As Environmental Criticism Mounts, Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power (livemint.com) 158
"Bitcoin miners, under fire for their sizable environmental footprint, are forging partnerships with owners of struggling nuclear-power plants with electricity to spare," reports the Wall Street Journal:
The matchups have the potential to solve key issues facing each industry, executives and analysts say: Electricity-hungry bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power, while nuclear plants facing competition from cheaper power sources need new customers.
Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December... New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining.
"Both industry's challenges are the other industry's positives," said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc....
"At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure," said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf.
Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December... New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining.
"Both industry's challenges are the other industry's positives," said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc....
"At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure," said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf.
Doesn't matter where the power comes from, morons (Score:5, Insightful)
How green/sustainable your power source is becomes irrelevant when you're turning 170 TWh into pure heat. Bitcoin is effectively a space heater consuming more power than Poland.
Re: Doesn't matter where the power comes from, mor (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Doesn't matter where the power comes from, mor (Score:5, Insightful)
This cannot be overstated. The solution to global warming is not to make horrendously wasteful activities green, it's to stop doing horrendously wasteful activities. If I run an AC with the window open powered by a wind turbine, I don't deserve a pat on the back, I deserve a kick in the balls, one hard enough to ensure I don't breed.
We spend an inordinate amount of effort on improving the efficiency of the world right now. Cars which consume less fuel. Fridges which consume less electricity. Banning Dell's shitty energy inefficient "gaming" PCs from California. Ever tighter minimum standards on heating system. Ever increasing efficiency requirements for new constructions.
To mine bitcoin for any reason is absolutely unconscionable. At least mining coal keeps the lights on somewhere.
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Agreed, there's no point to bitcoin. What is the societal purpose? None. The mining is only done to make a few people richer, without actually providing actual industry. This is similar to gold mining, we already have all the gold we need to industrial purpose, any extra gold does nothing that benefits society and has too much that damages society.
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The hilarious thing is that BTC could be the reason some finally see their dream of abundant nuclear power finally play out. I mean if the operators' making big buckage as long as it's on at least they'll maintain the upkeep.
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Not to mention every KWh wasted on mining is a KWh that could have gone to another demand.
Maybe, maybe not. It's really not that simple. The fact that you have generation capacity available in one place doesn't mean that you can necessarily deliver the power to where it's needed.
Also, as Noah Smith points out [substack.com] it's possible that BTC could help to subsidize the construction of solar, by making it economical to overbuild capacity. Overbuilding ensures that capacity is still sufficient to meet demand on cloudy days, and using the excess power to mine BTC would provide a profitable use of that exce
Re: Doesn't matter where the power comes from, mo (Score:2)
Only the perception matters, not reality (Score:2)
Not to mention every KWh wasted on mining is a KWh that could have gone to another demand. One that now will have to use carbon sources to fill.
Nukes for bitcoin is the perfect Biden era solution, only perception matters, not reality.
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This scheme isn't very green or sustainable anyway. The fuel comes from mines, and the waste has nowhere to go. The plant itself generates a lot of emissions during construction, operation and decommissioning.
Even something like solar PV wouldn't be very green unless they returned enough of the energy to the grid to make up for the manufacturing and disposal.
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Careful, your knee has gone haywire.
GP explicitly said it wouldn't be if
But that if is not the case
Calm down
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Depends on where you are. I've been looking at solar panels for a while now and Google solar roof calculator tells me even if I only choose the optimal orientation, payback is 20+ years.
Solar is great, if you live in a sunny desert. The other 75% of the world removed from the equator, where climate is temperate or cold, you're not getting much payback.
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Oh I'm a big proponent of solar PV and the low ROI times, but these guys aren't going to do that. They are in it to make money form bitcoinm mining, nothing else.
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> That fucking red herring again?
That clown is either paid by China to gaslight people.
Or paid by Slashdot to generate user interaction by trolling.
