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Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
- theamk 9mo ago"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet... That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.
- userbinator 9mo agoI wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.
- hephaes7us 9mo agoThere absolutely is, but of course it's nonzero cost to capture.
- adonovan 9mo agoAlso, the temperature is not high enough (compared to the steam coming out of a gas/oil/nuclear plant) to obtain much work from the waste heat.
- tonyarkles 9mo agoThat is 100% the issue. This is really low quality heat. Making it better would require even more energy input (e.g. a heat pump) because we can’t safely run electronics hot enough to generate high quality process heat.
- duskwuff 9mo agoRockdale is a small town of ~5000 residents. Even if it were practical to install district heating - which I don't think it is - there certainly isn't demand for hundreds of megawatts of it.
- timeon 9mo agoNot sure what your point is. With POW inefficiency is by design.
- edoceo 9mo agoYou got the point. It's "by design" - you've both said it.
- nh23423fefe 9mo agoa home can leak heat to the environment because of bad insulation. a datacenter doesn't leak heat because leaking is normatively bad.
- dangalf 9mo agoTechnically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
- geoffschmidt 9mo agoHeat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
- anon84873628 9mo agoHow many computer things you got done per unit electricity, and how many mechanical things you do with the temperature gradient between the computer and its heat sync. For example, kinda wasteful to cook eggs with new electrons when you could use the computer heat to help you denature those proteins. Or just put the heat in human living spaces. (Putting aside how practical that actually is... Which it isn't)
- eimrine 9mo agoGood luck with collecting that heat from air.
- mr_toad 9mo agoThere’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle
- RhysU 9mo agoIt'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.
- kelnos 9mo agoI would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose. It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity. (And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)
- stouset 9mo ago> wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work Even if turned into useful work, the end result of that work is still ultimately heat.
- cousin_it 9mo agoRight, but if it's noticeably hotter than the environment, then that temperature difference could be used to drive a heat engine and get some more useful work. So the knee-jerk response "omg, we see the heat from space? it's gotta be wasteful!" is kind of correct, in theory.
- anon84873628 9mo agoSome people are saying "waste heat" in the technical sense of "the heat my industrial process created and I need to get rid of" and others are saying "waste heat" as "heat humans are emitting into space without slapping at least one Carnot engine on it yet".
- stouset 9mo agoIf the heat being generated were economically worthwhile, the miners would be incentivized to use it to offset their costs. Since they aren't, we can somewhat reasonably assume that it would cost more to recapture than it's probably worth.
- tbrownaw 9mo ago
- EGreg 9mo agoSeriously, the only way I would accept Bitcoin mining is as a winter heating source that pays for itself. Why can't people sell those?
- wmf 9mo agoThose exist but they're too expensive to pay back their cost. And heat pumps are 3x the efficiency of resistive heating.
- anon84873628 9mo agoUnfortunately, Bitcoin mining is pretty hot as far as regular computer use goes, but not very hot at all compared to burning some fuel.
- yellowcake0 9mo agoThe economics of bitcoin mining dictate that the work must have no other utility. If you increase its profitability by using it for auxiliary winter heating, then more people will mine bitcoin until there is an oversupply of heating and we return to the current equilibrium amount of "wasted" heat.
- EGreg 9mo agoThis seems to indicate a serious misunderstanding of both bitcoin's economics as well as the feasibility of having an "oversupply of heating". Hundreds of millions to over a billion people globally lack reliable energy for lighting, heating, and cooking. And bitcoin's economics don't dictate that mining never have a side benefit.
- fainpul 9mo ago> By design, it's enormous electric heater. You're right, it's not leaking, it's dumping excess heat on purpose. However, I get triggered whenever someone uses the term "by design" wrongly. The generation of heat is not by design. It's an undesired side-effect of the computing being done. "By design" would mean that someone decided that there should be a certain amount of heat generation and made sure that it happens. Most often I see this term misuse from developers who explain bugs as being "by design". It happens when two features interact in an undesired way that creates problems (a bug). Developers like to look at feature A in isolation, determine that it works as designed, then look at feature B, determine that it also works as designed, then they look at and understand the interaction between feature A and B and since they now understand what is happening, they claim it's "by design". However, nobody ever decided that feature A and B should interact this way. It was clearly an oversight and every normal person would agree that the interaction is undesired and a bug. But the developer says "won't fix, this is by design". Infuriating!
- baruchel 9mo agoWhen you compute some nice and elegant result, dissipated heat is an undesired side effect. But let's face it: we are speaking about proof of work. Proof of work means that a computed has run during some "required" time. In other words, you have to prove that enough heat has been dissipated. Waste of energy actually is "by design" here.
