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If climate change is finally taken seriously at some point, I hope they get clamped down on very hard. Unlike meth labs and "terrorists", a large mining farm ca

If climate change is finally taken seriously at some point, I hope they get clamped down on very hard. Unlike meth labs and "terrorists", a large mining farm can be traced by power usage. (Unless you're using solar, then go ahead and mine all you want.) Crypto fanatics are doing nothing of any practical value while greatly helping out with destroying our planet. We've been having rolling blackouts recently because of these fuckers. Energy is cheap in my country and they use that. Power lines are not built for that sort of thing. The normal paying consumers are suffering as a result.

sktrdie 5y ago
Afaik most % of mining happens close to the energy source where it can't even be transported or where it's already being wasted. At least that would be the most economically viable solution; hence hopefully what everyone will eventually be doing (doing otherwise would not be rewardable). Actually in a way the market price is not only defined by speculation but also how much "paying for energy" compares to "getting the bitcoin reward". So in a way the market price tells us how much people are willing to pay for energy (globally). But yeah I agree it all sucks that it's going to mess up our planet even more.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  You're assuming that miners are paying the full cost of the energy they're using, which is not the case - see all the mining operations in places with subsidized energy, i.e. everyone else is paying some of the price, not to mention the externalities.
- jakub_g 5y ago
  There's been quite a few reports of unused coal burning power stations being revived and dedicated to mining crypto.
donatj 5y ago
> doing nothing of any practical value while greatly helping out with destroying our planet Serious question, where does this line of thinking end? Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Watching sitcoms on a television has no practical value. Phones capable of doing things other than making calls have no practical value, but we charge them all the time. Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days. The idea that we should do less stuff and be miserable because climate change is fatalist and just silly. We should be building nuclear power plants at a drastic rate to meet supply.
- antihero 5y ago
  Gaming and TV shows use a fraction of the energy to bring joy to far more people. Even if your enjoyment comes from watching numbers go up so you can get rich quick, it's literally burning through power and advanced components to do it at a rate like nothing else ever conceived. And it achieves basically nothing. Crypto is currently useless at doing anything other than making some people rich.
  - throwaway52355 5y ago
    So entertainment matters more than censorship-resistance and self-sovereignty. Remind me what did Wikileaks resort to using after it got banned from all payment networks?
  - lui8906 5y ago
    Your argument is completely valid against Ethereum and Bitcoin, I hope they will be used less to reduce the energy used by crypto. However the vast majority of others use Proof of Stake and a fraction of the energy. Take Solana, currently the 5th largest by MCAP, a tx uses a similar amount of energy as two Google searches. I am pointing this out as I see often the whole crypto market lumped together but crypto networks are not all created equally. Some are 10 years old and others are 2 years with vastly different implementations. > https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
- burnished 5y ago