But you can bet your ass he takes the most asinine position in any topic.
Pick any topic. You can even make one up or some future scenario - I can predict his position.
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...and say nothing of the carbon it takes to build a facility the size of 4 football fields, and then to stuff it with electronics and air conditioning. Your electricity might be carbon-free, but the operation is a long way from such.
I haven't done the maths, but I suspect that even if they spent every last drop of profit on carbon capture/offset schemes, they still wouldn't "break even" carbon-wise.
Physics Does Not Work Like That (Score:2)
Bitcoin is effectively a space heater consuming more power than Poland.
You are literally correct in that it is heating space, not the Earth. Simply generating heat does not have any measureable impact on the climate except very locally to the heat source because the local increase in temperature increases the rate at which energy is radiated into space. The reason why carbon-based fuels cause heating is not because of the heat from the fuel but because the CO2 gas produced is very effective at absorbing radiated heat energy and hence trapping it in the atmosphere causing it t
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And conversely, any use of a clean power source for Bitcoin displaces other uses for that power.
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How green/sustainable your power source is becomes irrelevant when you're turning 170 TWh into pure heat. Bitcoin is effectively a space heater consuming more power than Poland.
I actually commented half tongue-in-cheek a few weeks ago that nuclear plants would end up with crypto mines built next to them.
Why? Because it solves one of their biggest issues, which is load following. If you build a 500MW mining facility at the plant, you basically have a 500MW load-following margin that can be shed faster than a load-following plant can spin up, AND it generates revenue on the side instead of being an expensive idling power plant when you don't need it.
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You know believe it or not some of the older nuclear plants were actually built to load follow, I know of at least one still in operation. Back at the dawn of nuclear power it was assumed that within a few decades the whole grid would be nuclear, and thus they'd have to have following nuclear resource. I hadn't realized this till a few years ago when I made a comment to a friend about load following and he told me the nuclear plant he worked on actually theoretically had the capability. I also know a cou
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I'm in awe. Seriously.
It's ok, BTC is cool because it DOESN"T CONSUME AS MUCH POWER AS THE SUN PUTS OUT. Jesus H Christ on a cracker.
Re:Doesn't matter where the power comes from, moro (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm in awe. Seriously.
It's ok, BTC is cool because it
No, woosh, you've totally missed what he said, and bold ALL CAPS does not make you any less wrong.
BTC is bad because of carbon emissions trapping solar heat, but the 170TWh (or whatever) heat directly emitted in bitcoin mining is utterly insignificant.
Re:Doesn't matter where the power comes from, moro (Score:4, Insightful)
No, his point was clear, and still doesn't add up.
Let's put it this way: if the only way to justify turning 170 TWh into heat for no good reason is to compare that figure with the power delivered by the entire Sun, you might want to start reconsidering your arguments.
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In case it wasn't clear: yes, i was. I could use "hair blower" if that makes your blood pressure go down, but i guess that'd only segway into an argument about Bitcoin vs. winds all over the planet, apparently.
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No, they were riding a wind-powered Segway that crashed into an argument because it ran out of Bitcoin. (But who was "they"?)
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SEGUE
Gesundheit.
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You completely missed his point. The 2*10^10 watts that bitcoin mining is using is 2*10^10 watts of electricity that could be used for things that aren't completely useless. Like not building more fossil fuel powered plants to keep up with energy demand.
Delete the bitcoin mining, and you can delete that much wattage in carbon-intensive generation, because less demand means less needed supply.
This isn't hard.
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You completely missed his point. ... electricity that could be used for things that aren't completely useless.
No, that's bleedin' obvious , but not the point responded to. Read the subject line. Or the original comment:
How green/sustainable your power source is becomes irrelevant when you're turning 170 TWh into pure heat.
That sounds plausible, but the power source does very much matter. The direct heating of the planet from burning coal is insignificant. The problem is CO2 emissions. If you don't understand that, you are missing the basic science on climate change.
