power and doesn't need extensive mining farms. See also: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ The only remaining question is: are we going to transition away from bitcoin, the largest PoW bastion, or not ? Probably, yes.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.
  - Fiahil 5y ago
    I didn't meant for Bitcoin to transition to PoS, but rather everyone using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because it's now PoS.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Yeaaaaah i will believe it when i see it. I don't think betting the economy on changing airplane engines mid-flight is a good play. My prediction is that if ETH switches to a PoS consensus model, the value will TANK. If this happens at all. I know the PoS timeline, I think it is fiction.
      - whatisthiseven 5y ago
        Ironically, ETH switching to PoS is the reason I am holding the currency. In the future I expect all PoW cryptocurrencies to be banned, or severely hobbled, because of their electricity usage and e-waste. I have a long bet on ETH specifically because of its eventual move to PoS. Bitcoin doesn't even have a plan, and when the legal landscape changes it will be in the worst position to pivot. We'll just have to see what the future holds. But I got my money down.
morning_gelato 5y ago
It does not appear that this particular electricity shortage is caused by moving away from fossil fuels. The coal plant shutdowns mentioned in the article were outages (2 unplanned and 1 planned) [1] rather than permanent closures due to an energy transition. [1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-after-coal-fired-plant-outages-2021-10-15 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-aft...
politician 5y ago
Would you be bothered if folks built their own solar farm to power crypto mining on their own independent grid?
- nitrogen 5y ago
  A bit, because that solar manufacturing capacity wasn't used for reducing global carbon emissions or other direct human needs.
  - politician 5y ago
    On the contrary, it directly reduces global carbon emissions by removing a load from a grid that has not been decarbonized.
- oblio 5y ago
  Any way you skin this cat, resources are limited. So it would be taking away resources from other uses. Plus producing solar farms is harmful to the environment, as is running them. Unless you actually use solar farms for something useful, you know, replacing stuff with a higher negative environmental impact. Building your own power grid for crypto speculation is kind of the textbook definition of greed and selfishness.
  - politician 5y ago
    The Sun is not a limited resource, not until we're a K2 civilization anyway -- and we're no where close to K2. The other materials in solar panels are abundant and reusable. There is plenty of unoccupied desert to build on. In what way are resources limited?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      Hyper pure quartz for photovoltaic solar is limited.
      - 5y ago
risyachka 5y ago
"extremely limited utility for society" is harldy an argument. It's limited today. In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto). Going to space had hardly any utility, going to Mars even less. But on the way there will a TON of progress and discoveries made that will be used in medicine, manufacturing etc.
- oblio 5y ago
  Yeah, but meanwhile let's not burn the planet down. Let's ban all resource intensive crypto-currencies. If they're so good for society, surely they can be lean, too?
- crummy 5y ago
  > In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto). Can you suggest some ways my life might be different in ten years thanks to cryptocurrency?
bena 5y ago
I think the other thing ignored is that crypto tends to take as much power as possible. Making crypto more efficient wouldn't make it use less electricity, it would just increase the number of miners. And you'd be a fool not to do that because only one node becomes part of the chain and the more you mine, the greater your chances you get that golden ticket. Crypto will always try to get power usage as close to 100% as possible from every possible source. We never get off of fossil fuels unless crypto stops being a thing. And not to mention, being at capacity all the time is a bad thing. In something you want available all the time, you want a lot of potential capacity in case of failures or demand spikes.
908B64B197 5y ago
> What this actually means is that crypto-mining is focused on areas that have hydroelectric power because it's the cheapest, generally. Hydro is also interesting because it has to output power. When the reservoir gets above a certain level water has to be let out because dams can't handle overflow. That's achieved by diverting water to a stream without a turbine.
dogman144 5y ago
> this has been an issue in towns on the Hudson Valley in New York, for example. Believe you have your NY State river valleys swapped. There's not much mining downstate. Most of the the mining in NYS is up in the North Country and pulling excess power of the St. Lawrence River and a dam up there that supplies a fair bit of power to NYS/Canada/surrounding region. There was a study from Wharton recently on the impacts of power prices as a result.
nathias 5y ago
crypto provides a very important social utility to the poor, the only hope that they might stop being that
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by cletus 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. This is true for bitcoin. It failed at everything it set out to be and yet it is the most mined coin. Truly a waste of energy. There are better projects out there which actually provide value and utility. Monero is an example. It's pretty sad that bitcoin is still number one despite the existence of these projects.