- fainpul 9mo agoI'm not sure if you're trolling. Of course that's nonsense. The work is entirely the (artificially complex) computations necessary to get to the result. If someone were to invent a 100% efficient computer, based on superconductors, which produces no heat at all, the proof of work (the final hash value) would still be equally valid. As I said, heat is an undesired, unavoidable side-effect. You don't show anybody the heat you produced, to convince them that you did the work, you show them the hash value, otherwise you could just burn some wood.
- Lerc 9mo agoWell It it's using solar power it's just moving heat from one place to another. I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2. It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.
- akimbostrawman 9mo agothis obvious disingenuous framing is clearly on purpose to manipulate
- andai 9mo agoSo I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use? Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math
- sowbug 9mo agoYou can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.
- lostlogin 9mo agoThese discussions often turn into a ‘is this per hour? Per year?’ Discussion, which I find irritating. And now I’m that guy. Is this a daily usage thing? I test based on my home usage and the numbers seem way out. I use about 25kWh per day.
- pests 9mo agoIsnt 3000x more per day, the same as 3000x more per year? Or 3000x more per unit price? I have a smaller house, we use about 13kWh per day. 4kw highest spike during the day around 5-7pm when people are cooking and doing laundry.
- lostlogin 9mo agoI was trying to work backwards to see what they were using as their ‘per house’ measure. Your usage is very low. Do you use electricity for water heating and cooking? If so, that’s impressive. We do, and charge a car.
- pests 9mo agoOh I see okay yeah. Used to have one electric car but it was on a separate meter with unlimited charging for $40/mo (just looked, now its $46). Added a few hundred to the charger install originally. We really don't do too much around the house. Three people. One TV running maybe two sometimes. Two desktops (well one is laptop with a dock). A random PC as a server. Everything electric (oven, range, water heater, filtration, etc) besides furnace (nat gas), although I will say they are all new and pretty energy efficient. Random lights (all LED, Hue). Someone turns on an electric heater or blanket here or there. Some outside heated cat house and water heaters and stuff. In Michigan so its pretty cold right now. I recently bought a bunch of (used) solar panels and was doing our load calculations for peak draw and selecting battery size. How much of your usage is the car? I could imagine that would be a lot. A single model 3 refill (57kwh) would be almost 5 days of my usage. edit: I'm dumb. We replaced our electric water heater a few months ago with a tankless gas. I don't feel like rewriting this reply but just keep in mind. I would eventually like to replace the furnace and the water heater with electric so I can end gas service to my house. I do feel its the safest and in the future we will be looked back on as backwards. "They used to pump a flammable gas directly into their houses!"
- kanemcgrath 9mo agoI always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.
- TGower 9mo agoI did a quick alalysis and it actually matched the ~1.5 degree celcius rise pretty accurately. It required a bunch of incorrect simplifying assumptions, but it was still interesting how close it comes. Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large. On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.
- marcosdumay 9mo agoYour math is completely wrong. We use ~20 TW, while solar radiation is ~500 PW and just the heating from global warming alone is 460TW (that is, how much heat is being accumulated as increased Earth temperature).
- TGower 9mo agoWell the math is correct, the methodology has obvious flaws some of which I pointed out. If you took all the energy that has been released by humanity burning things since the industrial revolution and dumped it into a closed system consisting of just the atmosphere, it would rise by about 1.5 C.
- quickthrowman 9mo ago
- inatreecrown2 9mo agofunny how somehow similar this image looks to that of a pc motherboard.
- vondur 9mo agoWow. Is there still enough money to be made in crypto to justify this kind of investment?
- whatsupdog 9mo agoYou are kidding right? I'm sorry for assuming. But you have to be kidding. Bitcoin has been around 100k USD all this year. And about 450 Bitcoin are mined everyday, and this doesn't even include the Bitcoin miners get from transaction fees. So, there's about 45 million USD worth of Bitcoin being mined per day. I can go into profit calculations, but at the end of the day it comes down to how much you are paying for electricity.
- Waterluvian 9mo agoSome days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space. Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
- ramblerman 9mo ago> Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species
- Waterluvian 9mo agoThere is none. I just need to believe intelligent life trends much higher than this.
- tbrownaw 9mo ago> *But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species" Us being the dumbest spacefaring species does not necessarily imply the existence of spacefaring species other than us.
- mrguyorama 9mo agoAny species able to visit us would be definitionally smarter than us, since they somehow break the rules of physics as we know them, so they either have way better math and data, or are magic, which frankly I would treat as "smarter"
- iJohnDoe 9mo agoYou’re overall point and sentiment isn’t wrong. As a species, we do tend to focus on things that aren’t for the collective good. If some collective good actually happens, then it’s almost guaranteed another group will come along to undo it. We’re not a species that will likely ever reach singularity (unified, fully cooperative humanity). We operate in packs and if we don’t have a pack we’re loyal to then it’s every man for themselves.