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What you missed is that "turning 170 TWh into pure heat" is a metaphor for absolutely no value being created by that electricity usage. The computing power may as well be resistive heating coils for all the actual useful work being done.
Now, with that framing of the comment, read it again yourself and think.
Kardashev Type 1 (Score:2)
When we become a Kardashev Type 1 civilization utilizing 10^25 watts, no one is going to notice you to give you negative mod points.
Total vs Delivered Solar Power (Score:2)
next to the puny 10^26 watts that the Sun delivers to Earth.
That's the total power output of the sun, NOT the power that it delivers to Earth which is only a tiny fraction of that total.
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Only about 173,000TW=1.73x10^17W of this power hits the earth(see https://news.mit.edu/2011/ener... [mit.edu]), this is about half a billionth of the suns output.
170TWh per year for Bitcoin is about 19.4GW on average.
So the power used by Bitcoin mining equate to 1.94x10^10/1.73x10^17 ~ 1.1x10^-7 i.e. about a tenth of a millionth of the power of the sun that reaches earth.
It is not the power generation directly that causes a
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Bitcoin difficulty scales so that 1 block is mined every 10 minutes, it and potentially take up all the energy of the universe.
- At the highest difficulty, you have to guess a 256 bit hash = 1e77
- The most efficient mining hardware is currently at around 1e10 hashes/joule
- The mass energy of the entire universe is around 4e69 J
So, with current hardware, giving it the entire mass energy of the universe, we could mine around 400 blocks. Enough to run the Bitcoin network for 3 days.
Of course, my calculations m
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A horrendous waste of renewable energy isn't as bad as a horrendous waste of fossil energy...but it's still bad. The energy usage of Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies is unjustifiable regardless of where it comes from, the fossil fuel usage is just part of the problem.
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Not as hard as you're fucking yourself by supporting turning vast quantities of energy into waste heat to run the most inefficient payment system by orders of magnitude that's only useful to criminals, while fossil energy then needs to be used to do actual useful work because that power was wasted. See you at the ballot box.
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It would've been much easier and more efficient to buy that pizza with a credit card or cash. Should I say only advantageous to criminals?
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Maybe we can meet in the middle. If you define someone who, wants to safe guard their hard earned capital against governments endlessly printing money to cover their mis-management, as criminals. Then I suppose crypto is primarily for criminals. However, your definition of criminal is quite inverted.
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You can buy gold or uncut diamonds or any other physical alternative store of wealth for that, it's much less inefficient even if you pay to have it shipped around the world.
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If we had literally unlimited cheap energy and weren't in the middle of a climate emergency, it might be reasonable to completely piss away vast sums just for the lolz, but in our situation, that nuclear power needs to be used to replace fossil power for uses that aren't an utterly ridiculous vast waste.
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The real issue is not so much the electricity usage itself, but the fact that the waste product(heat) gets dumped/wasted to the environment. Nuclear plants could conceivably use crypto miners to preheat the source water, and even coal-fired plants could do similar. Personally, I have an old BTC miner that I use to help heat my workshop in the winter.
Behind this discussion is an assumption that Nuclear energy is basically zero carbon. That's just not true at all. Just building the plant uses a huge quantity of concrete. There's a bunch of other stuff - e.g. all the security that you need for a nuclear plant will mean massive amounts of carbon released. Most of the calculations you will find are very incomplete but attempt at a complete calculation found rates over 50 gCO2/kWh. [theecologist.org] which is well above the recommended level for new power investments.
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It's less CO2 than the production, transportation and maintenance of massive solar farms + storage with a guaranteed baseload output though.
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It's less CO2 than the production, transportation and maintenance of massive solar farms + storage with a guaranteed baseload output though.
