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Kosovo pulls plug on energy-guzzling Bitcoin miners
- perfunctory 5y ago> while Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country’s rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government. > The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades. > global bitcoin mining consumes 125.96 terawatt hours a year of electricity, putting its consumption above Norway (122.2 TWh), Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh). The absurdity of the bitcoin mining in the middle of the climate crisis is mind boggling.
- bspammer 5y agoI sometimes wonder if Satoshi, whoever they are, is incredibly guilt-ridden by this. I know I would be. Not that I blame them at all, there was no way to predict the scale of the damage that a single paper could have on the world, and someone else would have eventually come up with the same idea.
- octocop 5y agoI will also cast judgement back in time, to all families owning cars both fossil and electric, to all the people not recycling every ounce of garbage they've thrown. The people whom consumed even the slightest, I cast my judgement, they've doomed the world with their existence. The judgment I cast even lands upon you, hackernews commenter, when it's all laid out.
- secondaryacct 5y agoNo because he wanted to take revenge on the "banks" after the 2008 crisis. He must be incredibly proud of the gigantic pyramid he built, knowing if he move just one btc out of his wallet he'll cause so much ruin people will suicide.
- cyphertruck 5y agoSatoshi has been selling bitcoin to pay expenses every year. You just don’t know it because “Satoshi’s coins” is a myth. He wrote off the identifiable ones but still had years to mine cheaply. Bitcoin is not ab attack in banks but on inflation. It is undermining government ability to create poverty and oppress people.
- sigmaprimus 5y agoI heard that the person who invented single serve coffee pods felt a similar guilt when they witnessed the amount of trash created from such a popular invention.
- darthrupert 5y agoBoth of these sentiments probably deserve the good old "Woody Harrelson drying tears with 100 dollar bills" meme.
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- cyphertruck 5y ago
- rdxm 5y ago
- lordfoom 5y ago> Bitcoin is actually cleaning up the environment. At at this point still uses only a tiny fraction of the energy thrown away every year. This is not true.
- kbd 5y agoThis reads like it was written by a bot… except for spelling errors. I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to mean.
- imtringued 5y agoBitcoin is a currency that entrenches fascists that have bought early.
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- davidgerard 5y agoHal Finney (who beta-tested bitcoin before its release) flagged it almost immediately: > @halfin > Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation > Jan 27, 2009 https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538 https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538 Bitcoiners cannot claim they weren't told early, by bitcoin's second developer.
- boomskats 5y ago> The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades. I still find this wording very interesting, and somewhat loaded. It's not that the population is somehow collectively refusing to pay for their electricity. A mechanism for them to pay it has not existed since 1999. Discussed previously here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809078
- henrydark 5y agoI read the discussion and the piece referenced therein, but I couldn't find a reference to the Serbs not being able to pay. Can you elaborate on this?
- boomskats 5y agoMy understanding is that the billing infrastructure for that part of Kosovo still hasn't been established. Quoting another article from balkaninsight [0]: > While the Kosovo government remains unclear on how to proceed after the six-month deadline, Serbs in the Kosovo north remain confused on how and to whom they should pay their electricity bills. > Miodrag Milicevic, of the North Mitrovica-based NGO Aktiv, says Serbs in the north of Kosovo are in a “grey zone” when it comes to their electricity bills. > “Some still favour of maintaining this status, partly because they do not know who to pay, no one has complete information about it, about the method of calculating electricity, or who will be responsible for payment,” Milicevic told BIRN. [0]: https://balkaninsight.com/2021/05/06/kosovo-pledges-to-solve-electricity-billing-problem-in-serb-north/ https://balkaninsight.com/2021/05/06/kosovo-pledges-to-solve...
- basisword 5y agoThe irony of eating meat/driving gas guzzling cars/using air conditioning/flying/… Do we need to attach the climate crisis to everything these days? It’s very important but picking on one thing relentlessly and not others is just silly. We’re not going to solve the climate crisis by trying to stop people from doing things that use a lot of energy. We need to find ways to make those things sustainable/carbon neutral.
