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Bitcoin Power

Kosovo Bans Cryptocurrency Mining To Save Electricity (reuters.com) 52

Posted by BeauHD from the supply-and-demand dept.
Kosovo's government on Tuesday introduced a ban on cryptocurrency mining in an attempt to curb electricity consumption as the country faces the worst energy crisis in a decade due to production outages. Reuters reports: "All law enforcement agencies will stop the production of this activity in cooperation with other relevant institutions that will identify the locations where there is cryptocurrency production," Economy and Energy Minister Artane Rizvanolli said in a statement. Faced with coal-fired power plant outages and high import prices authorities were forced last month to introduce power cuts.

European gas prices soared more than 30% on Tuesday after low supplies from Russia reignited concerns about an energy crunch as colder weather approaches. In December, Kosovo declared a state of emergency for 60 days which will allow the government to allocate more money to energy imports, introduce more power cuts and harsher measures. The country of 1.8 million people is now importing more than 40% of its consumed energy with high demand during the winter when people use electricity mainly for heating. Around 90% percent of energy production in Kosovo is from lignite, a soft coal that produces toxic pollution when burnt.
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Kosovo Bans Cryptocurrency Mining To Save Electricity More

Kosovo Bans Cryptocurrency Mining To Save Electricity

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  • flippit (Score:1, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 )

    Here we save electricity by buying extra from Kosovo using our crypto profits.

    • You make a good point (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @06:54PM (#62147067)
      Since electricity is finite and in many places is bought and sold privately that means cryptocurrency will always increase the cost of electricity for everyone. So regardless of whether you're making any money off crypto you're paying for cryptocurrency miners to mine cryptocurrency
      • In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.
        • we're nowhere near able to do that. Even if the tech exists controlling access to energy is a profitable and highly desirable business.

        • In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.

          Sunlight may be effectively free and infinite but the mechanisms we need to converts sunlight into useful energy require materials and labor that is far from free and infinite. One crude but still useful metric to compare energy sources is by energy return on energy invested. When it comes down to it all raw materials we use come from an effectively infinite source we call Earth. In order to turn bits of Earth into something useful requires energy. Some materials take less energy to get than others to p

          • Except "effectively infinite source" isn't true for the Earth and hasn't been for a long time.

            Just the effects of infinite waste heat alone would render the planet uninhabitable in under 500 years at current growth rates per person (that we have sustained since the 1600s).

            That's ignoring global warming from fossil fuels. That's even if it was all solar. Even if 100% of the suns energy turned to infrared instead of being reflected, it would be bad.

        • Re:You make a good point (Score:4, Interesting)

          by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @11:46PM (#62147699)

          > In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in an year.

          A cubic inch of human bone can bear the weight of five standard pickup trucks.

          https://bestlifeonline.com/use... [bestlifeonline.com]

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by matmos ( 8363419 )
          Until it can all be collect that is pointless trivia when discussing bitcoin mining.

          • Until it can all be collect that is pointless trivia when discussing bitcoin mining.

            But somehow it always immediately becomes very relevant when discussing nuclear power.

      • Since electricity is finite and in many places is bought and sold privately

        Not in Kosovo.

        In Kosovo, the government sets the price of electricity. Low prices are popular, so power is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Kosovo has, by far, the lowest electricity prices in Europe.

        So here is how it works in Kosovo:
        1. Pay people to waste power.
        2. Become outraged that, lo and behold, power is being wasted
        3. Pass laws to micromanage how power is being wasted.
        4. Win the election.

        It should continue to work unless the IQ of the average Kosovar voter magically increases.

  • I hope other nations follow suit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @06:31PM (#62146987)

    Especially in europe, where electricity is approaching 80c/kwh in some areas.

  • Good Luck (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2022 @06:55PM (#62147069) Homepage Journal

    If you can actually make 2,400 Euros using only 170 Euros worth of electricity then Kosovo is going to have a hard time shutting down crypto miners. This is especially true in a country where apparently many people use electricity to heat their houses. If you are a public utility how do you tell the difference between customers using space heaters to warm their houses and customers using crypto mining rigs to heat their houses?

    Heck, depending on the price of crypto rigs it might make more economic sense to ban electric space heaters. If you are going to use lignite coal generated electricity to heat your house, you might as well use the space heater that pays you back in bitcoin.

    • Heck, depending on the price of crypto rigs it might make more economic sense to ban electric space heaters

      And incentivize upgrading to more efficient heat pump systems.

      If they were going to sanction any crypto mining, it should be at the utility level, and to fund efficiency initiatives to reduce electricity demand and pay for new generation. Not at the individual level, driving demand up, efficiency down, and not paying for better infrastructure. Not that I'm actually advocating betting your country's power infrastructure on crypto, but it's probably easy to find some sucker right now to agree to favorable

      • And incentivize upgrading to more efficient heat pump systems.