Why would anyone do that? You use distributed wind and then a) you get cheaper electricity and b) it happens at night. Solar is excellent for covering daytime peaks, especially in areas with large amounts of air-conditioning. It's never going to be your only source of electricity. You need overbuilt wind power which generally runs all the time but can be started and stopped on demand. It's also really useful to have pumped storage hydroelectric. Whilst that was originally built to overcome the limitat
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It's less CO2 than the production, transportation and maintenance of massive solar farms + storage with a guaranteed baseload output though.
Why would anyone do that? You use distributed wind and then a) you get cheaper electricity and b) it happens at night. Solar is excellent for covering daytime peaks, especially in areas with large amounts of air-conditioning. It's never going to be your only source of electricity. You need overbuilt wind power which generally runs all the time but can be started and stopped on demand. It's also really useful to have pumped storage hydroelectric. Whilst that was originally built to overcome the limitations of Nuclear (which takes a long time to start and stop), it can also be used to store excess wind power which is almost free and so means the energy losses in hydro storage aren't a problem.
Just a little quibble, but that "always on" wind you're talking about has dropped to low single digit percent output in the north sea for sustained periods this year, which is part of what is prompting skyrocketing energy prices in Europe and the accompanying protests. This idea that wind and solar complement each other in such a way that you don't need tremendous amounts of dispatchable storage is just flat out marketing nonsense. *Sometimes* they cover each other, but wind output isn't even remotely con
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So if Nuclear power generates too much carbon per kWh then I suppose something like solar must be right out...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I remember seeing that argument first made, that because steel and concrete are used in reactors and the surrounding containment nuclear power isn't actually carbon friendly. As another commenter pointed out it's straight out nonsense, pushed by traditional "green" anti-nuclear groups that are terrified that the arguments for nuclear power are gaining traction again. The amount of metal and concrete required to build wind and solar out to a level that they can compete with nuclear power dwarfs the materia
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Crypto has a carbon footprint, carbon bad.
Crypto has a carbon footprint, carbon bad.
Crypto has a carbon footprint, carbon bad.
Crypto has a carbon footprint, carbon bad.
Crypto has a carbon footprint, carbon bad.
It doesn't matter about the carbon footprint, wasting energy is bad.
It doesn't matter about the carbon footprint, wasting energy is bad.
It doesn't matter about the carbon footprint, wasting energy is bad.
I'm starting to believe the theories:
https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
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Sure. Let me know when BTC provides full-blown banking services, and we can continue discussing this analogy.
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I know one guy who has a small ETH mining rig and uses it as a makeshift room heater during the winter.
His life is miserable during the summer though.
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> electric heating systems
LOL, this guy has a point. Direct electric heating is about the most wasteful use of electricity there is. Make it do some useful work before generating that heat! Won't someone think of the children?!
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> Great idea. You just have to figure out how to make mining rigs cost about the same as a few feet of Nichrome wire.
Aren't microchips on the order of dollars to produce. The only reason they're expensive is to recoup R&D costs. As we all know from reading slashdot over the years, that can easily be solved through communism. The government will just set the prices of chips to be dollars. /s
Where is the outrage? (Score:2)
So, they will mine only during off-peak demand times? Where is the outrage over this misuse of resources?
Re:Where is the outrage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah no. that's just marketing BS.
They will mine at all times without consideration fr the rest of the planet, as any miner ever did.
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Yup, the goal is to make money, no matter what. This isn't even libertarian, because libertarians do believe that you should not harm your neighbors and that regulations and governments are necessary for that purpose. Instead here it's anarchy, do what ever you want, and if someone tries to stop you, go somewhere else. Not enough profits, cut workers, legal workers refuse the low pay, then get undocumented workers, a promise you made gets in the way of profits then break the promise. This is old style c
Re: Where is the outrage? (Score:4, Insightful)
Those mining ASICs age, running them less than 24/7 eats into profits.
They also get obsolete (Score:2)
Just Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Bitcoin is worth enough traditional, fiat dinero, that it is saving dying waste coal and gas plants.
