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> It's like Finland has suddenly shut off its power grid So, have we observed global energy usage go down by about one Finland? Shouldn't that be observable s

• TheDudeMan 4y ago
  If you were a crypto miner and had a pile of GPUs would they be powered-off right now? Of course not.
  • shabbatt 4y ago
    well it certainly won't be used to mine Ethereum anymore and if this is the trend we will see more "high volume" coins see dropping PoW even further. Those pile of GPU are going to be a write off since prices are dropping and supply issue improves as well.
    • mox1 4y ago
      if you are part of a mining pool, its possible they just auto-switched you to mine another coin (Ethereum Classic, LiteCoin, etc)
  • dcolkitt 4y ago
    There's virtually no other ASIC resistant (i.e. can use GPU) PoW coin left to mine. There's the proof-of-work ETH fork, but it only has a market cap less than 2% of than real ETH. So even though they juiced the block rewards, miner rewards are more than 90% lower, which isn't enough to pay for electricity of the previous hash rate.
    • qznc 4y ago
      ETH classic hash rate went from 50 to nearly 300 Th/s. https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate https://2miners.com/etc-network-hashrate
      • samatman 4y ago
        Reality will set in eventually. It was just the lazy place to point the cards, the pools will get tired of wasting that money pretty fast.
      • staringback 4y ago
        And the price remained the same, so it is now 6x less profitable to mine than before (it was barely profitable before this)
      • trompetenaccoun 4y ago
        Yep. But with that the difficulty is going through the roof and earnings are dropping. Ethereum had A LOT of hash power while ETC isn't really used by anyone so where are the earnings supposed to come from. It's not going to be economically viable because the electricity is a fixed cost, even if some individual miners are trying it out. There is a new PoW fork that was started by miners that want to continue mining. Some of the work could go there assuming it doesn't tank. I personally don't see the utility though, doubt it will be able to attract many users.
    • Iolaum 4y ago
      What about Monero? Isn't that PoW and asic resistant? Although irc you need to use a cpu, not a gpu to mine it.
    • crowhack 4y ago
      True, there are not many (or any) that will be as profitable but some still exist such as ergo, https://ergoplatform.org/en/get-erg/#Mining https://ergoplatform.org/en/get-erg/#Mining .
  • ajross 4y ago
    It will if you can't mine enough to cover the cost of the electricity required to run it, which is true if you want to mine BTC with it, for example.
    • wpietri 4y ago
      Not necessarily. It's true if the person making the decision is getting paid directly from the mining. But perverse incentives abound in the cryptocurrency space. For example, consider Celsius: https://amycastor.com/2022/09/11/crypto-collapse-celsius-voyager-skybridge-the-liabilities-are-real-the-assets-are-fake/ https://amycastor.com/2022/09/11/crypto-collapse-celsius-voy... https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/11/crypto-collapse-coinbases-billion-dollar-bloodbath-hodlnaut-goes-down-celsius-voyager-3ac/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/08/11/crypto-colla... As they thrash around in bankruptcy, they have proposed that they will mine their way out of the hole. Will this work? I doubt it. But will it let the CEO stay in charge for a while longer, taking in more investor money and continuing to get paid? Possibly! So actual economic efficiency may not matter.
  • blihp 4y ago
    Turned off is more profitable than running at a loss for miners that need to fund their opex by selling what they mine. It looks like it's already happening. After the merge there were a number of coins that saw huge spikes in hash rate which drove them to absolutely unprofitable levels. A lot of that hash rate has since gone elsewhere (most likely offline) and it looks like many coins are settling at a level in the short term that is breakeven at $0.06-0.08 kWh which many (most?) miners can't be profitable at as that is below their electric rate.
  • ryeguy_24 4y ago
    I think this is potentially the most interesting comment in here. If all of those GPUs just flipped to another cryptocurrency, global energy reduction would be zero.
    • mcherm 4y ago
      In the short term, that's true because the GPUs are already purchased. In the long run, people will invest in new cryptocurrency mining rigs very much in proportion to the profitability of running one.
      • ryeguy_24 4y ago
        Also a great comment. :) Good points on both short- and long-term effects.
  • xiphias2 4y ago
    My friend sold most of his GPUs a few weeks ago and you can see it in GPU prices.
  • josu 4y ago
    Yes. At the moment the marginal cost for the average ETH miner is higher than the marginal revenue of any GPU minable chain.
    • bredren 4y ago
      Unless you’re stealing power.
      • josu 4y ago
        The "average miner" is not stealing power.