  Our other uses (which may need to be curtailed, not arguing for or against that here) have comparatively fixed costs. Proof of work inherently increases energy consumption to keep difficulty up.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. You can of course overdo it, turn it into an addiction and it can destroy your life - like many other things. Crypto trading is as valuable as trading scraps of paper with a dollar sign scribbled on it - if it were done for fun or entertainment, then sure, whatever, but it's having major impact on our energy consumption and has to be curbed. PS - also, a small side note - literally no gaming rig uses an "upwards of a thousands watts". Even fitted with the highest rated components currently available on the market(say a 12th gen i9 + RTX3090) you won't be using 1000W of power. Consoles use about 200-300W under full load, and that's a bigger gaming market than PC. And then the biggest gaming market is mobile - larger than PC and consoles combined, and the energy consumption there is tiny. So you're massively off base here. >>Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days. And I honestly think that anyone who thinks crypto will become "an alternative financial system" and not just a pyramid scheme is lying to themselves.
user-the-name 5y ago
If you're using solar, you're still wasting energy that could go into replacing coal or gas elsewhere. Fully green bitcoin mining is still hampering our efforts to tackle climate change.
- michaelscott 5y ago
  Economics are fully at work in every market, including renewables. If it's more profitable to... I'm not even sure what your alternative would be but I'll say feeding the energy back into the grid, then miners would do it. It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy, especially off-grid renewables, just because you perceive their use to be "wasteful"
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    > It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy It absolutely will need to be if we are going to avoid frying the fucking planet. The free market is the enemy of humanity.
    - throwaway405769 5y ago
      Free markets elevate people from poverty and create wealth. Statism creates concentration camps and mass murder. And now we're supposed to trust governments that climate change totally happens and unless we give up our freedoms we will all die.
    - michaelscott 5y ago
      We're talking about renewables? How is that frying the planet?
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        We are talking about energy. Most of it is not produced by renewables. Any renewable energy that is being wasted on cryptocurrency bullshit is not going into displacing coal and gas, which are currently frying the planet.
throwaway52355 5y ago
Miners are securing the only censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money we have. The only people who don't see any practical value in this either don't understand Bitcoin or hate freedom.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Or realize Bitcoin just can't be used as money, by design. It couldn't even handle the volume of transactions of a small town, because the miners and developers are not interested in that, and have chosen to keep block sizes small for their own interests.
  - throwaway405769 5y ago
    Miners and exchanges were proponents of big blocks, since that would have centralized power in their hands and reduced decentralization. Bitmain, Coinbase, many others. This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill. Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly instantly transfer small amounts of Bitcoin for extremely low fees.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      LN doesn't really work either - it can't really guarantee that funds have been transferred until you close a channel (you commit the transaction on the Bitcoin chain). So, unless you trust the other end of the channel not to fraudulently close the channel, you can't actually consider the transaction settled. And of course, in the case of routes, there has to basically be end-to-end trust for this to work, or someone will be left holding the bag. It also can't scale the way it's usually promised, in part due to Bitcoin's horribly low transaction rate (you can't open LN channels fast enough, given Bitcoin's transaction rate), in part because of limits on the number of transactions in a live channel. And in practice, it seems it's highly centralized [0]. 0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sktrdie 5y ago