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
Monero is a proof of work cryptocurrency. I like PoW, it is the most secure distributed consensus algorithm we have discovered. If Monero was as popular as Bitcoin, it would use something similar to the energy. None of it is a 'waste of energy'.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I agree with you. It's a waste of energy because that energy is being spent mining BTC, a useless coin that isn't anonymous, private, decentralized, fungible, it isn't even an actual currency. It should be spent mining Monero instead which actually does have all of those properties.
  - BoiledCabbage 5y ago
    Oh dear. I don't remember who said that crypto is Lululemon, Amway, multi-level marketing for tech guys, but it's amazing the similarities. In a discussion on Proof of work does not scale, cannot scale, will choke out production in the economy going forward because of its design, a person responds with say "you're right, that product is bad. Don't buy that one instead buy this one". Does this other one solve any of those problems? Nope, but the person hawking it has purchased a lot of product and gets a cut if you buy into it. It's amazing how disingenuous crypto conflict of interest has made any and all discussion about crypto.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      So you think I'm a multi-level marketer? Is it even possible to prove otherwise? I just happen to believe in that project and like to talk about it. Am I supposed to not talk about this stuff? I don't particularly care that energy is being spent on cryptocurrency. What I hate is the fact that energy is being spent on bitcoin in particular. The energy is not supposed to be wasted, it's supposed to buy us something. Namely, a decentralized, private, anonymous, uncensorable, unsanctionable digital cash network. Something that could withstand even the might of the US and China if needed. Bitcoin is not it. At this moment I think Monero is closest to being it. I'm totally open to new ideas.
      - coldpie 5y ago
        > I'm totally open to new ideas. Find a better hobby =/ This casino is not worth boiling the world.
        matheusmoreira 5y ago
        It's not even 1% of global energy consumption. It's the oil companies who are boiling the world but nobody dares to touch them. The cars, the factories, the developed nations and their comfortable lifestyles supported by such a highly polluting economy. China is the most polluting country in the world, but will the US, Europe stop trading with it? No. How will the west survive without its cheap consumer products? The very computers we're posting this on? Yet I'm expected to care about BTC energy consumption? No, I refuse to care. It's a drop in the ocean compared to the real problems that no government will lift a finger to solve. That said, I'm totally open to new hobbies.
brezelgoring 5y ago
>yet it is the most mined coin Not a surprise when it is the most valuable one, a day of drops and the corresponding surges that come afterwards can set you up for a long time if you're not from the EU/US, it also appreciates faster than a house, which makes it a great asset to hold. Not a surprise it is the most sought after, looking at it from the supply/demand aspect.

paganel 5y ago

> Crypto-mining apologists will point to figures that say "crypto-mining uses mostly renewable energy". Which is a shit take anyway because that means that non-renewable energy (plus the renewable energy non-consumed by the miners) is now more expensive for everyone else, it's the basic law of supply and demand. And in the process those miners are also making non-renewable energy a more desirable investment because it now returns more money to those who invest in it (because of said increased prices people are now forced to pay for said non-renewable energy).

cletus 5y ago
It's sad that this gets downvoted because you're not wrong eg [1][2][3]. [1]: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bitcoin-mining-soars-in-kazakhstan-following-chinese-ban/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2284222-coal-powered-bi... [2]: https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-environment-pollution/ https://fortune.com/2021/04/20/bitcoin-mining-coal-china-env... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-is-now-mining-bitcoin-for-a-utility-company/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/09/old-coal-plant-i...
- latchkey 5y ago
  China has banned mining. Update cause I'm getting down voted: the point is that the quoted articles are talking about China and are therefore outdated. I'm not referring to what is happening today with regards to the movement of mining. _Some_ miners moved to Kazakhstan, but the truth is, they went global.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    Did you read any of the articles? China banned mining. Chinese miners moved to Kazakhstan. Now Kazakhstan is having power shortages.
    - latchkey 5y ago
      Apparently you didn't fully read the article. The shortages aren't the miners, it is the fact that 3 plants shut down... "On October 15, the national grid operator, KEGOC, announced electricity rationing after three major coal-fired power plants shut down. KEGOC did not directly blame miners, but it used language similar to the energy minister’s and said it was cutting off customers who “over-consume.”"

Nextgrid 5y ago

Taxation could be a solution though, with rebates for low-income people and individuals. This means that the disadvantaged still get access to cheap power, where as crypto miners have to pay the (taxed) price which makes their operation less profitable.