Four years ago, the Scrubgrass power plant in Venango County, Pennsylvania, was on the brink of financial ruin as energy customers preferred to buy cheap natural gas or renewables. Then Scrubgrass pivoted to Bitcoin.
Today, through a holding company based in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, called Stronghold Digital Mining that bought the plant, Scrubgrass burns enough coal waste to power about 1,800 cryptocurrency mining computers.
This is not what nuclear energy was supposed to save us from.
Re:Just Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Now that China has banned cryptocurrency use, I would expect that another 1 or 2 major economies doing the same will put a stake in the heart of this utter waste of resources.
Re:Just Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
This. Major Western powers need to take synchronized action right away to quickly de-escalate the situation, without it less scrupulous actors will quickly pick up where China left off. The US, Germany and Canada now have governments that should be willing to move on this.
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Only a tyranny will assert the authority to ban cryptocurrency. A free nation with a free economy means people are free to make bad decisions. That doesn't mean a democratic nation is powerless to get people to make the "correct" decisions. A government could set an example by making lowering CO2 emissions a priority in the products and services it buys from private industry. Governments buy a lot of stuff, and they consume a lot of energy, which means they have considerable influence on the market.
One
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Only a tyranny will assert the authority to ban cryptocurrency.
Banning cryptocurrency is not something that can be done in a free nation.
I'm actually pretty sure the US government explicitly has the power to ban (or tax to the point of effectively banning) cryptocurrency (or any currency), a power delegated directly in the constitution. There's actually a crapton of case law on this going back hundreds of years in the US, partly because states used to print their own currencies, and also because there was good reason to be cautious about the circulation of foreign currencies in the era the US was founded (you know, the whole revolted colony
Three Mile Island is available (Score:2)
These two deserve eachother (Score:2)
No bailouts.
"bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power" (Score:3, Insightful)
Well that's a lie. Bitcoin miners want nothing but cheap energy, and would burn down orphanages if it saved them a buck.
Re:"bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free pow (Score:5, Funny)
Just what is the energy output of a burning orphanage? Asking for a friend.
Re:"bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free pow (Score:5, Funny)
A typical human adult can give off about 150kWh of energy as per a study of waste energy recovery from crematoriums. We can assume a typical orphan will give off 50kWh. With around 450000 children in foster care in the USA we could generate 22.5GWh of energy.
Currently completing a bitcoin transaction and committing it to the blockchain consumes 1.82MWh of energy (yeah I was surprised when I looked this up). So burning all orphans in the USA alone would be able to complete 12360 Bitcoin transactions.
Or to put it another way, we have to burn a full orphanage of 36 orphans for every transaction.
This of course assumes we don't want to burn down the building. The building may generate more heat, but we'll need it to attract homeless people once we run out of orphans.
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Maybe, but they are not going to do it. Mining coins is all about getting the best bang for the buck. This is why theres a steady march of technology and seeking out the dirtiest disused powerplants they can find.
wat (Score:3, Insightful)
"Both industry's challenges are the other industry's positives," said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc....
So shitcoin somehow helps deal with the nuclear waste problem? It somehow makes nuclear cheaper than other forms of energy? The whole fucking concept is so far beyond stupid that I literally want this fuckface shot out of a cannon and into the sun, stat.
The synergy he's talking about is that nuclear can't be ramped up and down conveniently, so you either have to run other plants to fill the load demand, or you have to overproduce energy and then you go looking for people who will take it because even providing it below cost means you lose less money. So presumably you could sell it to shitcoin miners, who will be happy to have the cheap power. And then you could claim eco-friendliness, except for the fact that this is pure fucking garbage.
Why's it horse shit? Two big reasons. First, if you have ways to use excess power, that opens the door for renewables just as much as nuclear. You build excess capacity and then you mine bitcoins while the wind blows, or the sun shines or whatever. And it's STILL cheaper than nuclear even if you build an absolute shedload of excess. But the other reason is that there are lots of other things we could do with excess power which would not only not be harmful to the environment like wasting it on money laundering, but actually beneficial like carbon sequestration or avoiding needing to take as much water from aquifers by doing desalination.
Nuclear power and bitcoin are two things we don't need, which frankly make no more sense together than they do apart.
We wil build more nuclear power (Re:wat) (Score:2)
If wind and solar are cheaper than nuclear power then why is it that after decades of government incentives for wind and solar power we see nuclear power plants provide 20% of the electricity in the USA while wind and solar produce what amounts to a rounding error?
We know what has been holding back nuclear power for decades, it's been Democrat politicians tossing wrenches in the works since the Carter administration. Only in the last year or two are we seeing Democrats say nice things about nuclear power.
Re: wat (Score:2)
"So shitcoin somehow helps deal with the nuclear waste problem? It somehow makes nuclear cheaper than other forms of energy? "
Shhh.. We are busy making the planet the biggest crapsack world possible so future generations will hate us and install portapotty shells over our graves.
There is no greeen bitcoin (Score:5, Insightful)
False premise. (Score:2)
All the electricity used by Bitcoin can be used for more useful things, and renewable capacity build for Bitcoin can be used to displace coal plant instead of heating GPU.
That assumes the energy would have been generated without the bitcoin miners funding it.
Renewable capacity that isn't built can't be used to displace a coal plant.
My investments are still in popcorn (Score:2)
Because it will be good to have on hand as a snack when this all collapses.
Bitcoin will consume the universe (Score:3)
This is ridiculous. Where will it end? In 100,000 years, all stars will be drained of their energy, bringing on an early heat-death of the universe. All because some assholes wanted to "mine bitcoins".
Re:Bitcoin will consume the universe (Score:4, Funny)
Endgame? (Score:3)
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Even after the last BTC is mined, you still need to mine transaction blocks, constantly, for the Bitcoin network to work. There's no endgame here.
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The difficulty associated with mining bitcoin varies from time to time in order to keep the rate of new coin creation under control (avoid rapid creation of new coin). Without the financial incentive of mining new coin, I am sure that many miners will drop out, and the difficulty will go down. Then the power requirement will also go down. Only people interested in keeping the network running will then be mining bitcoin. So there probably is an endgame. At low difficulty, regular PC's can probably keep the n
Re:Endgame? (Score:4, Insightful)
Endgame is that more and more countries will ban cryptocurrencies as it is one of the easiest things they can do to be more green.
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Endgame is that more and more countries will ban cryptocurrencies as it is one of the easiest things they can do to be more green.
Ignoring my question about energy supply growth, is it [ledger.com]?
The estimated global production costs of paper currency in 2014 were 5 terawatts per year and 10 billion liters of water. While the banking system alone is even consuming more energy than the Bitcoin network, bankings energy costs are calculated around 100 terawatts per year. This is almost double that of Bitcoin. Indeed, banks need to run a lot of servers, branches and ATMs to keep their system accessible to the public.
Literallly everyone in Europe: LOL. (Score:2)
Because nuclear power has no environmental concerns at all. Noo, siree... XD
But the entire Bitcoin "mining" thing is already completely alien to us. And I mean in the literal "you must be from a different planet if you think this is a good idea" sense. Namely, from planet Ferengon's little-known second moon called "Moron" where they put all the Ferengi that *the Ferengi* think are too greedy. ;)
Money is supposed to represent value (Score:3)
Let's imagine we didn't have any money (John Lennon would be happy).
Now imagine you're a... chicken farmer, and I did some work for you... maybe I repaired your barn. OK, so you need to compensate me, but there's no money, so you agreed to give me 3 chickens in exchange for my work.
The thing is, I don't need 3 chickens, at least not right now. So you agree to give me 3 chickens in the future, whenever I need them. I agree to this, but I'd like it in writing, so you whip out a pen and paper to write me a note promising to give me 3 chickens (we'd call that an I.O.U.).
Thinking ahead, I stop you and say, can you just fill out 3 pieces of paper each saying you promise to give me one chicken? "Sure," you say. Ok, can you word it like this? "I (the undersigned chicken farmer) agree to provide one chicken to whosoever presents this note to me."
...and you hand over 3 slips of paper to me. I take those pieces of paper into town, and I say to the butcher, "how much for one of those roast hams?" "That'll cost you one chicken!" "Cool!" So I hand him a slip of paper.
Now we have money. In particular, make sure to understand that the paper represents debt. The farmer owes 3 chickens. The debt is used as currency and it has value so long as the farmer either (a) has chickens or (b) is presumed to have chickens in the future. By the way, when a company ships a product to another company, they send the customer an invoice (due in X days), and the amount owing (in whatever national currency) is counted as an asset to the vendor company. They can then sell that debt, to a collection agency, so it's a little similar.
How do you get from there (let's assume logically that's how a gold-backed currency works) to a fiat currency?
Well, you start with a gold (or chicken) backed currency, and once everyone is using it, you pass a law that says everyone has to pay X% of income per year to the government as taxes. As long as people are earning money (which they have to do to live) then they owe taxes, and since you have to pay taxes or go to jail, then the currency has value beyond what it's worth in chickens. The value is tied to the ability of the government to force people to pay taxes. Then you can get rid of whatever backed the currency because the fact that people have debt that must be paid in that currency is what gives it value.
Bitcoin starts with no intrinsic value. If anything it has negative intrinsic value because I have to do a bunch of work to maintain my digital wallet, make sure the keys are safe, etc., and I can't be guaranteed to swap it for something I need because unlike the US dollar, there's a very real possibility it'll be worth nothing in the near future.
In reality most of my net worth is tied up in non-monetary instruments, like shares of companies, a house, and a car, and chickens, and the like. I compare the value of those things in dollars for convenience, but they have intrinsic value to me.
The only value of a dollar to me is that other people need it, and the value stays reasonably constant over time. Bitcoin doesn't have either of those things going for it.
People once went berserk over tulip bulbs. And beanie babies. Bitcoin is mania. It will end the same way. And in the mean time we'll burn up a bunch of coal and uranium to "mine" more of it. That sounds dumb to me.
Now at first I thought NFTs were just as dumb... but there's nothing stopping a chicken farmer from making an NFT that entitles the owner of the NFT to exchange it, in the future, for a chicken. So maybe NFTs could have a future?
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Now at first I thought NFTs were just as dumb... but there's nothing stopping a chicken farmer from making an NFT that entitles the owner of the NFT to exchange it, in the future, for a chicken. So maybe NFTs could have a future?
There's nothing stopping a chicken farmer from making 10,000 NFTs that entitles the owner of the NFT to exchange it for the same chicken.
Much like Bitcoin et al, NFT scarcity is entirely artificial.
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True, but nothing says the chicken farmer has any chickens available when they write out the 3 notes either. The value is in whether you believe the farmer will have chickens in the future.
It's even worse than that: the value of what you would pay for such a NFT is entirely on the eyes of the beholder. This is not a check, a legal binding contract or even a fancy IOU: you're literally just buying a non-fungible token with some data on it. The fact that it states "valid for one healthy chicken" is, well, irrelevant really.
In some ways it's no different than a company selling shares to raise capital. There's still a person who can be taken to court and made to provide a settlement of their debt.
Oh, it is very different. An investment is not a purchase.
Banks are only required to hold cash in the value of 5% of the amount on deposit. We all believe the bank will give us cash when we go and ask for it. :)
For a reason - banks make your money earn interest (paltry as those may be), based on the expectation that their ent
Reset the Counter Yet Again (Score:2)
Power burned perceived as cheaper than alternative (Score:2, Redundant)
A number of posters have been flaming Bitcoin trading and mining as being pure waste. They're missing a point.
