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Texas paid a Bitcoin miner to use less electricity during hottest month
- bradfa 3y agoGrid stability is not free. This concept is not new. Historically things like aluminum smelting had very similar contracts to ensure grid stability.
- api 3y agoYeah but aluminum is useful.
- _trapexit 3y agoSo is a distrubuted, trustless system allowing transferring information securely. It shouldn't take much to see how this is solution is valuable to certain problems.
- stefan_ 3y agoYes, it has been a massive boon to scammers, fraudsters and extortionists worldwide. It's paramount we keep it up!
- flangola7 3y agoWhich problems today have been solved by blockchain? It's been around over a decade yet I still do not know of any noteworthy problem it has solved. What is a problem we had in 2009 that no longer exists due to blockchain?
- conductr 3y agoI don’t think a qualitative measure of “valuable” is too helpful when it’s consuming a very quantitative 120+ terawatts annually
- bradfa 3y agoThe Watt is a unit of instantaneous power. Watt-hours are a unit of energy.
- thesausageking 3y agoBitcoin uses less electricity than christmas lights. Are they more "valuable"? How do you decide?
- defrost 3y agoIs that true though, globally, over the course of a year, mining + transactions? I'd like to see the data sources and working on that. As for decisions, a WWII European economy would have ditched both as excessive and not contributing to the current situation.
- bradfa 3y agoI’ve never done anything useful with Christmas lights or bitcoin. But Christmas lights are much prettier to look at than bitcoins.
- lern_too_spel 3y agoHow do you figure? Bitcoin uses 116 TWh of energy each year, and that number is going up. The US, probably the largest user of Christmas lights in aggregate (probably more than Europe and South America put together, with Asia and Africa having negligible Christmas light usage), used 6.63 TWh of energy on Christmas lights in 2007 when only 5% of them were LEDs, and that number is dropping as people switch to energy efficient LED lights, which use 10% as much energy as incandescent Christmas lights.
- thesausageking 3y agoThat number is way low. I'm guessing it's only looking at indoor lights and not outdoor displays. Holiday lights in the US used 130 TWh in 2016.
- 3y ago
- belltaco 3y agoEthereum is doing that without Proof of Waste.
- stOneskull 3y agoit's waste if it's not used
- _trapexit 3y agoBecause there are no fundamental tradeoffs between the strategies. Because if it was so objectively more efficient and effective every project wouldn't move to that strategy.
- throw0101b 3y ago> So is a distrubuted, trustless system allowing transferring information securely. Not really. NIST did a really good introductory blockchain technology whitepaper in 2018: * https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8202/final https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8202/final Figure 6 is a decision flowchart laying out whether blockchain or some other technology would be best for various needs / use cases, and blockchain is very niche: * https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1048875246437195778 https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1048875246437195778 Needing both distributed and trustless simultaneous isn't common, especially in the modern, connected world: > Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future. * Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s
- api 3y agoSuch a system would be extremely useful but Bitcoin is terrible at all those things. It’s so slow and cumbersome that the vast majority of use is via banks, making it effectively quite centralized. It’s so volatile it’s a horrible currency so its main role is gambling and speculation. It’s pretty useless as the basis for decentralized communication or storage systems for a variety of reasons. The only decentralize app even tangentially related to Bitcoin I’ve ever seen be marginally useful is Nostr, and Bitcoin has nothing to do with how that works. It’s tacked on as an afterthought. Nostr is just a straight up relay-facilitated peer to peer network with cryptographic addressing. If anything the presence of Bitcoin makes Nostr worse by flooding it with spam, endless chatter about sending Satoshis, and stupid laser eye memes.
- _trapexit 3y agoNot only that... they were "paid" in credits. Not USD as many suggest. Though more likely they don't understand what that means.
- andrewxdiamond 3y agoFor a crypto miner, electric credits are as good as cash.
- _trapexit 3y agoNo, they aren't. Credits aren't as liquid or fungible. You can't pay for equipment, salaries, vendors, etc. in energy credits.
- Blackthorn 3y agoKey difference being that aluminum smelting is a useful thing for society to have. Bitcoin, not so much, so it's easy to see why this sticks in the craw of someone.
- bradfa 3y agoPresumably the bitcoin miners were the cheapest way the grid operator could buy this stability. If the grid operator chose a different solution to achieve grid stability then power may cost more for all consumers. It’s a trade off.
- donkykong22 3y ago[dead]
- bradfa 3y agoWait till everyone being negative about bitcoin miners getting paid to not mine learn that sometimes the grid operator is going to pay the bitcoin miners TO mine. Effectively the bitcoin miners will sometimes not only get free electricity but be paid to consume it. Again, grid stability at the lowest cost is the name of the game.
- safety1st 3y agoYeah I don't really have a problem with this. They are just going to a large electricity user and saying "we'll give you some free electricity later if you stop using it now." When the alternatives are brownouts or giving the grid operator the power to force businesses to suspend their operations, this is better. As usual lots of hot takes from people who just read the headline
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y agoWhy doesn't the market decide, if the bitcoin miners got 20,000% rate increases they would stop on their own for free. If the rate goes to zero, they will surely jump in an use as much as their hardware can burn. Why are payments outside of rate changes necessary at all?
- belltaco 3y agoI think aluminum smelters have big costs to restart after shutting down, so it makes sense to pay them. Bitcoin would take less than a minute to start mining again.
- crote 3y agoThe entire reason aluminum smelters are happy to play along is because their restart costs are relatively cheap. An aluminum smelter uses a humongous amount of power to, well, smelt aluminum. Due to the square-cube law the aluminum takes a really long time to cool back down. When you are trying to heat something from 20C to 700C it doesn't really matter if you take a break in the middle of the heating cycle. Sure, it might cool down from 500C back to 450C, but who cares? As long as they get paid enough to make up for their workers getting an unscheduled paid day off, the smelter really isn't going to complain too much.
- theossuary 3y agoI know it's common to have contracts that are cheaper per Kwh, but have requirements to not draw if/when high load occurs. Is it really common to pay to not draw power?
- bradfa 3y agoFor grid stability yes. The ideal grid stability solution is a customer who can sink AND source large amounts of power for a reasonable amount of time and very quickly. Like a giant battery farm can, although these are quite expensive.
- justrealist 3y agoIt's funny because it effectively reduces to Texas paying carbon offsets : )
- lakomen 3y agoI have read this before. Like a month ago. Pretty sure it was in Texas. Hmm
- michael_vo 3y agoOr, they could have implemented surge pricing and charged 10x, 100x for electricity during high demand for non-essential businesses and let market forces decide who wants to still use electricity. Some lobbyists must have lined some pockets.
- crote 3y agoThat is basically exactly what is happening here, though. A bitcoin business considers itself non-essential and gives up power availability for a lower electricity price. The issue with "pure" surge pricing is that it doesn't solve the actual problem. Most businesses - even "non-essential" ones will have fixed-price electricity contracts. They are not affected by surge pricing on the electricity market and have zero incentive to reduce their usage even when the market price spikes 100x. In practice the "market forces" here are a bunch of Wall Street investors losing a shitton of money because their bets went sideways, but that is not going to fix the grid itself.
- _nhynes 3y agoPrevious discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Texas paid Bitcoin miner more than $31M to cut energy usage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605 - Sept 2023 (130 comments) Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 - Sept 2023 (55 comments)
- donkykong22 3y ago[dead]
- Brian_K_White 3y agoIsn't this just getting compensated for being bumped off a plane?