AlexandrB 5y ago
It's not uncommon for poor people to not have spare money to float some taxes to the government for up to 12 months until they can get their rebate at tax time. That's assuming that the rebate is easy enough to get for 100% of those eligible to claim it. This seems strictly worse than just taxing "mined" bitcoins more harshly.

FriedrichN 5y ago

Even if it did use mostly renewable energy, which I doubt (I've heard some buy old coal fired plants to run their mining operations), it's still energy that could have been used for something useful. It takes away power for real enterprises and people that use it for their daily living.

_fat_santa 5y ago

An important distinction here, this really only applies to PoW (proof of work) tokens. The original philosophy for Bitcoin being proof of work is that you had to give up something (electricity) to produce it. Your comment is very true for Bitcoin and other PoW tokens but that will soon be in the rearview mirror as more and more coins either come out as PoS (proof of stake) or migrate to it (in the case of Ethereum), even Bitcoin is taking about migrating to a PoS model. Crypto will evolve past this.

cletus 5y ago
This has been a popular defense for several years now. For awhile I too bought into it. But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack. The best evidence for this is that PoS hasn't happened despite years of talk about it.
- dlubarov 5y ago
  > But there are real questions about whether it can ever work and won't in fact be vulnerable to attack. At this point PoS is quite prevalent among modern blockchains (Cosmos, Solana, NEAR, Algorand, Polygon, Cardano, ...). As far as I know, there have been no successful attacks based on PoS's theoretical weaknesses, like its reliance on weak subjectivity. Some PoS networks like NXT have been in production for nearly a decade now. Isn't that fairly strong evidence that PoS works fine in practice?
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    There have been several consensus failures from PoS, including the recent outage of Solana. One just needs to look at the Steem/Hive 'takeover' by Sun to see how political wars can form and threaten the security model in PoS world. Contrast with bcash incident of 2017. A few years ago, I saw a Hybrid PoS/Work chain (a satoshi-client derivative coin) being attacked in real time, and totally hijacked. Ultimately it was a bug in the PoS logic that enabled it. I am very apprehensive about PoS even providing a fragment of the security. Chain takeovers are a real threat in PoS world. The attacker needs very little physical resources -- just know the right stakeholders. PoW need resources. PoW is trivial to verify and test. PoS advocates like to gloss over all the real world failures. You may notice that during the China ban, Bitcoin worked pretty much as expected (with some slight block delays until difficulty adjusted). PoW works. The other metric to observe is how many chain reorg's occur due to PoS. This is practically a non-event in large PoW chains like Bitcoin, today. In Turing complete chains like EVM chains, it might not be possible to reorder transactions with no-loss during reorgs as transactions are state dependent. PoS potentially destroys finality.

adventured 5y ago

> And at best crypto provides extremely limited utility for society. Whenever you sell it, if you generated a profit on that sale, you are going to pay taxes on it (at least in the US). That's a real value for society. Can it ever be enough to offset the added squeeze on the electricity grid (which we really don't need right now, with EVs coming on and our grid in serious need of upgrade/expansion)? Someone will have to do the math on that.

lottin 5y ago
No. Your profit from trading bitcoins is someone else's loss. The amount wealth in society remains unchanged, only it's allocated differently. Total value added = zero. A tax on profits doesn't add any value either, it's just an additional re-allocation of the same wealth.
- trevyn 5y ago
  That’s not strictly true; some forms of capital allocation increase future productivity (and therefore future wealth) at a greater rate than others.
TomSwirly 5y ago
Crypto transactions cannot create or destroy fiat currency. If you buy and hold cryptocurrency, at no time will it produce "dividends" in fiat currency, or physical objects like cell phones. So if you make money by selling some cryptocoin, that is _entirely_ because someone else purchased it at a greater price than you did. Their expectation is that someone else will later buy it at a greater price from them, and that person will be buying it on the hope that someone will pay yet more again. No actual cashflows appear anywhere in this process. What happens when there isn't a new Greater Fool?
- trevyn 5y ago
  The value of fiat could go to zero.
- ilammy 5y ago

Fiahil 5y ago

I'm a bit of a crypto enthusiast, but I generally agree that crypto-mining suck too much power out of the grid for it's current utility level. However, your comment is a bit short-sighted and doesn't account for the switch of Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake algorithms that is currently happening. PoS use A LOT less power and doesn't need extensive mining farms. See also: https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2021/05/18/country-power-no-more/ The only remaining question is: are we going to transition away from bitcoin, the largest PoW bastion, or not ? Probably, yes.