Bitcoin is (still) valued and traded because it is perceived as being a better store of value than fiat currencies. The waste represented by miners' energy consumption is a drop in the ocean compared to the waste and theft of value perpetrated by governments by the inflation of their currencies.
If you want to bring bitcoin energy waste to a screeching halt, try coming up with a better alternative
Typo: add "to the federal government" (Score:2)
typo. Should have read:
"... would both apply the Gold and Silver part of Article I, Section 10, Clause 1, TO THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ..."
You could say that of ANY commodity (Score:3)
The two are not exclusive.
You could say that - or approximately that - about ANY commodity being used as a store of value rather than purchased for consumption: People expect someone else to pay (at least some) money later for what they've bought today.
Cthulhu (Score:2)
If all this power was used to summon Cthulhu instead, would that be better or worse for humanity than funneling it into the vacuum that is bitcoin?
"Laser" (Score:2)
They should use geothermal power: a secret facility in an old volcano is known to work well. Or at least put the nuclear reactor inside one. There they can mine One Hundred Million Billion Dollars of crypto.
Sharks optional.
Irony (Score:2)
Using one of the most regulated industries in the world to power an industry trying to be one of the most unregulated...
And still... (Score:2)
Bitcoin's price in US dollars keep going up. More and more companies, and now even whole countries, adopt it.
But interestingly, all of tech-loving Slashdot has decided a decentralized digital store of value (Bitcoin blockchain and efficient payment system (lightning network) has no value at all. What's going on here?
Is all of Slashdot salty cause they missed the boat?
(Bitcoin was launched with an article on Slashdot in july 2010. The price per coin was 8 cents! Ten dollars invested then would've been worth
Too late to save Bellefonte? (Score:2)
Too late to save Bellefonte [wikipedia.org]?
Let the madness end (Score:2)
Nuclear Shitcoin..shark has been jumped, series cancelled.
Crypto or paper, it's all numbers in people's heads and we keep reaching ever more cartoonish levels in our behavior surrounding it.
It's tiresome, it's old, and yes, this is more a rant than an observation.
Re: (Score:2)
In all fairness, EVs shift the responsibility of generating power in a way that allows switching to clean sources more or less easily down the line. But yeah, we're nowhere near that just yet.
Re: (Score:2)
In all fairness, EVs shift the responsibility of generating power in a way that allows switching to clean sources more or less easily down the line. But yeah, we're nowhere near that just yet.
Also, EVs use less energy overall, thanks to regenerative braking and the higher efficiency of big powerplants vs small, mobile ones. They're more efficient and therefore generate less CO2, even when powered ultimately by fossil fuels. And, as you say, they can be switched to cleaner sources down the line, something that is much harder for ICEVs (though not impossible, e.g. biodiesel).
Greener (Score:5, Interesting)
EVs are promoted as green tech over gas cars for the same reason LEDs are promoted as green tech over incandescent - it's not that they use zero energy, but that they uses less energy for similar results, therefore less pollution is created when supplying them with energy.
Here in Texas when I bought my Model 3 in 2018 the emissions equivalency when charging from the grid was that of an 89 MPG* gas car. At the time the US average was 24.7 MPG [reuters.com], so the emissions attributable to charging my Model 3 were 1/3 those of a gas car
In 2019 I installed solar. In 2020 the panels produced 86% of my electricity, which includes charging the car. My emissions equivalency is now that of a 636 MPG gas car. Those gas cars from 2018 are still 24.7 MPG.
So an EV bought today immediately generates less emissions than a gas car, and those emissions are reduced over time as electricity generation becomes greener. A gas car bought today never gets better.
* see Are Electric Vehicles Really Better for the Climate? Yes. Here’s Why [ucsusa.org] - you'll need to scroll down to the 2nd map [ucsusa.org], which is for more efficient EVs like the Model 3.