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- paulgb 5y agoWe’re talking about Bitcoin here because the news is about Bitcoin, it doesn’t mean we don’t care about reducing emissions in other areas. There are articles on HN regularly about EVs, synthetic meat, etc. One thing that sets POW apart, though, is how it is designed to resist efficiency improvements through the difficulty adjustment mechanism. When hashrate per watt goes up with efficiency improvements, the network difficulty goes up to compensate, so more efficient hardware does not improve the efficiency of the system.
- paulcole 5y agoThe climate crisis will solve itself when flying, eating meat, gas guzzling cars, etc. are impossible to use because the climate crisis has made life an (as of today) essentially unimaginable hellscape. Sure it’ll be a few centuries of abject misery but as a result the world’s population will contract a lot and things will “reset.” If people today aren’t willing to change their lives (and they clearly aren’t), then it’s time to enjoy the ride and hope we die (fingers crossed) before things get awful (which they will).
- KennyBlanken 5y agoSuch a boorish attitude that Bors made a specific version of Mister Gotcha just for you: https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1098281126743937031 https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1098281126743937031 If you think the comic is hyperbole, I've literally had people say "but you exhale CO2, AHA!" to me when I've suggested we need more people on bicycles for personal transportation. The fact that bicycles are the most energy-efficient form of personal transit? Irrelevant, apparently, because we exhale CO2.
- scotty79 5y agoPricing electricity so low that bitcoin mining is profitable during peak hours is absurd. We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices. Free market will sort the rest out Energy is so cheap that some renewables could be decomissioned if not for bitcoin: https://www.reuters.com/technology/costa-rica-hydro-plant-gets-new-lease-life-crypto-mining-2022-01-11/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/costa-rica-hydro-plant-ge...
- sigmaprimus 5y ago>>> We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices. Free market will sort the rest out Sarcasm?
- gambiting 5y agoI don't see why you think this is sarcasm. Sounds very reasonable to me.
- cyphertruck 5y agoHow will taxes improve the environment? They will give politicians more power to oppress, snd since governments are the largest polluters in the world the environment will get worse. Which they will use as an excuse for more taxes. See the pattern? —— This comment has two further comments, both of which ask questions. But since this comment is heavily downvoted, I cannot reply to the replies to answer the questions. In short: no such thing as “negative externalities”, thats just make-believe to whitewash oppression and poverty creation. Taxes are not a market signal by definition. Its interesting how blithely people accept using violence to force others to comply with their wishes. If you really wanted to reduce CO2 you would support safe clean nuclear. But CO2 isnt causing warming- its historically low, earth started at %100 CO2. Plants evolved to need levels 5 times higher than present. Increased CO2 would improve the environment. We had an ICE AGE at 10 times higher CO2 then now. ETC. Unfortunately Government propaganda has replace science education.
- WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
- mypastself 5y agoThe other two quotes you’ve posted suggest that mining is a significantly smaller issue in this particular scenario. The principal culprits for climate change instead seem to be government-sponsored majority-coal energy expenditure and irredentist nationalist policies.
- space_rock 5y agoBoth subsidizing dirty coal and using it to mine bitcoin both sound criminal to me. Subsidizing coal is the most evil while mining bitcoin with it is a meaningless act that's fun to dislike
- sofixa 5y agoIt's a poor country, they have lots of dirty coal. Their options are use it and have pollution, or pay money to import energy/electricity or build new nuclear power plants ( seems out of the question) or invest into renewables. Coal seems the cheapest option, especially for a country with complicated relations with many of their neighbours, which would make energy/electricity imports highly risky.
- space_rock 5y agoI think you replied to the wrong comment. Mind was about a poor country wasting govt money on populist subsidies It's possible to use coal for power without subsidies (coal is cheap) and bonus it's even more economically efficient
- LatteLazy 5y agoMaybe if countries stopped giving away free energy people would waste less...
- sofixa 5y agoThe poor population of those countries needs that cheap energy to not freeze to death and in general for everyday living.
- LatteLazy 5y agoSo ration is accordingly. Just telling everyone they can have enough energy to run a Bitcoin mining op, and then being surprised when they run a Bitcoin mining op seems silly...
- FabHK 5y agoSo, if everyone was mining Bitcoin, they would earn around US$0.15 per month (assuming 8e9 people, a 6.25 BTC coinbase mining reward every 10 minutes plus some 10% transaction fees, at a price of US$40,000/BTC, and zero energy/mining rig cost). Yay, Bitcoin is solving global poverty!
