14 ms·
I think it's kind of wild that you can just take a latent or otherwise inaccessible source of power and now convert it into money. And it doesn't really matter
by Zetice 4y ago
I think it's kind of wild that you can just take a latent or otherwise inaccessible source of power and now convert it into money.
And it doesn't really matter what the price of BTC is for something like this, as the resource is more or less entirely unused. It's just sitting there, doing nothing, so any value you can make out of it is better than the nothing they're already getting.
- anonporridge 4y agoIt's leading to some interesting developments in Africa, where stranded hydropower is generating income for remote villages and helping them expand their local economy. https://twitter.com/GridlessCompute/status/1650470292630716416 https://twitter.com/GridlessCompute/status/16504702926307164...
- giantrobot 4y agoAn Antminer rig is nearly $20k. A Starlink setup is $600 then $50 a month. Plus any other capital costs. If the electricity is "free" just the rig and Starlink satellite cost will take over five years to pay off assuming the mining revenue is $10 a day. Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs? For reference a milk cow costs about $1500 and can produce 2,500 gallons of milk in a year. For the cost of the Bitcoin rig maybe getting $10 a day a village could buy about 13 milk cows. Even selling milk at $1 a gallon that's about $88 a day. The "free" power can be used to Pasteurize the milk (UHT) for extra longevity. That same $20k could buy a room full of laptops plus networking equipment and Starlink. They could take online courses to learn a variety of technical jobs and then do contract work for way fucking more than the $10 a day they'd get from a Bitcoin rig. Edit: fixed Antminer from autocowrong
- eru 4y ago> Who is giving free money to remote African villages to buy Bitcoin mining rigs? Why would it need to be free? It could be an ordinary investment that's paid off over time. (Though I assume that the payback period is probably quicker than 5 years, that seems a bit too long to be useful.) Be careful about cows: there's quite a few charities who want to give out cows to help people (using the same logic as you do). But for many recipients the cow is a net drain on their resources. That same logic applies when buying a cow with your own money.
- giantrobot 4y ago> Why would it need to be free? It could be an ordinary investment that's paid off over time. If the Bitcoin rig isn't free then the villagers don't get shit for years while it gets paid off. Then they're just sharecropping Bitcoin.
- eru 4y agoDisplay a little imagination! They could invite outside miners to set up shop in the village. The miners would finance provide the capital, set up the mining rigs, and take all the bitcoin risk. The villagers would just sell them electricity. Just like they would sell electricity to any other business. No clue whether that's what's happening in Bhutan, but it's a perfectly valid business plan, and pays the villagers right away.
- giantrobot 4y agoSo Bitcoin miners will just go to some out of the way village in Africa to buy electricity? I don't need to imagine electrical utilities, those already exist. It doesn't make any fiscal sense to find some out of the way location with a small scale hydro generator to set up a Bitcoin miner. The amount the village would need to charge to make a worthwhile amount of money will certainly be above large scale utility rates. The Bitcoin miner in remote African village story smells like someone taking advantage of some villagers. They're either paying them below market rate for electricity or indenting them with a Bitcoin mining setup that will barely pay for itself over years.
- eru 4y agoWhat do you mean by 'market rate'? If virtually no one else would buy the stranded electricity, the market rate would be zero otherwise. Anything more than zero is better for them. There's more than one bitcoin miner in the world, so the villagers could get some competitive bids.
- saurik 4y agoYou only need a crazy efficient rig to mine Bitcoin if you have to still make money after factoring in your electricity costs; if you are given free electricity, you will be profitable using any existing computer you have to mine: you also won't be making as much money per unit of time, sure, but you will still be making money at that rate.
- giantrobot 4y agoMining rates are a few tens of cents per day per TH/s. Even with "free" electricity the payback time for a miner will take a long time. If you've got a non-optimized miner the payout rate would take months just to be measurable.
- triyambakam 4y agoThat's one of the rebuttals to "Bitcoin is wasteful" in terms of energy and the environment. Bitcoin isn't taking power away from anyone who needs it. It's very often stranded power, like you said, that is too far from a city to be useful efficiently.
- HWR_14 4y agoSometimes it is waste energy. Sometimes it's useful energy that the local market cannot afford but could easily use it to make everyone's lives better. Sometimes it's just a random quirk of markets that they get first dibs on the electricity. And in at least one case, a decommissioned coal plant was purchased to be restarted just to mine bitcoin.
- HashBasher 4y agoBitcoin makes people's lives better. A lot of people use it as a savings account. That's really great, especially for people living with a hyperinflationary currency.
