Iran Seizes 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Machines Using Subsidized Power (reuters.com) 57
Iranian authorities have seized about 1,000 bitcoin mining machines in two abandoned factories, after warnings that the activity had led to a spike in consumption of government-subsidized electricity. Reuters reports: "Two of these bitcoin farms have been identified, with a consumption of one megawatt,"; Arash Navab, a power official in the central province of Yazd, told the television. The machines, which produce cryptocurrencies that are banned in Iran, were mostly to blame for a 7% increase in power consumption in the month to June 21, according to an Energy Ministry spokesman, quoted by the website of state-run Press TV. In 2018, Iran's central bank banned the country's banks from dealing in cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, over money-laundering concerns.
Bitcoin is unsustainable (Score:3)
Wasting electricity to prove you're doing something worth being given the authority to print money for is the dumbest design ever implemented. It ought to be more than Iran confiscating miners. It ought to be every machine running on any form of carbon emitting power.
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Since there are other algorithms than proof-of-work, I have to agree that Bitcoin and other POW coins are wasteful.
Reddcoin, for example, doesn't require anywhere near the same computing power to secure its network.
In fact, I'm running the Reddcoin core wallet right now on my old 10-years-old PC and it barely spikes at 5% every few seconds or so.
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Re: No its not. The Fed created TRILLIONS of dolla (Score:3)
But in reality they only print enough money to keep the U.S. as the dominant economic force in the world, which drives tax revenue spent on defense which is primarily deployed to subsidize oil.
There are intermediary steps, but it's still largely true. Especially late last century, petrodollar was a pretty reasonable way to describe the USD.
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I don't like it either, but it's one of the normal ways people operate. Which group they choose to dehumanize varies, but they usually choose some group, occasionally after a heated and violent discussion. Gays, witches, jews, people with long hair, SOMEBODY.
Also, IIRC the US has a higher percentage of its population in prison than (almost?) any other country. And the prisons are often privately operated with the prisoners used as slave labor. This isn't a very secure moral high ground.
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Re:Bitcoin is unsustainable (Score:5, Interesting)
Fiat currency is far more energy intensive to secure than bitcoin and wasteful.
Cite your references please.
Fiat currency = money that has value because we all agree it does. It is a number in an account. Agreeing that there is a certain amount of it in circulation costs nothing in energy. Printing certificates of possession takes up some energy, and for small denominations is somewhat wasteful, however there are far fewer of those physical certificates and token than than there is currency in trade. So, compared to the amount that is out there, the energy taken to create the physical tokens and certificates is far lower than the cost for making bitcoin, which is intentional waste.
Bitcoin is like trading in pop cans where you only trade pop cans that have been filled. In order to prove you expended something of value, you produce the can of pop, then open it up, pour it down the drain, crush the can and that becomes your token worth $1.
How about a system that proves you just supplied an equal amount of electricity to a previously un-powered village in Uganda? The amount of power we're dumping up in waste heat in order to process bitcoin is criminally wasteful.
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How about a system that proves you just supplied an equal amount of electricity to a previously un-powered village in Uganda?
If you can design a system that does that, and you can show that it is as secure as bitcoin, go ahead.
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Sorry, but the basic reason that Fiat currency has value is that the government demands that you pay your taxes with it or they'll do bad things to you and steal all your stuff. This gives everyone an incentive to accumulate it. It is out of this need that the "we all agree it does" develops, but we agree that it does because it's empirically true.
Re:Bitcoin is unsustainable (Score:5, Interesting)
This article was written when bitcoin was close to $20k and at that point it already used half as much energy as the entirety of the global banking sector. If it ever hits $40k, arbitrage will lead to it using as much energy as the banking sector, while offering none of its services. It’s loan services for Microsoft, your mortgage, your pension accounts, your credit card, anti-money laundering, etc etc, whereas all bitcoin does is move “money” back and forth. What’s more, these banking services will become more efficient as time progresses, especially once ATMs begin phasing out in favor of digital payments, whereas the success of bitcoin would make it LESS efficient.
This is such a pants on the head thing to so. At least you could go with the Lightning Network excuse, that may or may not work due to the routing problem.
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Keep in mind that the mining reward gets halved on a regular schedule, which limits the growth of energy usage.
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While I happen to agree that blockchain is yet to find a lasting practical application, it's also a fact of history that pioneers are always wrong about something important. It's the nature of trying something different.
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Bitcoin uses less power than the Entire Global Fiat Infrastructure
But fiat has much higher transaction rates.
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It ought to be more than Iran confiscating miners. It ought to be every machine running on any form of carbon emitting power.
This is Iran, that would be ALL the machines.
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Isn't printing & issuing your own currency and/or stocks illegal & for really good reasons???
But isn't that what exactly cryptocurrencies really are doing???
First you have to define your terms. What is currency?
Lots of people make things that in some real sense resemble currency and, at least in much of the world, there is nothing illegal about it. Consider a silver round. Not a silver coin, a silver round, because a coin has a legal definition as something produced by a government as money. Lots of people make one ounce silver rounds (that many will informally call a coin) for trade, a store of value, or as some kind of keepsake. There are people that wil
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Isn't printing & issuing your own currency ... illegal ...?
No. [wikipedia.org]
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It may take a gallon of water to raise that almond, but the water doesn't just magically go away. A lot of it returns to the aquifers. Another part evaporates, and will later recondense somewhere, perhaps where it will end up in a reservoir. Only a small part of it will be converted into carbohydrates, and an even smaller part will end up in the exported almond.
If you do this in a closed system it takes an extremely much smaller amount of water to raise an almond. For this purpose a country is only a pa
One good way to build a supercomputer (Score:2)
When under sanctions that prevent you from importing a supercomputer...
Or you could just, you know, build one (Score:2)
Re: One good way to build a supercomputer (Score:2)
Bitcoin miners aren't general purpose computers. They only do one thing. The only supercomputer they could build is a Bitcoin mining supercomputer. It would be probably be more efficient to confiscate the BTC from the miners.
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Right. For bitcoin mining you need hardware that's optimized exclusively for fast SHA-256 hashing.
Regular (super)computers are bad at hashing, and dedicated SHA-256 bitcoin hashing hardware is useless for general purpose computing. Chips made for bitcoin mining are even useless for general purpose SHA-256 hashing.
Dumb (Score:1)