In parts of the world where the cost of electricity is low but reliable internet connectivity is available, cryptocurrency mining is widespread among those who can procure the hardware. For these operators, it's a low-risk way to generate profit and obtain foreign currency, and typically presents a far better opportunity than most other legal or illegal employment that can be had in the area.
This profiteering situation tends to crop up in places where the cost of electricity is "artificially" low, e.g. the government subsidizes it because of national security, humanitarian reasons, or to promote economic development, or places that cannot meaningfully participate in international bulk electricity export (e.g. distance, politics). These places formed functional market islands until recently, so their pricing was not relevant in the global context.
With cryptocurrency mining, the miners are engaging in a global arbitrage on energy prices. While the environmental costs are already externalized by the producer of the electricity, the electricity producers made those decisions before they foresaw that individual citizen operators could consume large amounts of electricity, and scale their consumption higher with fewer constraints than industrial consumers can.
Solutions are possible, but challenging to implement and enforce. If you switch to progressive pricing, you need better meters, and determined miners will steal or convince people to resell. If you want to regulate mining, you will need enforcement and tackle corruption. If you want to "let the market fix it", poor people won't be able to afford electricity.
Within Kosovo, the Serbian community controls the hydroelectric plant, and the Kosovan community controls the two lignite plants. This adds an extra complication for policymakers.
> so their pricing was not relevant in the global context
There are other sinks for cheap electricity in an industrial economy. Aluminum is a common one, as the main extraction is an electrochemical process. Canada is the 4th largest producer and Iceland (!) 11th.
Competitive and relevant Aluminum smelting requires massive economies of scale, an initial capital outlay, and a supply chain. A competitive smelter might require a billion dollars and a few years to build. And you have to negotiate a regular stream of bauxite ore, materials, etc. It's not an easy or quick arbitrage.
A price is a signal and serves as incentive to produce the good. Setting an arbitrary low price for anything is a bad idea.
> If you want to "let the market fix it", poor people won't be able to afford electricity.
If you want to give poor people electricity, just give them money which they can use for electricity or whatever else they may need. The solution isn't to pretend that electricity is cheaper than it is. Not only does it create issues like miners exploiting the system, but it also encourages wasteful uses of electricity, removes a valuable market signal and removes autonomy of those poor people you're trying to help. Maybe they would trade off some electricity for better housing. Instead you're making the decision for them.
Thanks for saying that. "Give them money" may not be the most optimum solution, but it's nearly always the most practical. Not only is it least likely to lead to unwanted side effects, it's actually most likely to generate positives ones.
If you're allowed to decide how to spend your money, you're likely to do a lot of low-hanging-fruit stuff that you wouldn't otherwise, like fix that windy window frame. No governmental program can even come close to this efficiency - they'd just do a "thermal reabitation" on the whole building, which will be 50% better and 900000% more expensive.
The reason giving money works so well is that it is both very flexible, and uses a huge information advantage - each person knows their situation better than the government. It's not about gov being inefficient (tho they may be) it's that it's incapable in principle of approaching the efficiency of "give them money".
It's not just a problem faced by governments. It shows up with charity too.
Small cash transfers may be one of the most effective form of poverty relief in politically stable poor countries with at least a nascent market economy. In a peer-reviewed trial in Kenya it was found to have substantial positive effects on the local economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveDirectly#Basic_income_expe...
One of the most common uses of the funds was buy galvanized roofing. It's very expensive compared to thatching up front, but lasts a lifetime and eliminates both the labour and material costs for ongoing maintenance.
That would never have occurred to me. If I had wanted to help them with in-kind donations, I may well have sent something relatively much less useful, lacking awareness of their local context. Very real risk of sending coals to Newcastle, there.
I know that in some developed countries, organizations like food banks also run into this. People will donate food in-kind, but most food banks would rather receive cash to have flexibility in addressing needs as they arise.
What would happen in reality is poor people would steal electricity and the whole system would collapse, which is what has happened in many places many time before and is still happening in many places. It's not like it's hard to draw a few cables.
Also "just give money to people" in systems with very poor and sometimes corrupted administrations is a very sure way of ensuring poor people get nearly nothing and it all gets siphoned in the pockets of not very nice people.
Would "give poor people electricity credits (denominated in the currency) which can be redeemed by the electrical companies (and not anyone else) for actual money" be viable and help avoid the corrupt admins siphoning the money?
It's the same as subsidizing electricity. Giving them cash allows for completely new and specific solutions, in a huge variety of forms. Better insulation. Switching to cheap heat pumps. Pooling cash together for a scaled-up approach - even if it's just family moving together. Not heating during the day. Accepting a lower temperature and using the funds for something else. Getting a credit for a more expensive fix.
Subsidizing electricity, directly or indirectly, is an incentive to do exactly nothing. Power is cheap, so you use it to heat the house - period. Any move to be more energy efficient doesn't make sense.