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
No, never. Bitcoin will be PoW forever. PoS is and will never have the same security properties of PoW. Its bad for decentralization, its bad for censorship resistance, and its bad for the free world.
- Fiahil 5y ago
  I didn't meant for Bitcoin to transition to PoS, but rather everyone using Ethereum instead of Bitcoin because it's now PoS.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Yeaaaaah i will believe it when i see it. I don't think betting the economy on changing airplane engines mid-flight is a good play. My prediction is that if ETH switches to a PoS consensus model, the value will TANK. If this happens at all. I know the PoS timeline, I think it is fiction.
    - whatisthiseven 5y ago
      Ironically, ETH switching to PoS is the reason I am holding the currency. In the future I expect all PoW cryptocurrencies to be banned, or severely hobbled, because of their electricity usage and e-waste. I have a long bet on ETH specifically because of its eventual move to PoS. Bitcoin doesn't even have a plan, and when the legal landscape changes it will be in the worst position to pivot. We'll just have to see what the future holds. But I got my money down.

morning_gelato 5y ago

It does not appear that this particular electricity shortage is caused by moving away from fossil fuels. The coal plant shutdowns mentioned in the article were outages (2 unplanned and 1 planned) [1] rather than permanent closures due to an energy transition. [1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-after-coal-fired-plant-outages-2021-10-15 https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kazakhstan-rations-power-aft...

politician 5y ago

Would you be bothered if folks built their own solar farm to power crypto mining on their own independent grid?

nitrogen 5y ago
A bit, because that solar manufacturing capacity wasn't used for reducing global carbon emissions or other direct human needs.
- politician 5y ago
  On the contrary, it directly reduces global carbon emissions by removing a load from a grid that has not been decarbonized.
oblio 5y ago
Any way you skin this cat, resources are limited. So it would be taking away resources from other uses. Plus producing solar farms is harmful to the environment, as is running them. Unless you actually use solar farms for something useful, you know, replacing stuff with a higher negative environmental impact. Building your own power grid for crypto speculation is kind of the textbook definition of greed and selfishness.
- politician 5y ago
  The Sun is not a limited resource, not until we're a K2 civilization anyway -- and we're no where close to K2. The other materials in solar panels are abundant and reusable. There is plenty of unoccupied desert to build on. In what way are resources limited?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Hyper pure quartz for photovoltaic solar is limited.
    - 5y ago

risyachka 5y ago

"extremely limited utility for society" is harldy an argument. It's limited today. In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto). Going to space had hardly any utility, going to Mars even less. But on the way there will a TON of progress and discoveries made that will be used in medicine, manufacturing etc.

oblio 5y ago
Yeah, but meanwhile let's not burn the planet down. Let's ban all resource intensive crypto-currencies. If they're so good for society, surely they can be lean, too?
crummy 5y ago
> In 10 years it can change many things for people (very possibly in areas that are not even close to crypto). Can you suggest some ways my life might be different in ten years thanks to cryptocurrency?

bena 5y ago

I think the other thing ignored is that crypto tends to take as much power as possible. Making crypto more efficient wouldn't make it use less electricity, it would just increase the number of miners. And you'd be a fool not to do that because only one node becomes part of the chain and the more you mine, the greater your chances you get that golden ticket. Crypto will always try to get power usage as close to 100% as possible from every possible source. We never get off of fossil fuels unless crypto stops being a thing. And not to mention, being at capacity all the time is a bad thing. In something you want available all the time, you want a lot of potential capacity in case of failures or demand spikes.

908B64B197 5y ago

> What this actually means is that crypto-mining is focused on areas that have hydroelectric power because it's the cheapest, generally. Hydro is also interesting because it has to output power. When the reservoir gets above a certain level water has to be let out because dams can't handle overflow. That's achieved by diverting water to a stream without a turbine.

dogman144 5y ago

> this has been an issue in towns on the Hudson Valley in New York, for example. Believe you have your NY State river valleys swapped. There's not much mining downstate. Most of the the mining in NYS is up in the North Country and pulling excess power of the St. Lawrence River and a dam up there that supplies a fair bit of power to NYS/Canada/surrounding region. There was a study from Wharton recently on the impacts of power prices as a result.

nathias 5y ago

crypto provides a very important social utility to the poor, the only hope that they might stop being that

deleted 5y ago

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