Iceland Takes Hard Look at Tech Boom Sparked by Its Cheap, Bountiful Power
wsj.com
wsj.com
"One particular concern is cryptocurrency mining—a processor and electricity-intensive computing process for generating currencies such as bitcoin. The process accounts for about 90% of Iceland’s data center industry in terms of electricity consumed"
If these data centers where actually being utilised for something useful then people would be happier about this. But no, it is just some speculators mining for crypto.
Of course, any sufficiently advanced civilisation that can build a Contraption to extract all the energy from s star should also be advanced enough to build a computer model complex enough to reveal the secrets of warp drive, but didn’t because they were too busy mining crypto.
Bitcoin does not scale, it's just people reaching for a smaller part of the pie that, for pretty purely speculative reasons, still cost a lot.
Feel free to like or dislike cryptocurrency mining (I too believe it to be a waste of energy -- but that's not the point), but it's likely not going away. So you want the "green" efforts to be as cheap and efficient as possible, if you want to outcompete the less eco friendly alternatives.
The reality is that there are only a handful of energy providers in Iceland capable of providing the energy at this scale, Landsvirkjun being the largest (by far).
These companies are either government owned or very sensitive to political realities, and will stop selling energy to mining centers if the pressure becomes strong enough.
I don't see how that fixes things at the global level (aside from them leaving Iceland and relocating somewhere else, of course).
Now they might at least be paying taxes and generating some jobs.
If it wasn't used for mining, where would the excess power go?
How much banker do you need per transaction? With modern banking, most everything uses as few humans as possible (if not simply because they're slow).
> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead.
Do you happen to have any sources for this? I wasn't able to find much after a quick google search.
If we had more automation and fewer banking jobs, beef consumption would go down because the former bankers would vanish into thin air?
Visa: 3.1 billion cards; $8.9 trillion in transactions in 2016; 65,000 transactions per second capacity.
Bitcoin is a very sad joke compared to just Visa. The global banking system is a marvel of efficiency by comparison.
Bitcoin is consuming as much electricity as the Czech Republic or Switzerland and half as much as the Netherlands.
Dollar for dollar, the global banking system is using less than 1% of the electricity that Bitcoin is.
Banking provides a number of services and employs a bunch of other peoples. Sending money from a to be is just one of the things it does.
Don’t the miners pay tax in your country?
Following you argument, whether you like it or not, people will commit homicide. Let’s regulate it!
I'm hoping this is sarcasm, but in case it's not the cost of opportunity here is the main issue. Imagine all that computer power applied to protein folding simulation, to name a simple, useful-for-everyone task.
There’s probably a rule, or law, or some such, that predicts if I do an internet search for this I will find it is already a thing.
Mirror of Faye's talk slides here: https://yadi.sk/d/8ezgDZvO3PLZ6C
It is not sufficient for the PoW just to be extremely hard.
... but not a profitable one, thus few will do it. Bitcoin incentivises "useful-for-everyone" tasks (mining), which makes people do it.
If you give people as much or more money for protein folding as for mining bitcoin they'll probably do that.
Answer is clearly no. Nothing benefits everyone.
There are still good reasons to host in Iceland — geothermal power, no or less need to run expensive AC units, maybe low enough latency to European sites — but 90% of their current consumption is BTC miners.
Yes and no :-). Ignoring other factors, a DC's services are on average less valuable the higher the latency. That restricts Iceland's primary market to Europe (and maybe east-coast North America).
Iceland has big ecological problems, but power usage isn't one of them. If you want to fret about Icelands environment, for gods sake get over here and help us plant trees before the last of the topsoil blows away.
Except that in Iceland, crypto mining could literally, and I use the word literally in the classical and correct sense, actually negate the problems of smelting. If crypto miners out-bid aluminium smelters on power prices, the smelting will leave Iceland and move closer to the source of the ore without any net loss in income to the Icelandic economy.
The economy of aluminium in Iceland /is/ the economy of selling electricity to foreigners. It generates some dock work as well, but the bauxite is here for the power prices, not the light touch of the local forklift drivers. If we can sell that electricity without shipping things, that's obviously better.
You're welcome to think that's idiocy if you like, I guess.
We're currently squeezing residents out of houses to turn them into airbnb's, replacing shops that the locals actually use with dozens of identical puffin stores selling tourist tat and bulldozing sustainable local business so we can replace them with hotels.
All this to service a tourism industry that is actually too large to handle. We've got tourists pooping in fields because no one has organised toilets for them to use. The toilets aren't there because no one is paying for them because the tourism industry is getting massive tax breaks, and yet despite this, Iceland is now so expensive to stay at that people are booking in Norway, because it's actually /cheaper/ to holiday there.
But this is apparently not a bubble and all good investment, just like the banking was I guess.
Seriously, when it comes to problems in Iceland, crypto mining isn't even on the map.
With mining, essentially we are building damns and steam generators to fuel heat dispensation for the benefit of helping some speculators win bets against other speculators. This is not economic activity imo, but some fancy techno-casino. I feel I am very justified in calling it idiotic.
And lets not ignore the externalities here. Just as miners can server as price competition to the smelters, they also out-price other potential activities. Not just as buyers of electricity, but also as investment for those that are running the datacenters. As long as the mining option is on the table, these operators and investors have no incentive to find other uses for their computer farms. Just buy some ASICs and be done with it.
It's the same reason why miners in China use hydro power.
I could trade a broken bicycle with my friends all day long, that doesn't make it useful.
I took the numbers from coinmarketcap, which lists the flow within exchanges actually, which are off chain. I am sure the numbers for on chain transactions can also be found.
Edit: the chart with the daily on-chain transferred bitcoins https://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume