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Texas Grid Paid Firm to Stop Mining Crypto During Heatwave
- adolph 3y agoWhile distasteful on the face of it, this may be a good way to increase base load utilization going forward, base load being powered by nuke, solar and wind. Instead of purchasing expensive infrastructure (methane) to power peak periods in a manner quick to ramp up and down, pay off known optional users to free up capacity.
- salawat 3y agoWhat a bloody anti-pattern. 0) business: Lets max out all slack in a finite system to make money! ...inevitably reality happens, and suddenly, slack in the system is needed to maintain operation for non-maximalist participants 1) non-maximalist part of system recognizes and rewards maximizing operator for maxing out utilization by paying them to not do it 2) Every other operator watching this transaction: Huh. So as long as I carve out a big enough chunk of utilization, I can make money doing AND not doing. 3) Every operator incentivized to maximize consumption 4) Literally everyone else just trying to get by suffer under increased grid instability and progressively more intense utilization that never actually got tested for because there wasn't a reason to transform all excess generation capability into waste heat via computation before. Like... this is an immediately obvious pathological outcome to me. Is it really that non-obvious to everyone else? Or am I just stuck in a headspace where the purpose of computation is to arrive at an answer as efficiently as possible where accounting for inputs extends from input fuel source to exhaust?