Oh, I of course agree that in general (in the absence of reasons like corruption that would make this not work as well as it should) it is preferable to just give cash. I'm saying specifically as a means to route around corruption that would steal the cash if you attempted to simply give cash.
And, while it is a subsidy of one sort of electricity, it is, I think, not the same as other possible subsidies which simply try to keep the price down.
(terminology : when I say constant-across-people I mean that the number for each person at any given time is the same, but what this number is may change over time, and possibly frequently)
Specifically, instead of the state using a subsidy to pay for a constant-across-people fraction of all electricity costs, it would instead be paying, for each person, a constant-across-people additive amount of electricity costs.
I of course agree that this still distorts the market signals somewhat, but I think it is substantially less, and, in particular, avoids most of the issues of "being a place where electricity is super cheap, where people will therefore try things that require very large quantities of electricity", because, after the relatively small amount of electricity which is free-for-consumers, the price beyond that point is not artificially cheap (and may instead actually be a bit more expensive than would be natural, because of the artificial demand increase caused by the credits).
I'm not an economist, but I think that seems like it would be substantially less distortion-causing than the state paying a constant-across-people fraction of the price in order to keep the price-to-consumers below a given threshold.
TBH, I don't particularly get how it would be stolen through corruption. I mean cash payments are pretty straightforward - either you get it or you don't, and people are pretty incentivized to make sure they get the money. It'd be the same as stealing pensions or children allocations.
You have an algorithm which says who gets energy allocations - and it really doesn't matter if it's approximate, as long as you notify who gets the money. Then you sent the money, and people will make a lot of noise if they don't get it. Sure, the algorithm won't be perfect, but people have a clear way of giving feedback: "I'm not getting money and should", or "I'm not included and think I should be because I'm poor". Just two failure modes, both clear.
Compare this to the totally opaque way energy subsidies work. Government postulates that prices should stay the same, then talks behind closed doors with a handful of companies and gives them a completely non-transparent amount of money that may or may not have anything to do with the price difference. I can probably think of 6 ways in 6 minutes on how this can be exploited.
This is all true if the country thinks allowing folks to take advantage of this "arbitrage" would be useful (for some definition of "useful"). And on other hand I can very well see how government(s) can take the other approach and just do some heavy-handed policing.
It's basically distributed neoliberalism: you don't have to wait for a United Fruit Company to turn up and wreck your country's economy for profit, anyone can do it now!
Bitcoin is like if someone made a real version of "Universal Paperclips"[1]. We now have a segment of the economy optimizing for creating cryptocurrency tokens with little-to-no use value but huge trade value. We already see the impacts on electricity capacity and some luxury goods (video cards). As these operations become more and more sophisticated, it's not inconceivable that they will eventually put price pressure on raw materials as well.
Maybe so, but at least mining is actually necessary to get gold out of the ground. Whereas running a distributed database and gambling can both be had for much less.
All of bitcoin could be run on a home PC from 2005. It can do about three transactions a second. And it is burning 0.5% of the electricity of the entire planet to do so.
This is basically a crime against humanity at this point.
Yes, but gold hasn't been explicitly designed to require ever increasing amounts of energy to extract ever diminishing quantities, and gold does have some practical use (approx 8% of annual production is used in mobile phones, televisions etc.)
Proof of waste cryto currencies are a malignancy on society. The people involved (even indirectly) are going to find themselves viewed and treated very similarly to other malign forces as time goes on regardless of how justified and practical they think they're being right now. In my mind they're right besides smallpox blanket givers. It's just business!
Those who live under corrupt regimes and/or hyperinflation have a different view. Furthermore, one could say the frames you're rendering for Netflix or Call of Duty is proof of waste.
How much crypto is traded to avoid corrupt regimes and hyperinflation? 1%? 0.1%? There's probably a few zeroes in there.
Regarding Netflix, it's better for the environment than buying a blu-ray and blu-ray player or driving to the cinema. Can the same be said about crypto?
> How much crypto is traded to avoid corrupt regimes and hyperinflation? 1%? 0.1%?
You can't know, and that's the point.
You can leave a country carrying nothing but a seed phrase in your brain and with it all your wealth, if you need to.
Just the fact that governments know that this can happen can change things.
I don't think governments care about this like they do about using foreign exchange to export wealth.
If you have a pile of Fakeistan dollarydoos you wish to convert into USD, spending those dollarydoos in Fakeistan on electricity to apparate some Bitcoin, then converting those Bitcoin into USD in the USA does not create a foreign claim on Fakeistani economic output. On the other hand, directly exchanging your dollarydoos with foreigners for USD does leave those foreigners holding a pile of dollarydoos, which does represent a claim on future Fakeistani economic output.
While I agree with the sentiment - as obviously crypto can sometimes be useful in that context - you're also talking about a tiny fraction of the human population where it's relevant in that way. It's a small fraction even within nations in those conditions.
