5 ms·

Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of ma

Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.

nikanj 5y ago
And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market. A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
    - hippich 5y ago
      prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
      - beckman466 5y ago
        > Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years. “In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.” https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from-the-left/ https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
- beckman466 5y ago
  > A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value. it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.
  - danlugo92 5y ago
    > ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value. It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.
    - nikanj 5y ago
      Is this censorship? https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-exchange-money-laundering-13-million-california-2021-11?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-excha...
      - danlugo92 5y ago
        Yes it is. Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil". Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality. Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked. But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it. Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography). Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.
        nikanj 5y ago
        So…how? What? Bitcoin is supposedly uncensorable - yet he was censored? Which one is it?
    - bserge 5y ago
- paganel 5y ago
  Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.
  - _jal 5y ago
    Shame about that other environmental nasty thing related to proof-of-work that renders the entire earth somewhere you'd prefer not to raise a kid.
    - paganel 5y ago
      I was just commenting on the aluminium smelter thing being very, very non-environmentally friendly at a local level.
    - VMG 5y ago
      Depends on what the miners are being powered with. Geothermal energy has very few emissions. If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.
      - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
        I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.
    - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
      CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.
SilasX 5y ago
What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.) Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”. Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
- acdha 5y ago
  There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like: Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1]. But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy). [1] hopefully with sustainable management [2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
    - acdha 5y ago
      Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this: 1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day 2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland). 3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
Symmetry 5y ago
The aluminium smelter also requires collocated skilled labor which is another factor.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting. https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money. https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helped-by-high-aluminium-prices https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...

Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.

nikanj 5y ago

And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market. A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.
- beckman466 5y ago
  > Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
  - hippich 5y ago
    prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
    - beckman466 5y ago
      > Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away? yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years. “In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.” https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from-the-left/ https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
beckman466 5y ago
> A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value. it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  > ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value. It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Is this censorship? https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-exchange-money-laundering-13-million-california-2021-11?amp https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-excha...
    - danlugo92 5y ago
      Yes it is. Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil". Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality. Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked. But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it. Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography). Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.
      - nikanj 5y ago
        So…how? What? Bitcoin is supposedly uncensorable - yet he was censored? Which one is it?
  - bserge 5y ago
paganel 5y ago
Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.
- _jal 5y ago
  Shame about that other environmental nasty thing related to proof-of-work that renders the entire earth somewhere you'd prefer not to raise a kid.
  - paganel 5y ago
    I was just commenting on the aluminium smelter thing being very, very non-environmentally friendly at a local level.
  - VMG 5y ago
    Depends on what the miners are being powered with. Geothermal energy has very few emissions. If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.
    - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
      I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.
  - OldManAndTheCpp 5y ago
    CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.

SilasX 5y ago

What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.) Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”. Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.

acdha 5y ago
There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.
- SilasX 5y ago
  To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like: Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1]. But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy). [1] hopefully with sustainable management [2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this: 1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day 2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland). 3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.

Symmetry 5y ago

The aluminium smelter also requires collocated skilled labor which is another factor.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting. https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70 It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money. https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helped-by-high-aluminium-prices https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...