- e-dant 9mo agoThis life is needlessly absurd. Why does this even exist? And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
- rixed 9mo agoThose datacenters are the moai of our time; if you step back, it's interesting to watch.
- Aerbil313 9mo agoNow that's certainly a take.
- phil21 9mo agoThe authoritarian state of KYC/AML might be even more absurd to some. Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back. It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.
- jesse__ 9mo agowell put
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo agoWe stare at screens full of text and pictures every day. We had screens full of text and pictures 20 years ago. Yet somehow we have justified re-creating every single component multiple times over, spending hundreds of trillions of dollars, to get the same thing we had 20 years ago. We've been able to talk to machines, have them understand that speech, and do work based on it, for decades. But we're all still typing into keyboards. We've had devices which can track our eyes to move a mouse pointer for 37 years, but we all still use our hands/thumbs to move a mouse. We had mobile devices which had dedicated keys for input which allowed us to input without looking, and we replaced those with mobile devices with no dedicated keys (so we have to look to provide input) and bodies made of glass so they would shatter when dropped and required additional plastic coverings to protect them. Even automobiles, where safety is a high priority, also adopted input devices which require looking away from the road. Our world includes a government which is indented to be led via decisions from all the people, and could easily be overthrown by all the people, but only a select few people actually get to make decisions, and they don't have to listen to the people, and basically do whatever they want (wrt the other few people who get to make decisions). Yes, life is needlessly absurd. It's best not to think about it unless you wanna end up in a padded room.
- anArbitraryOne 9mo agoI learned about turning energy into useful work and having heat as a byproduct, but never thought about turning it into useless work
- krautburglar 9mo agoOk. Now point at one of the AI datacenters for making titty pics and get back to us. Absolute corporate shilling / distraction.
- rvba 9mo agoThe government(s) could tax bitcoin mining servers with 1000% tax.
- toenail 9mo agoThat would just make miners move somewhere with more favorable regulation and taxation, and nothing would change. Funny how taxes work
- hackable_sand 9mo agoWhat do you mean nothing would change? What does "That would just make miners move" mean to you?
- toenail 9mo agoMining is one of the most mobile industries on the planet, see what happened when china "banned" mining, they all just moved somewhere else (or kept mining in secrecy). If it's in the US at least it can be regulated.
- danny_codes 9mo agoAnd then we wouldn’t be wasting time and energy on it. Someone else would be. Seems like a net win for us, since the entire industry produces zero value. This is like lamenting the departure of the industry of digging holes and filling them in again.
- toenail 9mo agoAh, the old bitcoin has no value to me, so it can't be valuable for anyone else argument.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- tempodox 9mo agoClimate pollution on this scale should be rated a crime against humanity.
- JungleGymSam 9mo ago[flagged]
- epolanski 9mo agoWhy such a stance? We're going through global warming, such a scale of waste to solve crypto sudokus can definitely raise eyebrows.
- t0bia_s 9mo agoThen what?
- ajjahs 9mo ago[dead]
- mnemotronic 9mo agoCan infrared energy be reflected like light? What would a good reflector be? (THEORETICALLY) Would a parabolic dish over this facility be able to focus the heat to a single point and, if so, what would the temp be? Is it additive? Like X joules of Y degrees over Z square meters focused down to 1 Sq cm?
- doctor_phil 9mo agoYes. Metal. No. You want to read about "conservation of etendue" for a technical explanation. For an easier explanation, look for xkcd's excellent "Fire from Moonlight".
- hulitu 9mo ago> Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center That's how they call Area 51 now ?
- johnnienaked 9mo agoWhat a waste
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- quickthrowman 9mo agoThis article is useless. Virtually every building rejects heat outside using vapor-compression refrigeration.
- arprocter 9mo agoThe article mentions Riot Platforms, but the image seems to show Bitdeer Technologies They're pretty much adjacent, but the orientation of the buildings is different: https://www.google.com/maps/place//@30.5678809,-97.0740152,2732m https://www.google.com/maps/place//@30.5678809,-97.0740152,2...
- t0bia_s 9mo agoTechnically any kind of datacenters, not just crypto, produces heat. Clouds, AI, banaking segment, etc.
- danny_codes 9mo agoSure, but those applications may actually do something useful. Crypto mining is entirely useless, except as a way to facilitate black-market transactions.
- t0bia_s 9mo agoThat is typical narrative of those who are teriffied of uknown. Or well functionial alternative transaction system that is not under control of central banks. Fiat is no longer currency that store value. How long do you think that financial system with unlimted debt could least?
- sershe 9mo agoNew business idea: can they mine crypto in my kitchen, it's an old house and the heating is uneven. Also there are whole countries that run on central heating where hot water is pumped from a central power plant like facility to houses and apartments. Probably inefficient, but something they could do.