        Heat pumps still use copious amounts of energy for the amount of heat they produce. If I want 20 kW of heat into my home an electric resistance furnace would consume 20 kW of electricity, that's by definition. The heat pump on my home can produce something like 8 or 9 kW of heat but it will consume about 2 kW to do it. My natural gas furnace, on the other hand, can produce something like 15 to 20 kW and consume something like 10 watts of electricity.

        Where I live natural gas is quite popular for heating i

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The great thing about heat pumps is that many people already have a thermal battery. That makes them ideal for using cheap electricity when demand is low.

          Decently insulated houses are thermal batteries. Running the AC overnight in the summer, or the heating overnight in the winter, can keep the temperature inside pleasant all day without much, if any, energy consumption at peak times. Many people have insulated water storage tanks too, which are used with some kinds of gas boilers.

          I'd be happy to give the e

    • If you can actually make 2,400 Euros using only 170 Euros worth of electricity then Kosovo is going to have a hard time shutting down crypto miners. This is especially true in a country where apparently many people use electricity to heat their houses. If you are a public utility how do you tell the difference between customers using space heaters to warm their houses and customers using crypto mining rigs to heat their houses?

      Considering Kosovo's current electricity price equates those 170EUR to be 2.8GWh you'll be able to identify the houses using a typical year worth of electricity consumption every month just to heat a few rooms by the charred remains.

      • Thanks for doing the math. That's helpful. It sounds like perhaps what the crypto miners really do need to do is spread the crypto rigs around so that they really could heat houses. You probably noticed that I am a little fuzzy about how much electric heat 170 EUR buys in Kosovo. Let's just say that in my neck of the woods spending that much money to heat the house would not stick out.

        Which means that it still might make sense to use crypto mining kits to heat apartment complexes. Or to spread them o

    • If you are mining crypto at a level low enough for your electricty bill to pass off as a base board heater, you are not part of the problem.

      As you alluded to, the entropy created is just as useful to heat your house.

      Nevertheless, making it illegal should alllow them to go after and shut down more problematic actors.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by matmos ( 8363419 )
      With smart meters it's not hard at all to find people abusing the system.

      • As someone else noted in this thread even without smart meters it is pretty easy to notice people that have 12 times the typical electricity usage. Which just means that crypto miners should be spreading the love. Instead of heating one house to the point where you need active cooling you could simply size your rigs so that they are about right to heat one house. I wouldn't mind someone else's crypto rig in my house if it cut down on my heating costs. That's a win-win situation.

  • so at least your daily dose of narcism and cat pictures won't be threatened.

  • Around 90% percent of energy production in Kosovo is from lignite, a soft coal that produces toxic pollution when burnt.

    As opposed to burning anything which usually gives off gasses and byproducts that are toxic as well. Seriously, what microbrains write this shit anyway?

  • The article states that electricity is used for heat. If heat is produced with an electric heater, then a crypto miner would produce the same amount of heat as the heater, and any crypto that is mined is a bonus.
    This does not apply if they use heat pumps for heating.

    • I wouldnt call it same. Efficiency is efficiency. Watts per unit heat will vary. If crypto mining is doing processor work then some of that energy is not producing heat and vice versus. Putting excess heat to use is not the same as a direct replacement.

      • The Law of conservation of energy guarantees that every watt of electricity put into the miner is converted in to heat. Miners don't produce any other kind of energy from electricity. Even if the miner produces light, as long as that light does not escape the room it will end up as heat.

        So yes, a crypto mine is the same as a space heater.

        • Thats a very oversimplified view of conservation of energy. Not all energy becomes internal energy. If any EM is emitted at all then some of that energy became EM. 15w of incandescent is different heat than 15w LED. Light IS energy. 15w LED produces more light and less heat because the majority of conversion was EM visible light. Heat sources work in the same way. An inefficient space heater glows, which means some energy conversion became light instead of heat. Transistors still consume work. So the work t

          • I agree that if your the miner generates and RF energy then that will escape a room. But a visible light will not escape a room (without windows) and will just bounce of the wall shifting wavelength till it becomes infra red, and that is heat.
            As far as your comparison of a ceramic heater, it produces the same amount of heat as a resistive wire heater (as long as the light waves don't escape through a window).

            Transistors don't consume work, work is force over distance, a gate flipping inside a transistor is

            • Its not a simple 1:1 with light. There is an entropy to the design. Shifting back down to IR becomes subject to losses including photoelectric effect, etc. its not as efficient as a direct conversion. Your fan example for example did not include inductive reactance, nor the energy that is lost imparting kinetic energy into the air, nor the energy that imparts interstitial cracks into the metal in those bearings. We suffer losses in everything we design. Ideally we build things to have less undesirable conve

  • This will concentrate the miners in miner friendly countries like Kazakhstan. With the consequences like right now, as they turn off the internet due to civil revolts the hash rates dropping by 12%.

    Source: https://coingape.com/kazakhsta... [coingape.com]

  • This looks super sketchy.

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