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Cryptominer loses bid to force BC Hydro to provide it power
- mikeryan 3y agoGood.
- nativeit 3y agoManufacturing electric heaters is a much more simplified and streamlined business model for making money by generating loads of waste heat.
- adamgordonbell 3y agoSell your miner as a heater. It will still be 100% efficient just also contribute to mining.
- arcticbull 3y agoHeat pumps are 4-6X more efficient than resistive heaters, so if your goal is just to generate heat, you'll lose to your competitors. In 2024 nobody should be advocating for resistive heating.
- superkuh 3y ago3x, and only when it's just mildly cold instead of actually cold. When it gets actually cold heat pumps stop working, or work at massively reduced efficiency.
- arcticbull 3y agoDepends how cold. You can get models that work down to -15/-20F. > High-HSPF heat pumps can handle cold weather. At temperatures below -20°F, cold climate heat pumps still provide dependable heat, and many models are 100% efficient at sub-freezing temperatures. Since they consume less electricity in moderate weather, heat pumps cost much less to operate than legacy systems like combustion furnaces and boilers. For building owners, that means enormous savings over time. So unless you're planning to run them exclusively in the polar tundra, probably still better off with a heat pump. [1] https://www.blocpower.io/posts/cold-climate-heat-pumps https://www.blocpower.io/posts/cold-climate-heat-pumps
- bluGill 3y agoThis is Canada - it gets colder than -20F most winters. Sure you should have a heat pump if you live there, but there will be days when you cannot use them. If you live right on the ocean shore you might get a mild enough climate to not need backup, but most of Canada is not that. (though the population may tend that way)
- arcticbull 3y ago> If you live right on the ocean shore you might get a mild enough climate to not need backup, but most of Canada is not that. (though the population may tend that way) There are high-efficiency heat pumps that you can use most of the time, and to my knowledge at least in Ontario, most of the heat pump setups I've seen use a heat pump with a back-up heater for days it gets too cold. And that's fine, it saves a ton of money over the course of the year vs. running resistive. 90% of people in Canada live within 100 miles (160km) of the US border and most people live in pretty moderate climates. The low-temperature heat pumps I've seen work down to -20F (-30C). It's not -30C anywhere in Canada people live for much of the year. Even Winnipeg you'll only get into the danger zone a few weeks of the year. If you live in Alert, feel free to stick to resistive.
- bluGill 3y agoThose really cold days matter though. You cannot say a HVAC system is good enough if it doesn't work on the coldest day while the system is installed. Even if it is only for 1 night every 15 years that you get down to -30C - that is not acceptable. Which is why you need some backup system. Even down in Iowa (quite a bit south of Winnipeg) I've seen -30C in the last 10 years.
- arcticbull 3y agoIn case I wasn't clear (and on re-reading, I may not have been) I mean it shouldn't be advocated for as a means of primary heating. Of course if you need it as a back-up then get it. However, using it once in a while materially changes the economics involved in both mining (negatively) and heating/cooling (positively).
- suoduandao3 3y agoNo... but functional currencies aren't free either. If a miner could run a heat pump via a Stirling engine it'd be even better.
- bluGill 3y agoIf you need the waste heat then there is no downside to mining bitcoin to get it. Over a few years you will pay off the computer. However even in Canada most of the time you are better off with a heat pump to create heat. On the really cold days heat pumps don't work (unless you have a ground source which is expensive to install) and there are not enough of those days that you can pay off the bitcoin machine. If you have the option on those really cold days you save money by burning natural gas (at least now) in a modern furnance. I'm not sure what the energy mix is in Canada, but at least some people there create less environmental impact by burning natural gas.
- nativeit 3y agoI’m frankly delighted by the discussion my smarmy remark ignited.
- klyrs 3y agoYesterday's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269695
- EGreg 3y agoGood. I have publicly been on the record as being against proof-of-work based consensus since 2018, when we implemented Monero in our apps briefly: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/theres-a-currency-miner-in-the-mac-app-store-and-apple-seems-ok-with-it/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/there... My own personal feeling that Proof of Work has a dangerous set of incentives which can lead to electricity waste on a global scale we've never seen before. We don't want to get sucked into this set of incentives, and hopefully our decision to ultimately remove the miner will set some sort of precedent for other apps as well. Ultimately, even though we technically could have remedied the situation and continued on benefiting from the pretty large income such a miner generates, we took the above as a sign that we should get out of the "mining business" before we get sucked into the Proof of Work morass of incentives. The only place I might be OK with it is in really cold places for actually heating a room.
- whimsicalism 3y agoA sauna in Brooklyn is powered by crypto mining.
- optimalsolver 3y agoNothing healthier than breathing in dusty mining rig fumes.
- whimsicalism 3y agoi don't think they are located in the same room :)
- saintfire 3y agoI'm certain they use heat exchangers and don't just pipe computer exhaust in. I hope they do, at least.