Afaik most % of mining happens close to the energy source where it can't even be transported or where it's already being wasted. At least that would be the most economically viable solution; hence hopefully what everyone will eventually be doing (doing otherwise would not be rewardable). Actually in a way the market price is not only defined by speculation but also how much "paying for energy" compares to "getting the bitcoin reward". So in a way the market price tells us how much people are willing to pay for energy (globally). But yeah I agree it all sucks that it's going to mess up our planet even more.

formerly_proven 5y ago
You're assuming that miners are paying the full cost of the energy they're using, which is not the case - see all the mining operations in places with subsidized energy, i.e. everyone else is paying some of the price, not to mention the externalities.
jakub_g 5y ago
There's been quite a few reports of unused coal burning power stations being revived and dedicated to mining crypto.

donatj 5y ago

> doing nothing of any practical value while greatly helping out with destroying our planet Serious question, where does this line of thinking end? Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Watching sitcoms on a television has no practical value. Phones capable of doing things other than making calls have no practical value, but we charge them all the time. Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days. The idea that we should do less stuff and be miserable because climate change is fatalist and just silly. We should be building nuclear power plants at a drastic rate to meet supply.

antihero 5y ago
Gaming and TV shows use a fraction of the energy to bring joy to far more people. Even if your enjoyment comes from watching numbers go up so you can get rich quick, it's literally burning through power and advanced components to do it at a rate like nothing else ever conceived. And it achieves basically nothing. Crypto is currently useless at doing anything other than making some people rich.
- throwaway52355 5y ago
  So entertainment matters more than censorship-resistance and self-sovereignty. Remind me what did Wikileaks resort to using after it got banned from all payment networks?
- lui8906 5y ago
  Your argument is completely valid against Ethereum and Bitcoin, I hope they will be used less to reduce the energy used by crypto. However the vast majority of others use Proof of Stake and a fraction of the energy. Take Solana, currently the 5th largest by MCAP, a tx uses a similar amount of energy as two Google searches. I am pointing this out as I see often the whole crypto market lumped together but crypto networks are not all created equally. Some are 10 years old and others are 2 years with vastly different implementations. > https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021 https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-...
burnished 5y ago
Our other uses (which may need to be curtailed, not arguing for or against that here) have comparatively fixed costs. Proof of work inherently increases energy consumption to keep difficulty up.
gambiting 5y ago
>>Gaming rigs use upwards of a thousand watts, no practical value in gaming. Humans have been playing games literally for thousands of years - there is a value in entertainment, especially with our busy lives of 21st century. You can of course overdo it, turn it into an addiction and it can destroy your life - like many other things. Crypto trading is as valuable as trading scraps of paper with a dollar sign scribbled on it - if it were done for fun or entertainment, then sure, whatever, but it's having major impact on our energy consumption and has to be curbed. PS - also, a small side note - literally no gaming rig uses an "upwards of a thousands watts". Even fitted with the highest rated components currently available on the market(say a 12th gen i9 + RTX3090) you won't be using 1000W of power. Consoles use about 200-300W under full load, and that's a bigger gaming market than PC. And then the biggest gaming market is mobile - larger than PC and consoles combined, and the energy consumption there is tiny. So you're massively off base here. >>Honestly I think providing an alternative financial system is more practical than most of the other energy intensive things we do these days. And I honestly think that anyone who thinks crypto will become "an alternative financial system" and not just a pyramid scheme is lying to themselves.

user-the-name 5y ago

If you're using solar, you're still wasting energy that could go into replacing coal or gas elsewhere. Fully green bitcoin mining is still hampering our efforts to tackle climate change.

michaelscott 5y ago
Economics are fully at work in every market, including renewables. If it's more profitable to... I'm not even sure what your alternative would be but I'll say feeding the energy back into the grid, then miners would do it. It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy, especially off-grid renewables, just because you perceive their use to be "wasteful"
- user-the-name 5y ago
  > It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy It absolutely will need to be if we are going to avoid frying the fucking planet. The free market is the enemy of humanity.
  - throwaway405769 5y ago
    Free markets elevate people from poverty and create wealth. Statism creates concentration camps and mass murder. And now we're supposed to trust governments that climate change totally happens and unless we give up our freedoms we will all die.
  - michaelscott 5y ago
    We're talking about renewables? How is that frying the planet?
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      We are talking about energy. Most of it is not produced by renewables. Any renewable energy that is being wasted on cryptocurrency bullshit is not going into displacing coal and gas, which are currently frying the planet.

throwaway52355 5y ago

Miners are securing the only censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money we have. The only people who don't see any practical value in this either don't understand Bitcoin or hate freedom.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Or realize Bitcoin just can't be used as money, by design. It couldn't even handle the volume of transactions of a small town, because the miners and developers are not interested in that, and have chosen to keep block sizes small for their own interests.
- throwaway405769 5y ago
  Miners and exchanges were proponents of big blocks, since that would have centralized power in their hands and reduced decentralization. Bitmain, Coinbase, many others. This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill. Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly instantly transfer small amounts of Bitcoin for extremely low fees.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    LN doesn't really work either - it can't really guarantee that funds have been transferred until you close a channel (you commit the transaction on the Bitcoin chain). So, unless you trust the other end of the channel not to fraudulently close the channel, you can't actually consider the transaction settled. And of course, in the case of routes, there has to basically be end-to-end trust for this to work, or someone will be left holding the bag. It also can't scale the way it's usually promised, in part due to Bitcoin's horribly low transaction rate (you can't open LN channels fast enough, given Bitcoin's transaction rate), in part because of limits on the number of transactions in a live channel. And in practice, it seems it's highly centralized [0]. 0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]