• shabbatt 4y ago
  I wonder what will happen now that the ponzi structure is now gained new velocity as energy constraints have shut down proof of work mining. PoW creates centralized collusion between those who can afford the best miners and this helped the velocity of the chain itself since it is only as good as the last mined block. Now that layer is gone, its this proof-of-stake which is a bit funny since, Ponzi schemes are also proof-of-stake, where the previous investors stake's performance signals the next until the order books flip to a highly skewed with a very long til, it results in the last group who were late to the party, get caught with the bags. I wouldn't be surprised if there are many whales dumping as they would know (and I hope so) what the new paradigm shift is in this digital ponzi gold rush. Also rather anxious for these fellas who promoted securities written on ethereum. The SEC flat out came out and said almost all cryptocurrencies passes the howey test recently. This PoS seems perfectly timed for the occassion.
  • mgraczyk 4y ago
    You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from the investments of future investors. That's not how PoS works. In Ethereum, everyone is diluted to pay stakers and the time of their investment does not matter.
    • shabbatt 4y ago
      > You're confused, in a ponzi earlier investors are paid from the investments of future investors. so you mean like pre-mine token sales? wait aren't those securities because there is an expectation of returns from the work of others? what you write here could be used against you, consult your lawyer before you admit anything!
      • mightypirate 4y ago
      • mgraczyk 4y ago
        A pre-mine might make it a security, but it's basically the opposite of a ponzi. Not everything is a ponzi. I think you're just confusing different financial constructs with one another
• technolo-g 4y ago
  This would provide visibility into Texas: https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d08c30787a?from_ts=1660662748113&to_ts=1663254748113&live=true https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d... Perhaps there are other such dashboards around? (Link was from HN a while back)
• matkoniecz 4y ago
  No, that is more diffuse. Whoever was using this electronics switched to other BTC variants, but in long term this reduced profitability and should harm people using energy in this way. But sadly no immediate impact, unless there are electronics that could be profitably consuming power for Ethereum and it is not profitable for alternatives.
  • ajross 4y ago
    In some sense that's true, but missing the point. The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. What we should expect to see[1] is that the value of "Proof-of-Work ETH" (which is still a functioning blockchain[2], just like Ethereum Classic is) will drop as attention is focused on PoS ETH. And so energy devoted to it will drop in tandem. It's also true that there are second order effects, like for example all the mining hardware dedicated to ETH needs to find a new home, which will depress prices for new mining hardware for "chains that are hardware-compatible with old ETH", and thus probably support their prices a bit. [1] And do, I think. IIRC there was a stat rolling around a few months back showing electrical grid usage dropping due to the crypto crash, but can't remember where it was or how reliable the source seemed. [2] Though AFAICT no one is tracking exchange rates for it yet, so your guess is as good as mine as to its value.
    • teawrecks 4y ago
      > The amount of energy worth buying to mine crypto is exactly equal to the value of the crypto mined. That's like saying a stock price is directly proportional to the p/e ratio. Things have both intrinsic and extrinsic value. You are only considering the intrinsic value. In reality, people mine stuff at a loss all the time because they think it might be work more later, i.e. speculation.
      • Edman274 4y ago
        Why would they mine it at a loss relative to the market when they could just buy it at whatever the current market price is, if they think it's going to go up in the future?
• TylerE 4y ago
  Power demand varies wildly during the day (Like +/-50%, maybe more depending on climate). A 1% change will get lost in the noise of "Oh, it's 3 degrees warmer today... HVAC working harder"
• camjohnson26 4y ago
  Ethereum Classic’s hash rate has gone up by about 25% of Ethereum’s hashrate, so at least for now it looks like a lot of the energy use is just moving as miners point their GPU rigs at alt coins. Very curious to see if ETHW, ie Ethereum without the merge, maintains a significant amount of hashing power. Another thing to watch will be if those alt coins are profitable to keep mining or if miners will start selling their rigs.
  • apeace 4y ago
    Aha, thank you! I felt like this change should be visible in some kind of graph somewhere, and you're right, the ETC hashrate has roughly quadrupled in the span of two days: https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate https://minerstat.com/coin/ETC/network-hashrate And here is the ETHW hashrate: https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate https://minerstat.com/coin/ETHW/network-hashrate EDIT: Better links
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      So, with all the new hashers coming from ETH, ETHW still has an order of magnitude less activity than ETH had before the change. Evidently it didn't absorb all the hardware. The question if it is visible in the electricity generation numbers is still very relevant. (If it is, we will probably only be able to see it in an year, when international organizations compile their numbers.)