How has Bitcoin saved Venezuela? Well it helped a small number of people in the country, sure. It obviously didn't fundamentally make any difference, and it's not going to anywhere else either. For the average person Bitcoin is not easier to acquire, use or manage than USD in locations such as Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela.
Sure, but it's increasingly relevant the more we see governments and currencies fail. If the same thing happens in El Salvador, the people will be in a far better position than Venezuelans were. Or if it happens in the West. The USD is at risk of losing global reserve status, and it's inflating, and some (Jack at Square, for instance) are making the case that hyperinflation is coming for us too. With how unstable things are this point, I would at least entertain the possibility.
Are all these problems caused by the lack of a decentralized currency that requires burning crazy amounts of energy to maintain trustlessness? Even if everything burns away and anyone who is still worth a damn holds BTC, what has actually been solved?
> furthermore, one could say the frames you're rendering for Netflix or Call of Duty is proof of waste
It certainly is in terms of being only for entertainment and no deeper use. However the amount of energy wasted here (let’s say 300W on a fairly high end machine) falls into the average area of energy spending per person, and thinks like driving or keeping unnecessary light bulbs on is same or worse. Crypto things however seem a whole other level of energy waste.
Should this now be interpreted as „it’s a lot“ or „it isn’t a lot“, relative to the economical and social importance of bitcoin? How much does all watching of TV consume? Of all personal PC gaming? Of all cooking? Operating every theatre on the planet?
crypto evangelicals are either get rich quick folks or sound money advocates. The former sucks but they are in every investment cicle.
The latter's religion has been based in seeing governments bailout bad actors with 0 consequences & devalue a currency astronomically over a 100 year period. Salaries are not keeping with the rise in asset prices which means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Buying a house in CA as a millennial is laughable.
Bitcoin or a gold standard is the only system that encourages a thriving middle class economy and keeps the government from poor policy decisions. Bitcoin seems to be better than gold since its mobile, transparent, finite. But i'd welcome a return to a gold standard with open arms.
I believe that 1) not all solutions can be 100% perfect for all problems an 2) a medium of exchange created by the people is our only hope to keep the gov/fed from enslaving with us debt forever 3) Judging what should/should not be able to use electricity is a slippery slope.
Why people mention Ethereum as a 'greener Bitcoin' baffles me. There are already some networks that are a thousand times greener than what Ethereum might be when it switches, and that is if the switch goes as planned and on schedule. There are a couple of networks that are already carbon neutral or even negative. If Ethereum takes over Bitcoin, it will still be a wasteful network, and still seen as (rightly so) a villain.
Ethereum has been "about to switch away from PoW" for years and years. They get zero points for this up until the day it actually happens. For now, they are massively harmful, and judging by their history, will continue to be so.
The smallpox blanket givers are maligned now but they and their people (~europeans) did grab and are still holding 97% of the territory they set out to conquer. History is written by the victors, and it's questionable whether this outcome is actually beneficial for mankind / the planet. On the surface it is - look at all the tech! On the other hand the tech actually results in an ever growing rate of destruction (of native nature and culture, aka. whatever was there before), and that trend was visible from day one.
In other words, bitcoin & co. aren't the first toxic, destructive get-rich-quick schemes, and we as a society have shown time and again we're unable to really resist most of them.
Because this common caricature of "smallpox blanket" is not based in verifiable historical fact. There's no clear evidence that Europeans were literally weaponizing smallpox to wipe out most of native American populations. The understanding of how infection spread happened a good 200 years later, than depopulation.
There is one documented case of someone suggesting distributing smallpox blankets. Exactly one; it's not entirely clear if it was carried out--furthermore, given that there was already a smallpox epidemic going around in the nearby Native American villages at the time, it likely would have done diddly squat.
Incidentally, if you want a good example of horrors meted out, try the residential school system, which does seem to be far less well-known among the lay public. Maybe "we're trying to civilize them!" turning out to involve horrific amounts of abuse (and, yes, death) is too much to countenance?
Allegedly, there are tons of money from the North Kosovo/South Serbia generated from crypto flowing into the investments in Belgrade. For example, here's the article of the policeman that was acquitted for not responding to the calls in the nights when the government organised tearing down barracks by using the illegal forces. This policeman then had his second appartment building (not House) washed and entered in the system.
This is doing a terrible damage to the society. It's tearing it apart to two layers, one extremely rich and openly criminal, and the other poor one. It's like if I'm watching Narcos. Crypto is not an issue, the corrupted government is. It would be the same if they got their money from drugs or weapons.
Just as an interesting fact, the electricity price is 7 cents per kwh during the day and 3 cents during the night, these prices make GPU mining very profitable. In the North where the govt. is weak the electricity is simply not paid, this has allowed a ton of small and big mining operations to pop up, the big ones are backed by the local gangs.