- can16358p 4y agoIt's actually good to have as an alternative to any centralized, government-backed currency. We need an economy that isn't denoted on dollars or euros or similar. Bitcoin is a step towards that. And all the PoW "waste" is worth it. (Though I wish there was a better alternative that's more environmentally friendly while still decentralized like PoW so PoS isn't a good candidate)
- HWR_14 4y agoOr they could put the money in stocks or gold or other assets. But note "assets" and "savings accounts" are not the same thing, and confusing the two is pretty bad.
- RestlessMind 4y agoStocks -> can be seized by governments where the exchanges or actual companies are based. Gold -> Good, and Bitcoin is like Gold in many aspects. While it doesn't have Gold's history yet, it has a few other qualities like easy transferrability and divisibility. Other assets -> Like? ForEx is at the mercy of issuing government (just ask Russia who lost ~300B$). Land can be seized if it's outside one's jurisdiction. In general, Bitcoin (like Gold) is a great asset to park some fraction of your wealth as a hedge against geopolitical risks.
- walrus01 4y ago> I think it's kind of wild that you can just take a latent or otherwise inaccessible source of power and now convert it into waste heat Fixed that for you. Bitcoin mining does about as much good for society as hooking up thousands of 1500W electric resistive element space heaters and dumping the thermal output into the atmosphere. Might as well install some mini split air conditioners backwards while we're at it.
- biggoodwolf 4y agoCould say that about social media or video games.
- kibwen 4y agoUnlike video games, maximizing energy waste is the goal of proof-of-work. The more energy wasted, the more money you make. It's an engine of conspicuous consumption, which makes it more dangerous than any leisurely pastime where energy is merely an input.
- biggoodwolf 4y agoYou just said it, it is money. It's not wasted any more than it is wasted when you play a game or watch a youtube video or TV. It's just a use of energy which you are trying to make as somehow bad. It's just a cultural preference.
- SamBam 4y agoNo, because if someone invents a way to power YouTube free of energy, that would be awesome, and it wouldn't detract in any way from the value of YouTube. But if someone worked out a way to generate BitCoin for free without any energy input, that would destroy BitCoin, because it depends on proof of work, where work is defined as consuming energy.
- biggoodwolf 4y ago
- rtpg 4y agoA, I imagine, very useful invention would be some sort of synthetic fuel generator that only needs water and could soak up a lot of this energy. How small can your fuel synthesis pipeline be? This issue of power in weird places could be aided by processes that make… well, something useful.
- HashBasher 4y agoBitcoin is very useful.
- rtpg 4y agoNot to be too glib but I’m sure that these places would rather just have USD if that were an option
- HashBasher 4y agoI agree, but you can't mine USD, it's actually printed out of thin air.
- eru 4y agoYou can do electrolysis. But then you need to store the fuel etc. That competes with using mined bitcoins to trade for fuel.
- rtpg 4y agoI don’t contest that if the point is money the bitcoins are… probably better? The risks involved with bitcoin custody being their own can of worms. But at least fuel serves a purpose (especially in remote areas!)
- eru 4y agoIf you sell the bitcoin right away, the risks of custody aren't too bad. You can probably also just join an existing mining pool, and negotiate that they pay you in real money straight away. > But at least fuel serves a purpose (especially in remote areas!) Money can be exchanged for goods and services that can serve almost any purpose.
- ChancyChance 4y agoAn easier and more reliable way to make money is to sell it to neighboring countries that need energy. Like they had been doing. Seems to me a little corrupt birdie told them about BTC and their ruling class wanted in on another way to hide wealth. Like every other use of BTC
- goldforever 3y ago[dead]
- Zetice 4y agoThat’s the rub; you can’t get the energy out of where it is. You can’t really use it for your country, you can’t sell it, it’s just kind of there, unused.
- crooked-v 4y ago> you can’t sell it Bhutan sells a massive amount of power.
- alienthrowaway 4y agoWhat? They are already selling energy to neighbours - it contributes 30% to GDP. Are you suggesting they cannot sell more of it?
- Mistletoe 4y agoIt seems likely they felt they can get more for it from mining Bitcoin. Surely they’ve done the math. Why would a country, like a business, choose to make less money?
- polygamous_bat 4y agoPossibly because there are hucksters whose entire life's goal is to convince others that soon rapture (hyperbitcoinization) will arrive and the believers (hodlers) will be rewarded greatly for their faith. > Why would a country, like a business, choose to make less money? See also: Microstrategy, El Salvador.
- c7DJTLrn 4y agoApparently a lot of the UK's wind power is wasted because they're forced to stop the turbines when there's too much wind. I guess we could be doing something with that excess energy, not sure if Bitcoin mining is the best option though.
