I don’t think there’s such a thing as any truly clean energy. There is always a cost to the environment, whether it be the costs of the infrastructure, the fuel, or the environmental impact of what is actually consuming it. All that compute, which is basically in a constant state of being replaced and upgraded, as a consumer, has real environmental impact.
And for what in the end? To support a fringe economic system of monetary transfer and speculation? Less than 1% of people on earth have ever owned any amount of bitcoin, yet it consumes as much energy as it does? Just in the runtime of the network, not counting all the infrastructure, equipment, etc.
> I don’t think there’s such a thing as any truly clean energy.
Your use of "clean" here seems like a strawman.
Some forms of energy exploited by humans (i.e. fossil fuels) impose far greater environmental costs than others (i.e. wind/solar). Lumping them all together because nothing manufactured at scale is "clean" is ignoring the vast differences between them.
That's why anymore, the terms "renewable" and "zero-carbon" are used to describe future energy sources, not "clean".
> And for what in the end? To support a fringe economic system of monetary transfer and speculation?
Those are the ones said out loud.
The unspoken end is to weaken and destroy the liberal institutions that are currently backed by the power of fiat currency, to then replace them with illiberal ones.
Climate change and the environment are not typically concerns for people who want that.
I don't think we really need to question the meaning of "clean energy". I think we're all aware that it costs something to the environment, after all solar panels and batteries don't grow on trees.
Good news. Bitcoin and this enormous waste of energy should get forbidden anyway. It does hurt the environment and has no real advantage over existing infrastructure.
While I mostly agree, there are subtleties here. Due to transmission capacity inefficiencies there are places in the grid where generation exceeds available load and power pricing drops very low or runs negative in price. For example, there are areas in California where a combination of physics and politics causes generation to have nowhere to go. Under these conditions I dontnhave much issue with people mining bitcoin. If there were more productive loads that could be utilizing that power, they would be.
> Under these conditions I dontnhave much issue with people mining bitcoin
At a penalty rate, sure. The problem is those negative rates invite productive power users. If you immediately balance them with useless crap, you never get the productive stuff.
There is an analogy to Dutch disease, except with power prices: crypto and its ilk are the disease.
edit: Perhaps I should say more. I'd rather that power heat homes and provide useable electricity for people, rather than solve math puzzles people are really into for some reason these days.
Why not offer an agreement for off-peak use, and put profits into expanding capacity?
This always seemed like a great use case for bootstrapping new power generation projects. It provides an immediate customer for excess base power generation that can be scaled back / migrated once demand picks up.
I think its a valid point that this approach would be more useful when run by the energy provider themselves, and would make it much easier to justify turning the miners off / migrating them to newer projects as a way to manage demand.
I think this capability would allow them to plan for a higher level of overproduction in the early stages, or scaling up ahead of the rise in demand.
Curious - crypto mining processes transactions, right? How does the electricity usage compare to a data center used by a large bank?
Obviously the bank can do things in a much less computationally intensive way, but my point is would this happen if a bank decided to use some computationally heavy process in its data center to make its transactions more secure and it used the same amount of power?
The bank would have to either find a way to make significant profits from that heavy computation or reduce the computation; CPU time is an operational cost and banks exist to make profits. Crypto mining is designed to be inefficient; it's a security feature, not a bug.
And if the global banking system was pulling 2% of global power consumption the shareholders would be fetching the pitchforks and torches. I have no numbers off the cuff but I don't see a world where banks would be dumping crypto levels of money into power and server use.
Different set of circumstances I believe and would likely be tackled differently.
I don't think there are currently many/if any Bank's that require a data center to draw as much power as required by the cryptocurrency miners.
Furthermore, does this Bank serve the people of that country? Does that Bank provide jobs for people in said Country? Does the benefit of such improvements in security greatly benefit the immediate customers in said country?
Many more questions would need to be asked to answer that question.
The article points out that these miners use a disproportionate amount of electricity, whilst providing little to no jobs to the local economy.
Whilst we don't have the numbers here, it is a safe bet for the company to withhold energy capacity for the likes of electric cars and heat pumps etc.