I think all of the negative externalities are reason enough to crack down on miners (gangs, mafia, ponzis, environmental concerns to name a few). Pick any one that makes you most comfortable.
If you can still “create value” as a miner in a country that welcomes you, more power (hah) to you.
So you are arguing that all the energy we waste to solve sudokus is small compared to the flights that some bankers do and the oil required to move the armored vehicles with money? Really?
Humanity is capable of performing more than one task at a time. Were you not aware of that fact? Why not?
Please stop making lame excuses and tired rationalizations for destructive antisocial behavior, and insisting that nothing be done about it because it's not the only problem in the world. And please stop shilling cryptocurrencies, pushing get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, and trying to deceive people with ridiculous spurious arguments and lies. Nobody's foolish enough to fall for your argument, and it makes you look extremely unethical and sociopathic.
Yeah, you're right. Governments could do both. It's just that I've never seen a major nation actually punish the banking corporations. Iceland's move was impressive though.
I don't appreciate your gross stereotype but I do understand it. It may suprise you to learn theres a minority of people that actually use bitcoin as a currency. I've used bitcoin for fun since 2011 and as a currency since 2013. I didn't get rich because I'm not an investor. I don't play around with exchanges and other finance stuff. I just pay for my dot com domains, VPS rent, and buy new computer hardware with it on the blockchain. It's fairly currency-like from my end of the elephant. I completely agree what's going on with financial style scams offchain is nasty and pretty much every "cryptocurrency" created since 2015 has been a pre-mine scam of some abstraction or another.
Kazakhstan government is facing incredible amount of protest now due to rising fuel prices. Makes me wonder how much of that is due to their cryptofarms putting upward pressure on energy prices across the board… Some people got the memo it seems
It has not had any link to power consumption, due to crypto mining.
Electricity generation doesn't impact gasoline prices, as much as you'd think. If you wish to see evidence - then go check out the prices of natural gas(widely used for power generation) and crude oil... and how they drastically vary in different markets.
And finally - Kazakhzstan is 70% coal power, while the world is only 3.5% on oil and 23% of gas. And there's a lot of spare coal power capacity...
I didn't say that anyone was trying, but ultimately even as a producer if your export market suddenly increases pricing by 3x, the local producers have very little incentive to distribute locally rather than exporting, which will knock domestic pricing too. And the heads of the fuel companies in Kazakhstan are not the people protesting on the streets and bringing down the government.
They don't, it's an unexpected side effect of putting pressure on Eastern Europe and the Ukraine. I imagine Putin expected Kazakhstan to be able to manage this internally better than they have, and are now very concerned. It's something of a nightmare scenario for them.
I have no crypto holdings and feel good everytime it goes down because it validates my decision.
That said does anyone have any real data on this or is this one of those internet talking points that just sounds good? Like what percentage of power in these countries is being used by crypto farmers. If its 25% then yeah that seems like an out of control problem. If its 0.25% then it seems like a pointless scapegoat and we would need to start looking at how much of the countries power goes into manufacturing candy or maintaining golf courses or a long list of other things that only a portion of the country consumes.
A bit of pedantry: BTC is .56% of electricity use, and .28% of energy use according to this site, though I don't grasp where the disparity of coming from other than many miners getting power directly from the energy source versus through the public electrical grid.
Other way around. There's a lot of energy us on the planet that isn't electrical (good examples being gas cooking, petrol, and biomass in the developing world).
There was a report on HN recently that said crypto’s 2021 worldwide energy usage was roughly the same as Argentina. I don’t know where that puts it as a percent of energy usage worldwide.
> The photo of a power bill with an extremely huge price tag, issued for a customer named “Iran and China Investment Company,” has gone viral in recent days. The power bill, which apparently belongs to the Rafsanjan mining farm operated by the Chinese, indicates that the miners have used 58,615,905 kWh of electricity in one month, for which they have to pay over 270 billion rials (some $1.2 million).
> In recent weeks, Iranian power plants have been forced to switch to burning low-grade fuel oil to generate power because a sharp rise in the country’s domestic consumption has led to natural gas shortages. This severely increased air pollution in Tehran and other megacities, increasing public anger toward the government.
China uses 1.5 kWh/household... and if I did my math correct again: 54,000 homes in the power use that a household China would use. Or basing it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... (note change in units) a per capita use of 20,300 people in Iran.
I'm happy to have government in electricity markets. More poor folks would die if you didn't have some control - and I definitely don't want what happened in Texas to happen other places. If it were up to me, households would have taxpayer funded electricity because at this point, surviving without it is nearly impossible while still taking part in work and broader society.
You can have different sorts of controls for crypto miners. We already have laws against folks taking advantage of government services, after all. Heck, in the states, electricity usage used to be (and still probably is) used to locate pot farms. I'm not sure why this would be any different for crypto farming. At minimum, you could require it be registered as a business and require businesses to pay for their own electricity.