- fleddr 5y agoSo are giant TVs, PC gaming rigs, ACs, large cars, overconsumption of meat, etc. None can be justified given climate change, but everyone wants to keep it. The truth is that nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades whilst fully knowing about the problem. People only care about somebody else's energy usage and call for the banning of things they don't use or care about.
- lucb1e 5y ago> People only care about somebody else's energy usage and call for the banning of things they don't use or care about. That's your bubble, not mine. This is not my experience at all.
- FabHK 5y ago> nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades That's not quite right. In the West, energy usage per capita has risen until the 1970's or 80's, then stayed flat or fallen. (Of course, it's continued to rise in Asia, but fairly linearly; I wouldn't call it an explosion.) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&country=SWE~CHN~USA~DEU https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab... https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumption-since-1820-in-charts/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumpti...
- ttty 5y ago
- lucb1e 5y agoI was thinking of bringing up the same point, but one could argue that it's for own gain to pay less on the energy bill. It can be said much more broadly that people are changing behavior. Not everyone for sure, but there are few people left that will not claim to be making different personal choices for environmental reasons. I think a lot of them are worth very little and there are definitely hypocrites that take multiple flights per year and compensate that by plugging out phone chargers while not in use, but it's still something that's apparently on their mind. People do do things, and some people do significant things. If GP says that they only see people complaining about others without doing anything themselves, that must be a quite narrow bubble (from my point of view, at least). Edit: maybe a less debatable example is meat replacement products in supermarkets popping up. It's not as if we have more compassion with animals today than ten years ago, what changed is that more people are aware of the climate impact of meat. If nobody was willing to do anything, who's financing the production and buys the shelf space? The products don't even hold that long before spoiling, so they must be sold nearly as fast as meat.
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- Jach 5y agoI like putting it another way: 125.96 terawatt-hours at 11 cents per Kwh (my local rate which is quite a bit higher than many places mining happens) is about $13.8 billion. This is much less than what the world spent on toothpaste in a year ($30bn), isn't much more than Americans spent on Halloween ($10bn), cigarette companies spent on US marketing ($8bn, with much more than that being how much American spent on cigarettes), and is only about 10x more than a single banking player (Bank of America) spends on cybersecurity per year. Do any of these figures seem as absurd to you?
- danlugo92 5y agoBTC bad. Giant faceless banks in bed with the government good. You dind't get the memo when you signed up?
- tradesurplus 5y agoClimate crisis aside, the absurdity of bitcoin mining parasitically profiting out of a local geopolitical situation like this is very ...illustrative.
- foepys 5y ago> "There are a lot of people who have invested in crypto mining equipment and it’s not a small investment," cryptoKapo said. "People have even taken out loans to invest and the impact now is very bad on their lives." Well, risk evaluation is part of founding a company. Sucks to be them but there is no need to keep having rolling blackouts just because some people didn't do their research.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoWhat would they have done if the ban did not occur and they raked in lots of cash? Would they have donated it to the Kosovan public? Of course not. So they should not expect bailouts from the Kosovan public now.
- nathias 5y agoOf course they would, it's called tax.
- xxs 5y agoHow do you tax the bitcoins?
- plebianRube 5y agoAnd that's the problem China and governments banning it have. There is no easy way to force someone to give it up, since it can't be taken by force.
- arlcode 5y agoUuuh the large scale mining operations can easily be detected through their power use. Then warrants can be served equipment can be confiscated and people be put in front of a judge
- lucb1e 5y ago> There is no easy way to force someone to give it up Isn't it about as difficult as asking someone for their cash? People aren't happy to part with it, but the $5 xkcd wrench usually does it. You can hide a paper wallet or storage medium in a sock at a friend's house, but that's no different from cash. Cash is also easy to spend anonymously; try hiding a bitcoin transaction from others or make its traces vanish to avoid problems later. I don't foresee many issues with banning bitcoin at all, it's more of a political problem.
- hpd 5y ago> The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades. So how exactly are they mining if they aren't paying for electricity ? Illegally connected to the grid and/or bribed someone from the electric company to turn a blind eye ?
- mrweasel 5y agoMaybe the government is scared to allow powered to be turned off, fearing an uprising among the Serbs, potentially giving Serbian a reason to interven?