- arcticbull 3y agoA sauna in Brookyln would save a lot on their electric bill if they switched to heat pumps.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI worry about the level of manual approvals/chokepoints that increasingly exist in anglo societies. Luckily crypto isn’t very useful (especially in US/Canada), but I worry about what happens when a useful industry becomes politically unpopular.
- JustLurking2022 3y agoFunny how crypto folk constantly talk about libertarian ideals, except when other people exercise their right not to do business with planet destroying scam artists.
- vdaea 3y agoI don't see this crypto "folk" asking the government to provide them with electricity under the threat of violence. He said "I worry about"
- k__ 3y agoWhich cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin are still running on useless PoW?
- whimsicalism 3y agoYeah and also how 'crypto folk' call crypto useless. or wait... maybe I'm not a crypto person?
- klyrs 3y agoThis isn't a little rubber-stamp issue. The issue at hand would require adding 2.5TWh/y of capacity. And, you're right, there are countries where you could totally grease the palms of some politicians and get a new coal plant built. I'm glad that Canada isn't so corrupt.
- whimsicalism 3y agoAnglo societies absolutely have a problem with committee veto. I get that you're proud that there is low corruption, but that doesn't mean other problems don't exist.
- k__ 3y agoSo, they have to build their own plant now?
- Scoundreller 3y agoA crypto miner in Alberta tried that and got smacked for it: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/green-block-mining-settlement-utilities-commission-1.7099790 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/green-block-mining-s...
- k__ 3y agoSeems like the problem there was that they operated a power plant in secret, not because they mined cryptocurrency.
- Scoundreller 3y agoI think it was the noise mainly. The lack of licensing was the angle to shut’em down, but even if they had a license, I’m sure the complaints would have persisted. Would like to know if the noise was primarily from the generators or from the miners.
- superkuh 3y agoNasty. Electrical power is definitely a basic utility and refusing to provide service should at the least be heavily investigated by the governing regulatory body of the region. It doesn't matter what one's opinion of the use is. This could very easily spiral out into a larger societal problem.
- shitpostbot 3y ago[dead]
- mjhay 3y agoWanting 2.5 million megawatt hours per year (an average of almost 300 megawatts) goes a bit beyond providing a basic utility. Doing that while not impacting other customers would almost certainly require big infrastructure investments. The fact that crypto mining is a useless dead-weight loss compared to supplying power to homes and productive businesses just makes the decision all that easier.
- ceejayoz 3y agoSounds like they're preventing a larger societal problem. > It said the pause ordered by the government was in response to "the very real prospect that devoting such a large proportion of the available electrical power supply to one industry would leave less energy for other uses which might result in increased costs to all other residential and industry customers in B.C."
- superkuh 3y agoIndeed. Such a general response can literally be applied to every industry and so shows the judicial response in this case is working on feelings rather than facts.
- bawolff 3y agoI assume it would be applied to any other industry. If you started a steel plant without telling anyone and created a potential electricity shortage in the process, it would probably be shut down too. Industry-scale resource usage requires planning and coordination.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago> Conifex Timber Inc., a forestry firm that branched out into cryptocurrency mining This feels like an episode of Captain Planet.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoAh, smells like a corporate shyster bought in. Much like this company, where a shyster from my country bought into it, (he had to move into overseas markets after the crap he pulled here) > Long Blockchain Corp. (formerly Long Island Iced Tea Corp.) is an American corporation based in Farmingdale, Long Island, New York. Its wholly owned subsidiary Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC produces ready-to-drink iced tea and lemonade under the "Long Island" brand. The company's first product was made available in 2011. > In 2017 the corporation rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp. as part of a corporate shift towards "exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology" and reported they were exploring blockchain-related acquisitions. > In July 2021 SEC announced charges of insider trading against three major Long Blockchain investors who allegedly bought substantial numbers of shares which they sold after the stock gained as much as 380%. They allegedly had advance notice of the name change which preceded and caused the stock rise. They didn't even have to sell shovels for the crypto gold-rush, just had to look like they might do to bump the share price enough. No idea if their drinks are any good.
- optimalsolver 3y agoAre there any coins that do proof-of-useful-work? Like solving scientific problems with the compute cycles? The thought of all this pointless computation is painful.
- k__ 3y agoArweave and Filecoin. Their PoW algorithms require the miners to store data uploaded by clients.
- YossarianFrPrez 3y agoIn some sense, the introductions of scientific papers are supposed to be / are the original 'verification blockchain' albeit one done with human minds and messy research projects.
- IshKebab 3y agoIn some sense a potato is a machine gun.
- bawolff 3y agoBasically none that actually work. The computations done in bitcoin aren't just to waste energy, they are meant to prove you have the ability to waste energy. That means you need a problem where: there are infinite instances, the hardness of an individual instance can be dynamically tuned, there is no central authority needed to give out problem instances, there are no shortcuts or ways to collude to make solving a specific instance easier. Nobody has come up with a useful problem that meets this criteria. It seems hard to imagine anyone will. If you want crypto enviro friendly, proof of stake (like eth) seems like a much more viable path forward. Even better would be to stop using fake money altogether.