I'm not nearly as concerned with folks leaving air conditioning on: You never know what sorts of lives folks lead nor if they happen to have a medical condition that makes them need cool air (Multiple Sclerosis, for example, causes heat intolerance. A cool home when you get home from work means you can cook dinner.) And besides, surely there are ways to fight against that as well.
So... You want to tax people to get free electricity. Then you want to make laws against people who use "too much". Then you need to tax more, to hire people to enforce the rules that you created.
Taxation doesn't mean free. It is simply taxpayer funded. The vast majority of folks will use between x and y electricity (I am not privvy to such numbers). Having electricity is a life-saving measure as it means that folks will (theoretically) be able to have heat, cooling, cooking, and refrigeration: If we switch to all-electric water heating, it'll mean hot water as well. These things cover the biggest energy uses. As a bonus, it means that folks can do things like charge a phone and run a computer.
But yes, I would charge folks for using too much.Crypto mining will put you well above the median use. You can have wide margins: 2-3 times median use for the house size and number of occupants - after offering an investigation to be sure folks aren't stealing their power. Few folks would go over this. Realistically folks are mining cryptocurrency to make a profit, making it a business, so we could just switch it over to a business account.
It isn't like the system we use is more than this. We bill people every single month and process their payments as they come in: The vast majority of this would be completely gone. Most states in the US have their own Public Utility commission with their own rules and regulations on top of what federal regulatory agencies have - in part, these agencies set rules on how utilities can bill people, rules about payment plans, and rules about when they can shut people off. So much of this wouldn't be needed either. On top of this, we have a patchwork of regulations to help poor folks with their electric bills - which could be eliminated completely.
I don't know how this is "less". I'm just proposing different, and probably simplified. I think people just get caught up on "But I don't wanna help them" or that it is "free".
Every taxpayer pays for things others consume and pays for things that they don't like. That's the way it works. It isn't like you won't benefit from it as it would completely eliminate a lot of bureaucratic overhead and probably benefit society in the same ways that uplifting the poor does.
EDIT: I'll add that you also pay for things others consume (and steal and ruin!). You do this every time you pay for medical care, groceries, and other things. As a member of society, you cannot escape this.
In Iran, gasoline and electricity are sold for next to nothing (electricity might even be free for businesses, not sure). This sort of market distortion has real effects. Obviously if electricity is very cheap to essentially free it makes crypto-mining very attractive (on top of the attractiveness of a 'currency' outside of the banking system in a country under international sanctions) and shortages worse.
Iran (also under sanctions) and Kazakhstan having relatively ineffective economies simply can’t sustain paying us/european energy prices. The idea that this unintended arbitrage is somehow subsidies fault is just ludicrous to me. Their only fault is they didn’t stamp out those assholes quickly enough
The problem with things like energy that are almost a necessity for modern life is that some individuals cannot afford it, not that "the economy" taken as a whole cannot.
Let's say 5% of Iran's GDP is spent on energy. Not sure what the number is, but whatever. A big chunk but affordable for the economy as a whole. At the market price, maybe 10% of people cannot afford to consume enough energy to meet the necessities of modern life - cooking, not freezing to death, using transportation. If you don't want these 10% of people to be shut off from modern society, you need to subsidize somehow.
It would be better to give the money to the people and they can choose to spend it on electricity or something else. Subsidizing electricity is a distortion.
2. It has always worked the same: people arbitrage the subsidy by doing energy inefficient labor. Bitcoin mining is just a more efficient arbitrage mechanism.
You're the guy that doesn't get invited to parties because you keep eating all the food because it's free, aren't you ?
All those subsidies are given under the expectation that people will behave reasonably and only use what is necessary, because it gets the country running. It's taking a hit so that your citizens can live and thrive. When you suddenly have a bunch of people running thousands of GPU for magic internet money, that is not a reasonable use of it.
In my opinion it would be better to have normal energy prices and simply redistribute the money. At least it would give an incentive to use energy more efficiently
You don't make your economy more effective by having incentives to remain ineffective. This sort of arbitrage (crypto-mining) is a direct consequence of misguided subsidies: If electricity is essentially free you have no incentive to control your electricity consumption and that attracts heavy users, which pushes consumption up in a vicious circle and can lead to shortages.
Iran has oil so they can probably afford to keep energy prices very low but that does not help them over the long term.
A ban on crypto-mining is also very difficult to enforce, IMHO.
> In 2019 Iran officially recognised cryptoasset mining, later establishing a licensing regime that required miners to identify themselves, pay a higher (but still very low) tariff for electricity, and to sell their mined bitcoins to Iran’s central bank. Thousands of unlicensed mining farms have subsequently been identified and shut down - including in mosques, which receive free electricity.
