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An 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 bi
by ChancyChance 3y ago
An 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 3y 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 3y ago> you can’t sell it Bhutan sells a massive amount of power.
- alienthrowaway 3y agoWhat? They are already selling energy to neighbours - it contributes 30% to GDP. Are you suggesting they cannot sell more of it?
- Mistletoe 3y 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 3y 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.
- SamBam 3y agoBecause it's worse for the world. They have a tremendous source of green energy, and they could sell more of it to India reduce the amount of coal and oil India burns, but instead they use it to spin motors to power computers to guess random numbers and hope they make the rich a little richer. Plenty of countries have chosen to have environmental goals at the cost of making less money.
- Mistletoe 3y agoI’m not sure Bhutan can afford to do that. It reminds me of when Western countries burned coal for 100 years to get where they are and then don’t want other countries to do that. I get it, and I don’t want the earth polluted either but it certainly smacks of colonialism/manifest destiny type thinking.
- jcranmer 3y ago> It reminds me of when Western countries burned coal for 100 years to get where they are and then don’t want other countries to do that. I get it, and I don’t want the earth polluted either but it certainly smacks of colonialism/manifest destiny type thinking. That kind of argument makes less and less sense the more you think about it. It's like arguing that Africa can't develop the Internet until after they get their telegraph network up and running. There's no reason that a functional power grid requires the use of fossil fuels as the primary energy source, and we're already at a point where renewable energy is as cheap to set up as fossil fuel plants. An advantage to starting industrialization later is you don't have to waste time working through worse versions of technology. If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, especially because you often have a chance of undercutting existing providers who have too much sunk capital costs in less efficient technology.
- eru 3y ago> If you want to be competitive, starting out on the latest and greatest is the best choice, [...] That's not true in general. It depends on the specific situation. You are right about learning from existing technology, and that people will not and should not blindly retrace the technological evolution, missteps and all, of those who came before them. To give an example that combines both points: a poor country might be well advised to focus on bicycles instead of modern cars. But that doesn't mean they need to do a penny-farthing before they can get to safety bikes.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoBecause they think it will make more, but their predictions are wrong? That's usually how I end up choosing things I thought I could never choose.
- lordlimecat 3y agoFor the same reason people got suckered by FTX and the same reason so many got burned in the many BTC crashes: They got taken in by the wild promises of cryptogains.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoThey probably can't. They don't control the demand for their power.
- robocat 3y agoHuh? Quantity demanded increases as price decreases https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_demand Bhutan controls the price they will sell at, and for hydropower the marginal costs can be very low, so surely they do control the quantity demanded.
- 1123581321 3y agoThere is an optimal product of price * quantity sold they can’t exceed without something changing on the buyers’ end.
- pclmulqdq 3y agoA lot of people don't understand energy markets. They are not basic commodity markets. They use weird pricing mechanisms and they are tied up with national security concerns on both sides of the border. They rely on a weird kind of distribution infrastructure. The product is consumed immediately, with no (realistic) way to store a ton of it. Most likely there is a treaty setting a floor price on the power or a demand ceiling, and they have hit one of those. Those limits are negotiated based on all of these considerations.
- robocat 3y agoWithout specific knowledge of the agreements between India and Bhutan, or knowledge of the constraints on the network, plus other factors, your comment is hypothetical. I agree with some of your points. I don’t agree with “They don't control the demand for their power” because Bhutan do have choice over how much they deliver, even if it is only in the long term via their contracts. Bhutan exports 70% of their power, so clearly India wants it. As an aside, I have two very good friends who work designing electricity markets, and planning country interlinks. I am not a specialist, but I do try to keep up with the play.
- thoi342343434 3y agoThe part of India that neighbors Bhutan is extremely un/de-industrialized, and due to years of insane 'SJW-liberalism' driven politics, is as bad as the worst of sub-Saharan countries in terms of development metrics. India also gives away electricity for free to farmers (due to similar idiotic populism), and compensates by charging industries more (grid losses in India are also very high). To say that demand side is anemic is an understatement. Bhutan doesn't have the best relations with Nepal either after the ethnic-cleaning of Nepali Hindus (1/5 its population) from Bhutan. Nepal, ofc, is as poor as India (though better than Bihar).
- zetazzed 3y agoWhat do you mean you can't sell it? Bhutan exports 70% of their energy to India (https://www.sasec.asia/index.php?page=news&nid=1178&url=bhu-hydro-export-aug2020 https://www.sasec.asia/index.php?page=news&nid=1178&url=bhu-...). India needs lots of energy to do normal energy things that improve people's lives, like lighting and cooling homes and running irrigation systems.
- shrubble 3y agoIf they are gapped out on transmission capacity, then they can produce it but can't send it to India, in which case doing something locally with it woukd be useful.
- throwaway2037 3y agoTwo options: They can build the transmission lines themselves, or lend money to India to build them.
- whitesilhouette 3y agoLend money to India.... that they earned from Bitcoins‽ That's kind of a circular logic, isn't it?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lordlimecat 3y agoThe article (and Bhutan) are strangely cagey about whether this process has actually generated a return. Spoiler: it hasn't.
- RestlessMind 3y agohttps://thebhutanese.bt/dhi-confirms-that-it-is-mining-digital-assets/ https://thebhutanese.bt/dhi-confirms-that-it-is-mining-digit... Per a Bhutanese source, it has been mining BTC since it was 5000$. Also, the electricity is free so it hasn't lost any serious money given the low expenditure. Last time BTC was 5000 was in Mar 2020 so given that they are still doing it, I don't see why this is unprofitable for them. If it was, they would have stopped by now.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoCables.
- arcticbull 3y agoYou absolutely can by investing in transmission infrastructure instead of wasting it on guessing nonces. It incentivizes continuing to waste it instead of transmitting to to places with productive uses. Transmission is extremely efficient. A power line spanning all the way from New York to San Francisco should be about 92% efficient. Transmission line losses are only about 2-3% per 1000km. [1] [1] https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSOK.pdf https://iea-etsap.org/E-TechDS/PDF/E12_el-t&d_KV_Apr2014_GSO...
- datadata 3y agoTransmission loss can actually be reduced to zero, if voltage is infinite (or super conductors were used). However, the important part is the installation and operational cost of a high voltage line-- which is definitely non zero. For a small enough economic value of a far enough away stranded power source, installing transmission lines would not be economically rational. It is a bit like saying that every house should have 10 Gigabit internet. The technology is there, but the capital expenses are not reasonable for ubiquitous deployment.
- arcticbull 3y agoIf there's a small amount of power available then it's not worth mining. If there's a lot of power available it's worth building a transmission line. There's no rational economic system where the ideal case is build-to-waste - that's just policy failure. Bitcoin just provides economic incentive to create that policy failure instead of minimize it.
- datadata 3y ago> If there's a small amount of power available then it's not worth mining. Could you explain how you arrived at this conclusion? The value of mining is generally proportional to the available power. If the capital expense of a mining rig is less than a transmission line, it might be better to mine than to transmit. For example, if it costs 1 million dollars to install a transmission line, but only 1 thousand dollars to setup a mining rig that could consume all the energy, it probably be more feasible to mine than to transmit.
- HashBasher 3y agoHow is it easier to sell energy? Electricity is not digital, you need to build the wires, figure out the demand and fund the operations of the whole thing.
- acdha 3y agoThat’s already setup: they export something like ¾ of the electricity they produce to India. I suspect this is either trying to get higher rates or possibly challenges related to their seasonal hydropower issues – if India is building more capacity for the times when the water levels are too low, the long-term rates aren’t going to be going up.
- NBJack 3y agoI also speculate they have gotten all they can out of the arrangement. Or it just isn't as economically lucrative as holding back some of that power as a speculative bet on the future.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lordlimecat 3y agoYou need to do those things for a datacenter too.
- HashBasher 3y agoYou don't need to build wires that spans half your country! Just a big building, some transformers or whatever equipment is used to consume the energy from the stranded producer and a lot of miners, as much as you can power!
- throwaway290 3y agoafter I heard about express cryptocurrency management workshops for Thai buddhist monks last year I am not surprised
- sidiropo 3y agoThere are power generation facilities in Canada that are paying the US to take their excess energy.