Despite Bitcoin’s Dive, a Former Soviet Republic Is Still Betting Big on It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But no. Georgia is allowing an American company mine Bitcoin at scale. It uses a lot of power and a lot of infrastructure. But isn't a huge bet or anything interesting.
I mean, fundamentally the issue is that the rise in digital payments puts most of the money supply in bank ledgers... if the money supply was on a public ledger, individuals could still deposit it with a bank, but they could also send it peer-to-peer if they so chose.
In general though, I think it would be an interesting experiment if individuals can hold central bank money directly instead of going through commercial banks.
But I agree... that experiment would be quite fascinating. It might not even be that big of a change... most people would probably continue to entrust a bank with their funds, and banks could potentially continue to operate a fractional reserve system.
Why not just issue dollars?
I hope they realize the digital currency doesn't necessarily "stay" in Georgia. Either way, the prime minister provided a loan out of his own investment fund, and it's been paid back. Not sure they are betting big on crypto, but they are using 10% of their electricity for it...
yes this looks like textbook corruption: the government just "gives" land and energy to cryptocurrenncy mining operations? seems very probably that not the government but those in government who set it up are getting crypto bribes in return...
There was money to be made in crypto. But not by buying coin low and selling high.
>With electricity so cheap that most residents use it to heat their homes, the city’s consumption exceeded its allocation on several days, Mr. Read explained. As a result, the Municipal Lighting Department had to purchase additional power at much higher prices — a cost it spread across its customers.
The machines are generating heat (and cryptocurrency) from electricity the locals were using to generate heat... At least they could have co-located the machines with the locals in a way that heat can be exchanged with inside and outside, and a meter measuring energy consumption when heat is directed inside...
The least wasteful form of mining is by replacing electric heaters with mining rigs, but that's not what happened here, it's more like going to the library to fetch some books because you ran out of toilet paper...
thanks for sharing the article
there's lots of similarities in this article with the Georgia one: besides the local economic depression, in both articles they also mention the local prison and the local casino...
for example why not use the heat to pasteurize milk? co-locate the miners with the pasteurization plants
even better: desalinate water to steam, use the steam to heat the milk and the milk to cool the steam, now you have desalinated water AND pasteurized milk...
but oh no, that would actually create a job for a couple of people to work it out and change the plants and negotiate and discover similar opportunities...
If Bitcoin is using locally underutilized electricity, I don't see anything wrong with this adventure.
There were both what they've been called, sure, but given the current state of relationship between Russia and any of the two countries, it's like looking for trouble.
EDIT: what?
The big difference, of course, is that Mesopotamia is unlikely to commit crimes on foreign soil any time soon because you dismiss its territorial ambitions... unless I'm missing something everyone else gets here.
That's beside the point. Right now, there's a growing nationalist sentiment growing in Ukraine. If you go to Ukraine and shout this historical fact in the streets of, say, Kiyv, you might just encounter a group of people who violently disagree with the "underlying idea" (which you won't express, but they'll perceive) that Ukraine is Russia's bitch.
Imagine shouting about the Armenian genocide in Instanbul, or about the extermination and oppression of Native Americans in a major city in Texas.
Maybe not exactly, but you get the idea.
> My ancestors never immigrated from a country called Ukraine even though they were Ukrainian (or back then often called Ruthenian)
That kind of Ruthenian? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Galicia%E2%80%93Vol...]
Or that kind of Ruthenian? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenians_and_Ukrainians_in_C...]
Your ancestry might as well be "Polish with a mix of Lithuanian", 'cause who knows at this stage, no? Did you take a DNA test?
Yes there is, but Ukrainian Neo-Nazis aren't exactly known for their understanding of history.
> Imagine shouting about the Armenian genocide in Instanbul, or about the extermination and oppression of Native Americans in a major city in Texas.
Except Ukrainians and Russians are the same people, and it's Germans and others who slaughtered them.
> Your ancestry might as well be "Polish with a mix of Lithuanian", 'cause who knows at this stage, no? Did you take a DNA test?
Maybe, it's a region that's had many conquests and we're all mixed to some degree. But my ancestors all spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox, and Slavic culture has always been defined by culture, not necessarily ethnicity.