Iran is 0.004 USD/kWh for households with no info for business costs (though its still likely rather low as Iran is the 2nd lowest cost for energy on that list).
For comparison, USA is 0.153 USD/kWH.
The sanctions aspect make this part of the why crypto currency is appealing. They are essentially burning oil they can't sell on the market into electricity for Bitcoin which is hard to sanction.
> The electricity being used by miners in Iran would require the equivalent of approximately 10 million barrels of crude oil each year to generate - around 4% of total Iranian oil exports in 2020.
Ah, maybe, it depends on the country. In Greece you'd get a fine if caught, but that's a huge if. You probably wouldn't be able to bribe your way out of it unless you were a huge company, as corruption is somewhat localized to higher levels.
> Coin mining has been on the rise in northern Kosovo, mostly populated by Serbs who do not recognise the state of Kosovo and refuse to pay electricity.
Think about that for a moment... There are a large number of people who just refuse to pay for electricity, and yet it is still delivered to them...
North Kosovo is a very tricky political situation where the govt. does not have effective control of the region, for political reasons you can’t force the population to pay but you can’t also cut them off either, since Serbia will step in and undermine Kosovo’s sovereignty.
The electric situation has allowed domestic and foreign opportunists to set up extensive mining operations with free electricity, this has cost the Kosovo govt. tens of millions in bills they have to cover. My grandpa’s village is a popular spot, every house is renting out their garages at crazy high prices, I’ve seen videos of rigs worth hundreds of thousands sitting in the barn in shelves next to the cows who use the heat.
> My grandpa’s village is a popular spot, every house is renting out their garages at crazy high prices, I’ve seen videos of rigs worth hundreds of thousands sitting in the barn in shelves next to the cows who use the heat.
> "I read somewhere that each cow generates 2,350 BTUs. We have 255 of them in here keeping this barn warm," Sweet said. "It's hard to believe a barn this size there's no heat in this beside the cows." Sure enough, some sources say cows give off 4,500 BTUs per hour. The barn does have insulation in the ceiling and end walls, and the side curtains have an R-value of 2. They leave the equipment they use daily in the barn so it doesn't freeze up.
> "One cow gives off 4,400 btu's per hour. Our Dairy-Aire system recovers 2,500 btu's. A 60-cow herd will easily heat and cool the average 1,500 to 2,000 sq. ft. home," Lussenden told FARM SHOW, noting that the system can also be installed in high capacity hog, poultry and other confinement buildings.
> It wasn’t long before the inventive engineer realized that, since a single cow gives off 3,500-4,000 BTU an hour, a mere 15 milkers could provide sufficient excess warmth to heat a standard 2,000-square-foot home.
The people in charge quite possibly have crypto farms themselves, so... don't expect a solution until there are literal electricity blackouts due to shortages or the electorate gets really angry.
But if it were to be implemented, it would work. It wouldn't make the electorate happy either short-term, it would be like flushing out an infection with a fever.
Plus, with the delicate nature of the political situation, I wouldn't recommend Kosovo's institutions imposing brownouts on Northern Kosovo, or at least not just on Northern Kosovo.
You cannot simply stop providing electricity to people that don't pay the bill. It's a long process that takes time and sometimes providers don't even bother, because of the human rights. That's how it is in my European country and I suppose it is similar there too.
The same in Portugal,a very socialistic country. You will likely get an extra fee for reconnection even. Truth be told neither in Poland nor Portugal have i ever had power going out due to demand and the grid is generally reliable for years.
Like my bill is 900kW/mo for a family of 3 with climatisation in the southern US. I think this is a reasonable amount. Then, you can still mine crypto but know you can't go balls to the wall.
There is a quota in Kosovo, but there’s a ton of small time miners that are distributed all around and none reach the quota individually but overall they affect the electric situation of the whole country.
> Coin mining has been on the rise in northern Kosovo, mostly populated by Serbs who do not recognise the state of Kosovo and refuse to pay electricity.
"Mimoza Kusari-Lila, an MP from the ruling Vetevendosje party said that “it is a matter of weeks” until consumers in northern start paying their own bills for the first time since the war ended in Kosovo in June 1999."
"Serb consumers in the four northern municipalities have not paid for their electricity since 1999. According to Radio Free Europe, the total cost of the energy used in the Serb-majority municipalities is around 12 million euros per year."
Whoever really believes that people who haven't paid their bills since 1999 would magically start paying in 2022 is quite naive.
> Whoever really believes that people who haven't paid their bills since 1999 would magically start paying in 2022 is quite naive.
That belief is irrelevant. It's completely different to the article's statement that the population refuses to pay it, when a mechanism for them to pay it has not existed since 1999.
Even 30 years ago, while Kosovo was part of Serbia, people didn't pay for electricity. But at that time Albanians weren't paying for it.
Later tables turned and Albanians become rulers, but then Serbs refused to pay.