- boomskats 5y agoIt's far more complex a situation than the article makes it seem. This one explains it much better: https://balkaninsight.com/2021/11/23/kosovo-to-end-free-energy-supplies-to-serb-majority-municipalities/ https://balkaninsight.com/2021/11/23/kosovo-to-end-free-ener...
- rixed 5y agoAnd how is this ban going to be enforced if they can't even enforce energy bills to be paid?
- fluffyguy 5y agoThey signed a dumb deal with serbia. The serb community doesn't pay the energy bill until a final deal is reached with serbia on the EU facilitated dialogue. I don't know the details of this, but that's a tl;dr version!
- thisistheend123 5y agoCould there be a similar ban or some regulation on crypto mining in western countries?
- nannal 5y agoWhere do you think Kosovo is?
- xxs 5y agoEast Europe. Also it won't be considered a Western country, even if you say it's in the central Europe (with the latter starting at the Ural mountain). The west is more of a cultural term than geographic one, e.g. Finland is West, but Estonia, Latvia and Bulgaria are not, even though their capitals are roughly at the same meridian... and Estonia & Finland having the same song as national anthem.
- schleck8 5y agoEstonia and Latvia aren't western countries? What else then? You just showed how stupid of a construct the whole 'western/eastern' nonsense is
- FabHK 5y agoWhy is it nonsense? The fact that borders between binary concepts are fuzzy doesn't make the whole concept nonsense.
- secondaryacct 5y agoThis is as coherent as talking of "black culture". There is no west, people who use it are chinese to dismiss everything not chinese (so Japan is western) and the US uses it to force us to join their stuff.
- nannal 5y agoHave you ever been to any Baltic country? Your argument is coming across as vaguely racist and appears to be based on nothing but the divisions imposed between the second and first world.
- mrweasel 5y agoWhat will happen if more countries ban crypto mining, say the US? Would that leave mining under Russian control? In that case could Bitcoin be embargoed, because they’re “made” in Russia? Personally I don’t see the value in crypto-currencies, but that doesn’t mean it not useful to someone. The crypto community should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin, before the whole thing is regulated away. Right now it’s pretty hard to defend Bitcoin, based on the environmental impact alone.
- xxs 5y ago>should find a way to address the energy consumption of Bitcoin Proof of work is the core of bitcoin; it has a built-in deflation on top it. In short it won't happen. And yes, if someone mentions proof of stake, there is still no working case for it.
- erwincoumans 5y agoIsn't Ethereum using proof-of-stake since a recent update? (I'm not an expert in this though)
- DennisP 5y agoIt's running a proof-of-stake network in parallel to the main chain, which is still running proof-of-work. The proof-of-stake network has been running for a bit over a year and has $30 billion in ETH deposited. Code for merging the two networks and eliminating mining is on a public test net right now. Previous upgrades have gone live within a year of the launch of their public test nets.
- ziml77 5y ago> Previous upgrades have gone live within a year of the launch of their public test nets. I didn't know that, but it helps with my hope that PoS will become the default. People bringing up how long they've been trying to switch had been hurting my confidence.
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- MrDresden 5y agoFantastic news!
- space_rock 5y agoFantastic news would be getting rid of the coal subsidy not this meaningless theater
- lucb1e 5y agoThat would also be even better indeed, but much harder to achieve overnight. Reducing the use of coal power is also good, though.
- cuteboy19 5y agoCoal subsidies are good in poorer countries. Having cheap electricity is important for developing nations
- space_rock 5y agoWhy? It's a waste of money and not economically efficient
- MrDresden 5y agoAlmost identical to bitcoin.
- darthrupert 5y agoAll this negativity is fueling the current or upcoming dump run, which in turn will fuel the next pump. Which eventually will expand crypto usage and make some rich cryptobros and sisters even richer. Unless some actual systemic and global changes happen.
- chollida1 5y agoThis is something that even the most die hard BTC fans should be happy about. We can't go around claiming BTC is green while mining in countries that use the dirtiest of the dirtiest coal for their energy.
- ejb999 5y ago>>We can't go around claiming BTC is green Has anyone, anywhere, actually convinced someone that BTC is green?