- zdragnar 4y agoThere's too much wind in three senses: - excess supply would force rates to go negative - excess supply would damage transfer equipment - the wind exceeds the safety rating of the generators, due to either vibration, blade stress, or thermal issues Increasing demand only helps with the first scenario, whereas I suspect the latter two are more likely reasons in the UK (esp with so much generation stranded up in Scotland).
- EGreg 4y agoThe real question is, how to make money with FileCoin these days ? Any stats on this? It seems free hosting and earning the 10x block rewards for “valuable” things, is the only way. Has ANYONE here successfully set up a Filecoin Plus mining operating lately? How much does this program pay out per $1000 in cloud storage? https://sp.filecoin.io/plus https://sp.filecoin.io/plus I would pay someone to show me how to actually set it up and expolain where to advertise my pinning service. I can find almost no useful information on any of the above. Looking forward to MaidSAFE launching soon.
- Mistletoe 4y agoI would just abandon that and stake Ethereum. 5-6% apy is incredible returns on an asset that goes up greatly itself.
- EGreg 4y agoNah, I have access to a lot of storage resources at the moment, not money, that’s why. I want to earn block rewards for storing files. Also I don’t believe in staking or trading because it’s a zero sum game that you are just as likely to lose as win (if you don’t have an edge). Earlier this year I debated Richard Heart about staking Hex vs actual utility and open source software: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3eU3hx0U0Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r3eU3hx0U0Y Although I seem to call it correctly (March 12: buy way out of the money put options at $4 strike on FirstRepublic) I am too busy and overwhelmed to act on it (deposit money into RobinHood, have it clear, time my entry etc.)
- gweinberg 4y agoWell, if energy is locally cheap but difficult to export, it's not surprising that somebody tries to find a use for it, and really not that surprising that it's being used for computations. But since mining bitcoins is sort of a zero sum game, it might be better if the energy were used for some computation that actually added value to the world, if such a thing exists.
- eru 4y agoMining bitcoin is also a zero sum, if other miners aren't allowed to leave the business. If someone in place A with cheap, stranded power enters the mining business, the difficulty of bitcoin mining will increase, and perhaps enough to convince a miner in place B to exit, and thus free up some energy there to use in another productive endeavour. Be that for computation or for a different use. In this sense bitcoin mining acts a bit like a pneumatic system to 'move power around' in a virtual sense. I specifically use pneumatic as the analogy, and not hydraulic, because hydraulic fluids are incompressible.
- mtoner23 4y agoThat's not how energy markets work
- eru 4y agoPlease explain what you mean. My example assumed for the sake of simplicity that people starting bitcoin mining in A would drive up hash rate and thus difficulty enough to make mining unprofitable on the margin in some place B. The electricity used for mining in B before can now either be used for something else, or the people in B can produce less electricity and save on resources.
- Moneyyyyy 4y agoPeople want to have as much BTC as possible. Which means Bitcoin mining is a virus searching and consuming as much cheap energy as possible. We are not at a point we're the margin is so small that we see consumption/mining shifting. We only see consumption and more consumption. And of course this totally decentivie making the energy usable through things like high voltage DC lines or metal smelting or even making hydrogen.
- bigiain 4y ago> the resource is more or less entirely unused. The article says a tenth of the entire country's inbound trade and 15% of the entire government budget was spend buying "computer chips". And that this has "fueled a yawning trade deficit and tallied with a sharp drop in the country’s foreign currency reserves." Maybe they'll get a good return on "the $193 million spent on computer chips" plus whatever they spent to build hydro power plants to tap that "more or less entirely unused" resource? How much would you bet against the only real money ever made here ending up in the pockets of pork barrelling politicians and bureaucrats getting kickbacks from the mining rig vendors and hydro dams/powerplant construction contractors?
- foobarian 4y agoThis why I want a space heater built out of BTC mining ASICs!
- asciimike 4y agoYou joke, but... https://qarnot.com/en/qalway https://qarnot.com/en/qalway
- ironmagma 4y agoThe impressive part is almost that the paper money managed to drift so far from inherent value as it did. Crypto brings it back to being correlated with effort.
- Moneyyyyy 4y agoAh yes the unused water plant payed and build basically for fun. Now after building this for millions the country is searching for a solution to do with this magic free energy source. And instead of trying to use it for something at the end guessing a hash wins. What a Kafkaesque world we live in.
- cyanydeez 4y agoItpsp not money. It's a scam token that has a hysterically variable exchange rate.