And why electricity was still delivered to the people in both cases - well, with everithing that was/is going on there that's the most benign issue one can think off.
They should also audit every datacenter to make sure that only pre approved loads are being run.
The only allowed programming languages should be the energy efficient ones
A government official shall follow you to the shower to make sure your hot bath is not consuming too much energy for too long
Only serious applications are permitted. Websites that mostly involve jokes are a waste of energy. Google searches that are not strictly necessary should be dropped (those Google datacenters consume to much!). Every ounce of energy should be saved
I think this is the endgame for the government having the power to decide what should and should not spend energy. (With some stretches for comedic effect)
Getting rid of coal is a really important goal and would be much easier to achieve if "we" reduce our energy consumption. One way to achieve that is stop wasting energy with resistive heating
… and did so because a few large companies recognized how much money they could save by trumping up a controversy around a scientific consensus which was largely settled by the Reagan administration. It’s really aggravating now to hear people complain that it’d cost too much to do anything, knowing not just that this is untrue but also that it would have been much cheaper if we’d made minor changes back then.
> China now emits almost twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.
China has over four times the population of the US.
edit: i.e. comparing China to the US is like comparing the US to Germany or France. We're polluting twice as much, and a good amount of the pollution in China is for exporting to us.
From global point of view if there is demand for energy they will burn the coal. New sources of energy are not replacing the old ones, just covering new demand. You can point to any country while missing where the demand is coming from.
Cryptocurrency mining uses orders of magnitude more energy than the business logic behind website and apps. Even transcoding (ie. YouTube, Netflix) does not meaningfully compare to cryptocurrency energy usage.
Isn't it in the governments interest to have stable and affordable electricity for the population?
Comparing crypto mining to useless websites is dishonest at best, it seems intentionally misleading
Everything else you listed is taken care of by the market.
Want to consume resources with a website that tells knock-knock jokes? Have a great time! Just make sure to pay your hosting bill. Want to host it on 10,000 servers? Again, have a great time. Just know that you'll be paying a ton of money for that website with no hope of an ROI.
Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months.
Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite.
But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.
People are only aware cryptocurrencies exist because a handful of people were wily enough to come up with new ways of burning fuel to make money. Once the idea of crypto is encoded into a whitepaper, it's impossible to completely prevent people from reimplementing it themselves. You can make the technology itself illegal but save for completely draconian measures it's impossible to enforce such a thing.
Maybe our standard for what constitutes a good quality of life should have been frozen in time 7 years ago and we all should have just remained oblivious about how to improve that standard at the cost of the environment and our attention span. Along with crypto, we'd also be running a version of YouTube and other services with 7 years worth of research and whitepapers produced by clever people to increase engagement wiped away.
It would also future-proof us against intelligent, visionary actors that see us allocating larger and larger portions of our attention span to their neat little pet project-turned-hulking abomination that average people will never be able to forget the existence of or escape from. I do not believe that there is an upper bound to how much of some org's KPIs that humble people can be driven into contributing to - except the number of hours we can stay awake per day.
If we continue to innovate at this pace, making our products better and more attractive to where they become irresistible, when will the time come when our allocation of free hours or energy usage becomes completely saturated by unnecessarily things that we can no longer detach our attention from?
One could also argue for the banning of video games using the same logic. A relaxing drive to the beach, your wasting energy!
A better solution would be to tax Crypto earnings at a higher rate, and use the tax revenue to build some green energy. I'd imagine Kosovo could become a low cost tech hub , but if you freak out techy expats with strange laws...
How do you implement that without absolutely draconian measures?
A dmv like government official gets to your home for your scheduled computer search.
> Is this the python binary? You better be ready for a hefty fine.
>> I'm sorry sir! I promise I was only playing around with pytorch and tensorflow! Did you know that they get compiled to much more efficient languages? I'm sure their c++ backends are pre approved!
> Playing? What do you mean by playing? Do you have an energy license for this? Anyways, python is not allowed and this is going to cost you.
>> Most of what I do is c++, don't I get some credits for it?
>Let's see..Is this an old clang compiler? They are 10% less energy efficient but I'm letting you walk with a warning if you update it right now.
>Wait a minute is this an octave binary I see!?! You sir are going to jail
This is actually a theatrical representation of code running in the background of your computer
> How do you implement that without absolutely draconian measures?
You don't, which is why I was thinking it had to be sarcasm. That said, it sounds just idealistic enough that someone would blurt it out without thinking.
The other part that is confusing is what's an efficient programming language? The answer is none. It's all about how programmers write their code. Sometimes you're optimizing for performance, but other times you're solving a niche problem.
Ironically if you let the market do it's thing, this is basically the end result too, but it's not some central authority telling you what to do, but you can decide what you want to waste your money on. A hot bath tonight or running that C compiler for an hour?
Governments have the right to, and do, regulate the power used by industrial facilities.
A hot bath, hosting a joke website, and hosting a search engine all consume magnitude less energy than a crypto farm.
This comment is very out of touch. Energy supplies are limited, even more so in developing countries. Governments everywhere have the responsibility to protect the well being of their people. Even most dictatorships at least try to do that. If crypto farms are hogging so much energy to the point of causing localized blackouts for other people, then most governments will want to put a stop to it. Governments failing to address the basic needs of their population is how you get strongmen in power who will use ruthless means to act on their agenda.
It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.
> It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.
I think a lot of people here will be cheering along with you. But alas, we can dream...
DPoS fails the $5 wrench test (xkcd 538): a motivated attacker can doxx and take control of the 21-100 witnesses responsible for authenticating transactions, resulting in a compromised network.
Sure, but coin holders could just select another delegate. What cryptocurrency wouldn't fail that test? I could buy ~10 wrenches and cripple the Bitcoin network if I take control of the major mining pools.
Personally I think cryptocurrency is being scapegoated a little bit. It is understandable that they are taking action. Mining's electricity consumption is no longer negligible, and the optics of mining during a shortage are of course terrible.
But, I don't expect the ban to accomplish much. The causes of the shortage is environmentalists making huge promises about renewables that didn't pan out. "Don't build nuclear, we have windmills!" It didn't work and now we are paying for it.
Things will get better in spring, but I shouldn't be surprised if winter shortages become a regularity.
Worth mentioning since I misread the actual title of that article: it goes through the legality of Bitcoin itself (not just mining, or other PoW cryptocurrencies). Only a few entries mention PoW mining itself.
Capital costs maybe. Running costs would be equivalent to running a plain resistive heater element, which I think just about still counts as a modern heat source, given you can wander down to the local shop and buy one. You can beat it with a heat pump.
Heat pumps don’t just beat space heaters they heat them by an order of magnitude. They also are an order of magnitude more expensive than fossil fuels.
The numbers that I come up with for 6 months (not going to run the heater in the summer) put an earnings of $285 with a cost of electricity of $850 to do it.
And that's before the cost of the device which is a $1000 item (compare with a $60 one that heats more efficiently).
That isn't exactly a truck load of cash.
I am 100% against proof of work, but I don't think your statement is quite true. If you mine Ethereum on a modern Nvidia GPU you can easily offset your electricity costs.
It's about time to do this everywhere! In Bulgaria, for example, most of the mining is with stolen electricity! Craptocurrencies are nothing but fuel for crime and scams!
Gold has been a store of value for millennia. Tulips were a store of value for just over a decade. What makes you so confident Bitcoin is the new gold and not the new tulips?
That's only answering the question of "will it technically implode". It has nothing to do with why you think bitcoin will continue to be a store of value like gold as opposed to suddenly stopping being a store of value like tulips.
What will bitcoiners do when the inevitable happens- inflation and green energy polices raise the price of electricity...
I guess they can pick up and move somewhere if it gets banned. In the meantime they can partner with green energy, raising electricity prices or cost to mine bitcoin which helps push up the price of bitcoin. All while pretending to be green- encouraging wind expansion and hoping for blackouts which they can also profit from - wild swings in prices makes them also enron energy traders.
This will encourage more POW coins... lets launch even more tokens with POW.
> raising electricity prices or cost to mine bitcoin which helps push up the price of bitcoin
The price of bitcoin is not driven by electricity prices, or more generally by the cost of mining. Bitcoin supply works at a fixed rate: one new block of 6.25 BTC is mined (on average) every ten minutes. Every four years the BTC reward per block is cut in half. More mining effort (higher hash rate) just raises the difficulty threshold so that the interval remains 10 minutes per block. Lower mining effort, of course, has the opposite effect. Higher mining costs would drive marginal miners out of business and lower the hash rate but otherwise have no impact on the supply of new bitcoins or the ability to process transactions.
This profiteering situation tends to crop up in places where the cost of electricity is "artificially" low, e.g. the government subsidizes it because of national security, humanitarian reasons, or to promote economic development, or places that cannot meaningfully participate in international bulk electricity export (e.g. distance, politics). These places formed functional market islands until recently, so their pricing was not relevant in the global context.
With cryptocurrency mining, the miners are engaging in a global arbitrage on energy prices. While the environmental costs are already externalized by the producer of the electricity, the electricity producers made those decisions before they foresaw that individual citizen operators could consume large amounts of electricity, and scale their consumption higher with fewer constraints than industrial consumers can.
Solutions are possible, but challenging to implement and enforce. If you switch to progressive pricing, you need better meters, and determined miners will steal or convince people to resell. If you want to regulate mining, you will need enforcement and tackle corruption. If you want to "let the market fix it", poor people won't be able to afford electricity.
Within Kosovo, the Serbian community controls the hydroelectric plant, and the Kosovan community controls the two lignite plants. This adds an extra complication for policymakers.