- paulgb 5y agoThey haven't done much to convince an impartial outside observer, but they have muddied the water enough that people invested in it can sleep at night. As the Upton Sinclair quote goes, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoThe latest talking point is to claim that it incentivizes clean energy production and that’s a good thing. The argument is bananas, but that’s the line that Bitcoin celebrities like @jack have been pushing.
- randomhodler84 5y agoI like Jacks arguments, they seem informed and data driven. Do you think yourself or @Jack has better perspective and visibility of planetary money flows, inflation, energy productive and distribution and peer to peer payments and networks?
- hadrien01 5y agoI've seen arguments on HN that the whole energy consumed for crypto (speculation by a few thousand persons) is equivalent to the consumption of classic payment infrastructure (used for billions of transactions every day). And that's by including bank buildings, airplane travels by anyone related to fiat transactions, etc.
- kgilpin 5y agoIf value of a commodity is predicated on scarcity - eg gold - then isn’t it the case that Bitcoin is actually using energy as the scarce commodity on which its value is based? Unfortunately, production of energy is one of the very things which is driving one of our biggest global problems - global warming. I don’t see how the two can be decoupled.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> then isn’t it the case that Bitcoin is actually using energy as the scarce commodity on which its value is based? Bitcoin’s value isn’t coupled to energy. However, it does have a perverse incentive to miners to consume as much energy as possible. Each additional miner that comes online doesn’t really add anything of value to the network at this point. It just consumes more energy. Each miner plays a game of maximizing their own energy usage to maximize their take of the fixed rewards structure. It has to be the single most inefficient large-scale engineering project I can think of, and certainly the only one that literally pays people globally to make it less and less efficient.
- ahoka 5y ago"Bitcoin’s value isn’t coupled to energy." Sorry, but it is? "The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended."
- DennisP 5y agoThey are coupled, but the BTC price is the independent variable, because of the difficulty adjustment. If the price rises, the mining becomes more profitable, more miners jump in, and mining gets more difficult so the issuance rate stays roughly constant. If the price falls, mining becomes less profitable, some miners drop out, and to keep issuance from slowing down the difficulty is decreased. Whatever the price does, the energy usage follows. So we can't really say that energy usage is the foundation of BTC's value, it's the other way around.
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- wheelerof4te 5y agoBitcoin mining is a waste of electricity. Energy is not a free resource. "Real" money is essentially free. Only cost of producing real money is in materials needed to print a miniscule amount of it. Vast percentage of money currently in circulation is already virtual - in the form of bits inside computers. Your bank has desks with computers, a server where the actual data is stored and a vault with a mandatory reserve in the form of printed currency. So, only reasons to prefer Bitcoin are if you want to, for some reason, avoid the banking system or you don't have cash ready. Either way, Bitcoin is a murky ground to tread on.
- scottiebarnes 5y agoThere is a lack of knowledge about money here. - Some countries are undergoing hyperinflation in which the value of their money decreases daily. Authoritative governments implement currency controls which prevent free market exchange for other currencies, and so citizens are forced to hold worthless bills. - Electronic banking is mass surveilled and your bank and credit card companies are selling your data. - The yield on a 10 year US treasury note is 1.79%. The interest rate on a Bank of America savings account is 0.01% APY. There is no "risk-free" return for savings in today's world; people are increasingly pushed to take risk just to keep up with inflation. Everyone living in Western democracies think good times will last forever, that this kind of debt and money creation is sustainable, and that the party will never end.
- wheelerof4te 5y agoOh, the party will end, for sure. But Bitcoin is not an answer to western consumerism. Nor will it prevent future debts. On the contrary, imagine what a shitshow it would be if someone started selling "bitcoin credit" to the masses. How would you keep the interest stable?
- randomhodler84 5y agoI can tell you are not a Bitcoiner! It may well be something of a antidote to Western Consumerism. Some things I have experienced in my years: * Consume less as I see how the time value of my money is preserved * know that spending now means less in future, so weigh priorities of purchases * priorities longer term thinking with regard to ownership of assets * constantly consider the cost of capital and trade offs owning one instrument vs another There is indeed a working credit market for Bitcoin backed tokens! The largest is aave, and interest rates are driven by liquidity pool usage and incentive programs by the chain devs. There is one level removed from the actual BTC but we are getting close here. You can borrow WBTC right now, consumer facing defi!
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