- whimsicalism 3y agoAll money is fake. I am not at all a crypto evangelist, but it has its uses - especially outside of the West and in remittances.
- michaelbuckbee 3y agoComplicated mix of things here: 1. So it's not so much "not providing power" for some political or philosophical reason but "not providing all the power they want." 2. The miner wants the equivalent of ~500,000 apartments worth of power...which is substantial. 3. The reason the miner wants this particular power from this particular provider is that it's cheap. 4. If the miner got all the power they wanted it would be enough to drive up local utility rates. 5. The local utility + government aren't keen on this as it's a pretty blatent resource extraction with no local jobs being created.
- jeffwask 3y agoEverybody wants a deal like Texas gave out: https://www.tpr.org/technology-entrepreneurship/2023-09-06/texas-paid-a-bitcoin-miner-more-than-30-million-to-power-down-during-heat-wave https://www.tpr.org/technology-entrepreneurship/2023-09-06/t... Please sir here's millions of dollars so you won't tank our grid. These things should require co-gen facilities instead of my power bill suffering so they can print money.
- MattGaiser 3y ago> would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity each year. Just to give some level of scale to this request, this is half the annual generation of the new $16 billion Site C dam. They are demanding the use of $8 billion in public infrastructure.
- jeffwask 3y agoWe need to start heavily regulating unchecked industrial resource usage of public utilities like power and water. There needs to be a penalty/incentive for conservation.
- MattGaiser 3y agoYou can regulate it pretty easily with appropriate pricing. The problem is that plenty of jurisdictions are willing to price industrial rates quite low for the sake of jobs and jurisdictions are in competition for those. So "wasteful" is largely determined, as far as the government is concerned, by whether a lot of jobs are produced.
- chrisfosterelli 3y agoThis outcome is unsurprising given the industry climate. BC gets the vast majority of its power from hydroelectric dams and power is historically very cheap here. But last year's drought forced BC to import record amounts of electricity from surrounding provinces and states to cover the gaps between supply and demand. Meanwhile the province right beside us, Alberta, was issuing emergency alerts to the population last month asking the public to reduce power consumption in order to avoid rolling blackouts. It's not the ideal time to be trying to force the gov to give you electricity to use on hashing.
- whimsicalism 3y ago> Meanwhile the province right beside us, Alberta, was issuing emergency alerts to the population last month asking the public to reduce power consumption in order to avoid rolling blackouts. This is why having constant prices for power is dumb.
- ceejayoz 3y agoVariable pricing doesn't necessarily do the trick. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/17/puc-appeals-court-uri-prices/ https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/17/puc-appeals-court-ur...
- Timber-6539 3y agoIf you think this is bad, wait until AI compute becomes mainstream.
- ceejayoz 3y agoVastly different scenario. My AI being super power efficient doesn't harm yours; there's a shared incentive to make it as cheap and low-power usage as possible. We're not scrabbling to take a share of a limited pie as we would over a block reward. Proof-of-work cryptocurrency power usage/efficiency is a zero-sum game in a way AI is not.
- Timber-6539 3y agoThere's no evidence that AI is getting more power efficient or that it will in the future. It's still new tech that we haven't tested to the limit. Current indications lend to AI going more cloud/enterprise (centralized) than local (decentralized) where it will continue to increase energy demands to data centers that were already power hungry before AI. The Bitcoin miners and AI compute scenarios are more alike than you think.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> There's no evidence that AI is getting more power efficient or that it will in the future. Model optimization is absolutely a thing; faster models are desireable, and GPUs are in short supply. And, again, my model getting optimized doesn't hurt you. If I make a faster or more efficient Bitcoin miner, that directly reduces your profits, because all miners are competing for a fixed pile of rewards.
- Timber-6539 3y agoJust because AI-specific GPUs are in short supply today doesn't make your argument stronger. You are complicating the comparison with the incentives for Bitcoin mining. It is irrelevant to the fact that it is today consuming more power than ever due to the increase in demand of the commodity. In the same comparison, the same increase in demand is what's going to 3x today's energy use for AI and probably even surpass Bitcoin's in the future.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39269695
- gorkish 3y agoPretty easy to cheer when it's crypto. But if we are onto the slippery slope of canceling utility customers who don't use their power judiciously, let's go ahead and cut off a few more customers while we are at it: 1) Anybody using resistive heating instead of heat pumps. 2) Anybody that uses a non-induction electric stove. 3) Anybody heating an outdoor pool or hot tub. 4) Anybody still using an incandescent bulb. 5) Anybody who leaves the lights on after they leave the room. 6) Anybody who use their TV to watch a reality show. Actually come to think of it, residential consumption in its entirety is a total joke when examined from an efficiency standpoint. Really, if you play this nonsense to the endgame, it's best for utility companies to cut their losses and simply end residential service altogether.
- Ekaros 3y agoSeems reasonable. You don't have to produce hydro power at maximum capacity. Mostly you do not even want to as you only get so much water. In certain situations there might be potential for excess, but those are only periodic. So limiting production makes lot of sense. Specially if use case is crypto...