I don't think that's for either of us to declare.
I'm at least quarter-Ukrainian from my father's side (I think my parental grandfather was Russian, but parental grandmother was certainly Ukrainian). You sound like you have much less than that in you. We're in no position to dictate who's one people and who aren't.
I do consider Ukrainians and Belarussians brotherly peoples, from my view as a Russian. I wish either of them no harm, and all the best, and hope that no major conflict arises between either of the three.
But they're going to be the ones to tell me what nation they are and what other traits they identify themselves with.
> and Slavic culture has always been defined by culture, not necessarily ethnicity.
I don't think Slavic culture – if there is, indeed, such a thing – defines itself with itself. It can't be its own description, see?
Aside from that... Don't you think there's this whole new massive issue of nationality that defines a people?
Were the same people then? Historically there were few differences.
> You sound like you have much less than that in you.
Ethnically? Mother is 100% Ukrainian.
> I don't think Slavic culture – if there is, indeed, such a thing – defines itself with itself. It can't be its own description, see?
Historically, Slavs are defined by language and culture. Kind of like various Celtic groups. Just the way archaeologists and historians group them.
> Aside from that... Don't you think there's this whole new massive issue of nationality that defines a people?
Of course nationality matters now and to the future of a country. It's all that really matters. But people shouldn't try to rewrite history.
Heck, the Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia had that as its official name until very recently resolving the dispute with Greek irridentists.
Northern Macedonia was a proposal, but the referendum to adopt it failed to attract 50% of the voters. Unless I've missed some big news since then, FYROM is still its official name.
Regardless, it is a bad example since they are forced to use that name because of Greece. Other former Yugoslav Republics don't have such issues.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-how-much-it-costs-to...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulation_%28currency%29
Physical currency in circulation. Almost every modern currency is principally held digitally.
I had wondered why that $3300-3600 mark seemed to be the bottom. That seems to be a fair explanation. It doesn’t seem good. I wonder; has the demand for gold ever been lower than the cost to mine it?
>which still seems insane to me given that you probably can't even use it to buy lunch.
Anyone still calling it a “currency” doesn’t seem to grasp what currency is supposed to be. Crypto-commodity is much more appropriate.
What this means is if there was a world where only one person was mining bitcoin using a single hand crank and a laptop for energy, it'd still take exactly as long as a world where there were trillions of people mining bitcoin using nuclear powered supercomputing complexes. So the amount of electricity required to produce one coin on average is 100% a reflection of demand.
The more demand there is for bitcoin (and the more miners), the more it costs to mine a BTC. It's quite a brilliant design since it scales endlessly with no change necessary to the underlying system. For instance imagine a bunch of people started spending $3600 of electric/compute time mining coins. Suddenly the increased number of people mining would mean that that level of compute would generate fewer coins - and so the necessary compute to produce a coin would naturally grow. By contrast, imagine the price of BTC went down and thus there was a decline in incentive and number of people mining it. Suddenly the price of electric required to produce one coin would also go down.
There are also some technical issues with things like the 'price of electricity to mine a BTC' such as the fact that the electric consumption per hash generated is going to vary quite dramatically depending on whether somebody is using a CPU, GPU, dedicated ASIC system, etc and then the specifics within those broad categories.
The old saying likely holds here: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. People stating statistics like this are mostly just pushing an agenda. I do not mean the grandparent comment here. I mean the source he read it from. There are so many uncountable variables that just giving a number is completely meaningless, and highly misleading.
It has definitely happened that mines were closed because of a decline in price:
https://www.cdfund.com/en/gold-mine-closures-due-to-current-...
At the risk of being branded a "Bitcoin zealot from Reddit", I'd like to point out that although this may be locally true for any given reader since it's obviously dependent on where they live (which is also true of being able to buy lunch with US dollars by the way), it's certainly either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
You can buy anything under $500 on aliexpress or amazon here[1], and that's only one of about half a dozen or so different websites I have bookmarked that accept various cryptocurrencies, operating either as currency conversion services or selling directly. The implication that you cannot spend bitcoin on real goods is not correct. If you don't live in mexico, it's much easier to spend $10 of bitcoin than $10 of pesos.