The bank would put the energy on the "expenses" side of its accounts and look for ways to reduce it, whereas cryptocurrency advocates seem to believe that the more waste the more secure it is.
(Arguably the use of AI for anti-fraud detection might start causing a bit of this problem)
I've done some work on ethereum applications and have even written some protocol code (it pays the bills while I work on a non-crypto project)
Even I think bitcoin is a massive waste of energy, as is mining precious minerals that are only used for vanity purposes.
Considering the system-wide effects of an action is absolutely a hacker mentality.
The early bitcoin devs were hackers, sure, but the true hackers then went on to solving the optimization problem of providing tamper-resistant consensus without burning unfathomable amounts of energy.
In the year 2050, society decides that heating your home and your water is wasteful and shouldn’t be permitted, you are no longer allowed electricity for such things, after all you can put on a sweater and use a solar panel on your roof for hot water.
I don’t agree that we need any more crypto mining operations, but at what point and whose control does the availability of electricity to a person get determined ?
If you’re payin, why is it not allowed? I guess the alternative is just fire up a diesel generator for this crypto mining operation.. then everyone loses? Why stop there, how about a diesel genset that runs used oil or preheated bunker fuel? Heck why not coal?
> I don’t agree that we need any more crypto mining operations, but at what point and whose control does the availability of electricity to a person get determined ?
Assuming we want a society where as many people as possible get their basic need covered while electricity supply is restricted, fixed (high) price on electricity for everyone just means that the richest will buy most of the supply for superfluous use while the poorest won't be able to afford heating.
Directly forbidding superfluous use should help against that. Though politicians may not be good at deciding what is superfluous (I can see resistive heating being deemed needed while gaming wouldn't, which is true but the game machine would heat as well as resistive heating leading to little difference in winter). Exponential price as another comment mentioned sounds like a better idea.
I think you rightfully point out there is a spectrum. So far, the line is at: company that will add just a few jobs, will pull in profits all for themselves, and will take the electrical requirements of half a million people when that much energy is scarce.
Meanwhile, there is a trade-off. If the power were granted, that is half a million apartments worth of hydro power that is no longer available. Where will they get that power instead? Perhaps that can be supplanted by other renewables, but does speak to your point on diesel and other fossil fuels being used instead.
> If you’re payin, why is it not allowed?
Because they are not allowed to charge whatever they want.
In parts of Texas I believe that is true. For BC hydro - it's a fixed rate based on usage tier. [1] For a large energy user, looks like it would be a quarter a day charge plus the usage charge at $12.50 per kW. [1]
No one would be able to mine profitably while using a diesel generator, so this isn't going to happen
Let's consider a large-scale mining operation that would use 20% (or up to 20% for elastic miners) of the current energy usage of a region. This isn't a hypothetical, this is something that's happened many times.
One of 3 things (or a combination of them) will happen:
A) The energy companies are now incentivized to produce more energy, which has an impact on the environment. Greenhouse emissions, resource extraction, waste, etc.
B) The mining operation may only use surplus energy in some situations. Or at least they claim to, though I'm skeptical of these claims. Regardless, this disincentivizes the energy company from producing energy in an elastic manner; they can now keep their production methods running a bit longer, and they'll get paid for this energy. See (A) for the problems with this. They may also have been incentivized to store surplus energy or peer with other companies whose energy demands would be complementary. They no longer have this incentive
C) More demand for energy results in higher prices for the other customers of the energy company.
That's the point though. You should let people that PAY for electricity use it however they want. If it's profitable to mine bitcoin this tells me that the price of the energy is too low.
While that is true, the price of energy is too low because transmission system limitations bottle it up in a limited geographic area. With proper infrustructure, the PRI es would be much more stable geographically as the number of bottlenecks decreased.
So really what it should tell us is that we don't spend enough on infrustructure.
And for what in the end? To support a fringe economic system of monetary transfer and speculation? Less than 1% of people on earth have ever owned any amount of bitcoin, yet it consumes as much energy as it does? Just in the runtime of the network, not counting all the infrastructure, equipment, etc.