    • sam0x17 4y ago
      There will probably be some really interesting network effects with this. Since a lot of the other PoW coins that are ETH-hardware compatiable have low volume, I think we're going to very rapidly see the profitably of mining these go way down (to the point of going negative in some cases) as all these extra miners suddenly start mining these coins, but this takes time. So in other words, I would expect the real global energy usage reduction to happen weeks or months after the merge since it will take a while for all the altcoins to get overmined.
      • sam0x17 4y ago
• guerrilla 4y ago
  > Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand? Not likely. We'rein an energy crisis and it just started getting cold. So, the opposite.
• oliwarner 4y ago
  The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else. I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.
  • colechristensen 4y ago
    With ETH off there’s going to be a significant loss of profit to be had and people stopping because the expected value of mining has gone negative. Store stocks of graphics cards are booming. There absolutely will be a reduction in PoW power usage globally.
  • kenforthewin 4y ago
    My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.
    • bravetraveler 4y ago
      Depends on the hashing algo -- some make sense for GPUs, others not so much. I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still relatively viable for example. Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to CPUs, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.
      • pclmulqdq 4y ago
        RandomX is pretty GPU-hostile. If you have a lot of VRAM, you could theoretically make it work okay, but I don't know of a GPU miner that has any semblance of performance (or perf/watt) that is close to a CPU.
        • bravetraveler 4y ago
          Gotcha, CPUs have been most of my experience with it. I dabbled with GPUs but it seemed like I'd have to do a lot of clock/voltage tuning to make it worthwhile. This was way before energy prices jumping, too
• mrb 4y ago
  «Shouldn't that be observable somehow?» No, because of two reasons. First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. Second, contrary to sensationalist headlines Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only 0.1%. Yes that can be a "country's worth of electricity" but in relative terms, 0.1% would be barely visible on charts you might examine. Also, digiconomist, an often quoted source of Ethereum miner's energy consumption statistics, was grossly overestimating the figures. The actual consumption was probably around 20-30 TWh/year instead of the ~80 TWh/year figure they estimated. Just look at their chart: it made no sense, for example between Sep 2020 and May 2022 Ethereum hashrate grew 5-fold from 200 to 1000 TH/s, whereas in that same time-frame digiconomist estimated the consumption grew 15-fold from 6 TWh/year to 90 TWh/year. If anything, hardware has become (a bit) more efficient over time, it didn't become 3 times less efficient... But that's not too surprising, given the author of digiconomist has a history of exaggerating his figures, like he did for Bitcoin see https://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ https://blog.zorinaq.com/serious-faults-in-beci/ But nowadays his Bitcoin estimate is more in-line with more reputable estimates such as Cambridge's https://cbeci.org/ https://cbeci.org/ Last time I looked he was within ±30%
  • anonporridge 4y ago
    > First, many miners simply pointed their hardware to mine other cryptocurrencies such as ETHW or ETC. For example we have evidence that about a quarter of Ethereum's mining farms moved to ETC over the last 24h. We'll see if this is maintainable. Miners can't mine if the reward doesn't cover their costs. So, the only way the mining remains sustainable is if these tokens rise drastically in value. It is possible that many miners are huge holders of ETH, in which case we may see them massively dump ETH and buy ETC to try to invert the price and keep their business going.
  • ninkendo 4y ago
    > Ethereum miners only represent a drop in the bucket of the global electricity consumption: only 0.1% 1 out of every 1000 watts of energy produced in the whole world going to ethereum mining is tragic. It’s an absolutely massive waste, and the fact that crypto miners think a number like that isn’t a big deal is horrifying to me.
• webinvest 4y ago
  Ethereum miners were using GPUs. AMD, Nvidia, and others. They could switch their GPUs from mining ethereum which is about $1500 per coin to Ethereum classic but that is only about $40 per coin. I’d guess that wouldn’t be worth continuing with since it would be much less than than their electricity bill. They could sell their GPUs on EBay or other secondary markets, switch to protein folding, cloud-based password cracking, or SETI sky scanning. Maybe they use them to play high resolution video games like most people. Some smaller percent might notice next month when they eventually see that their ETH wallet hasn’t grown over the next month and Google why that’s the case. Crypto mining occurs mainly where electricity is either cheap or free. Hydroelectric and Geothermal tends to produce the cheapest energy so many large mining outfits were relocated next to Hydroelectric and Geothermal plants. Many are in remote northern areas where computer cooling costs are less expensive too. $HIVE blockchain technologies was running enough ethereum miners to mine 7675 ethereum ($11.5 Million dollars worth) during the 3 month period ending in June 30, 2022 according to their quarterly earnings report. 100% of all of their miners used renewable energy sources.
  • trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    In case of Ethereum that wasn't true afaik, a lot of it was mined in the US for example. Since Ethereum wasn't all ASICs like Bitcoin, there was more decentralization in that sense with individuals running miners from home, not always at the highest efficiency. Your first paragraph is correct regarding profitability for most miners though, based on the numbers I've seen. One thing that I find interesting in the electricity debates is that if we took the gaming example and looked at the collective consumption of all people playing video games around the world, you'd arrive at even larger numbers of power usage and emissions. Yet this isn't ever discussed, even though an immutable public ledger like Bitcoin arguably has more utility for society than playing games. A lot of HN users probably play video games, CO2 emissions are of course mainly an issue caused by other people and activities oneself doesn't take part in. In Europe, there's also a trend of public anger against SUVs and there are groups slashing tires of cars, simply based on the shape and ignoring the actual energy efficiency. Happened to a friend of mine who couldn't understand why they targeted her car and left 30 year old gas guzzlers in the same street alone. I think a lot of it has to do with emotions more than rational considerations around sustainability.
• anonporridge 4y ago
  The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year. Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year. An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change. News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization. And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.
  • oblio 4y ago
    The thing is, in the wider cacophony of human civilization, Ethereum and cryptocurrencies also don't exist. If I and my grandma and everyone's grandma would use Proof of Work cryptocurrencies to buy peanuts at the supermarket, PoW energy usage would probably rival that of China. Now it's just used for speculation by a bunch of rich folks, crooks and marks. Probably only a few thousand transactions per second, I imagine.
    • osrec 4y ago
      Given that Visa does around 1,700 TPS, I imagine it's probably lower than that.
    • e1g 4y ago
      “a few thousand transactions per second” is all of Visa+Mastercard. Bitcoin is just “a few” and ETH is barely “a dozen”. Edit: Sorry folks, that claim was based on outdated data! The latest figures for both Visa and Mastercard are ~5,000 transactions per second each.
      • consp 4y ago
• dogman144 4y ago
  There is a X Moonshot Factory or w/e the google incubator is called for unified power grid visibility. It is supposedly hard to do.
• Frost1x 4y ago
  If you're the type of person who poured capital into mining hardware and you own it, which you likely do because it's more cost effective, you still have all that hardware sitting around. You're going to repurpose it to other mining endeavors or quickly find a way to try and eek more money out of if, because you were already that type of person. I don't keep up with crypto and mining but until it becomes unprofitable or you can't pull money for and start operating in the red, you're going to continue consuming similar power.
  • knicholes 4y ago
    Yeah, I've got 21 3080s/3090s, and I'm still mining (NiceHash switched algorithms for me automatically). But I've also listed my machines on vast.ai to rent out for deep learning. When they're not being used by a client, they're mining still. My electricity is super cheap, though $0.0875/kWh. That said, it's hardly profitable at all. I'm just speculating and breaking even at this point.
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  I find it incredible how many arguments rely on a uniform distribution assumption here. There are markets where crypto miners are double digit percentage of utilization. They have very favorable conditions for mining, like the Pacific North West. The “one Finland” isn’t smeared over all power consumption, it’s highly congregated in a relatively small number of locations. The argument that a sudden devaluing of the use of electricity has no impact in the power infrastructure where it’s concentrated is absurd. I’m not saying it has or hasn’t happened - I’ve no idea. But it will be news if it does happen because operators will see double digit drops in demand locally and it’ll be noteworthy. But I don’t think it’ll be like energy prices in the EU improve - the mining happens in places with huge gluts of power they can’t otherwise sell or distribute for more.
• simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  > Shouldn't there be some power stations reducing their output as a reaction to reduced demand? No, because ETH mining is/was quite distributed globally, let's say across thousands and thousands of power grids. A single grid or power station shouldn't be able to notice the difference. Think about it this way: all of a sudden, domestic fridges consume 1/100th of electricity, compared to before. Fridges are 0.1% of average power consumption. Thousands of fridges in a given area are powered by the same power station. The power station barely notices the ~0.1% reduction in power consumption, compared to the day before. Shrugs.
• whiplash451 4y ago
  Apparently the global reduction was 0.2%. That is not negligible, but not nearly enough to see power plants shutting down.
• marksmith2996 4y ago
  Is it just me or does that sound like an insignificant amount? Finland has a tiny population, if ETH mining only used that much electricity sounds like it it was pretty great to begin with.