Bitcoin Miners Are Giving New Life to Old Fossil-Fuel Power Plants | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Miners Are Giving New Life to Old Fossil-Fuel Power Plants

wsj.com

67 pointstareqak84 comments

Somebody did the calculation of how many bitcoins we can mine with the energy released by burning the entire planet? That would be great

well seeing as mining difficulty scales with the amount of mining being done...

1 bitcoin would be mined.

Current block reward is 6.25BTC and you can't exactly mine a partial block.

... and the next halving is still ~3 years away.

oh, well then. And here I was thinking it might not be worth it.

That numbers adjusts upwards and downwards every 2016 blocks.

So if we burned the entire planet the recipient will mine most of the bitcoin for a maximum of 2016 blocks at a faster rate than before they started mining, and then the difficulty will adjust upwards reverting the block creation time to 10 minutes per block. When the planet extinguishes, blocks will be found much slower or cease being found at all, until the end of the 2016 block period where difficulty will drop much lower, allowing people to earn bitcoin using an abacus and negligible amounts of power.

So there is no absolute need for bitcoin to use a lot of power and it scales up and down.

Think bigger. A Dyson Sphere would maximize bitcoin mining

(Not much) additional discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27234948

With more said under a different submitted link:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26828479

We no longer need the paperclip maximizing AI from Adams' novel. Turn all resources into beautiful hashes and HODL!

I don’t know the answer to this but most crypto related post on this site generate super low quality discussion. Mostly echoing points that are provably debunked or really don’t do anything other than echo the sentiment of HN from past threads.

For people on mobile does any way exist to filter out posts like this that we know will produce disappointing conversations. I like conversations opposing my view points but not when its uneducated or just pandering.

You would make your point better by pointing out the "low quality discussion" and explaining why it's wrong. That way you would also be contributing to better discussion, and others will learn something.

I have a shocking proposal that may seem too good to be true:

1) Stop subsidizing fossil fuels. [0]

2) Tax carbon emissions.

Bonus:

3) Incentivize clean energy.

[0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

Great idea. Not gonna happen quickly, particularly worldwide.

So now what do we do about Bitcoin in the meantime?

Perpetually being stuck in a cycle of implementing politically expedient but half-assed measures? See also: "oh no, there's too much plastic! let's uh... ban plastic straws!"

More like perpetually being stuck in a cycle of voter appeasement to get re-elected because they are “doing something”...

So now what do we do about Bitcoin in the meantime?

Exactly as the commenter above proposes: "Change the subject"

Not sure why the downvotes. It is not realistic for every country in the world to pass an equivalent carbon tax. The mining will just move to he locations with no (or lowest) carbon tax

> 2) Tax carbon emissions.

Progressively.

Not a detail at all.

Progressive taxes on carbon emissions will discourage economies of scale. This means for the same amount of co2 produced you have less production (good things for society) which is pretty bad. Ideally the co2 should be taxed at exactly the cost to reduce it to an easily stored or safe molecule.

AFAIK Canada does this by giving everyone a fixed amount of tax credit to offset the tax. That way poor people aren't taxed more but everyone are still incentivized to reduce their emissions

The best way is to take all the carbon tax collected, divide it by the number of people in the country, and distribute it evenly to everyone.

That way, if you use less than the average amount of carbon, you actually make money.

That's essentially what Canada has done, except on a subnational level (as it only applies in individual provinces that don't have their own emissions reduction mechanisms with at least equivalent effects)

Poor people will still pay in the form of higher prices that bake in the coat of the carbon tax.

Poor people are also the most exposed and suffer the most from carbon emissions.

1. that's how the tax would be collected for most peope. ie. you'll pay $x/gal more at the gas pump, rather than declaring how much tons of carbon you emitted on your tax return.

2. whether they pay or not is irrelevant. what actually matters is whether they end up paying more or less in net. for a scheme that taxes people according to their consumption but gives everyone the same amount of tax credits in return, poor people would be expected to come out ahead because they consume less on average.

carbon dividend.

Yup, this would ensure the benefits of bitcoin mining would not outweigh the costs, and it would make most of it unprofitable. One great thing about crypto mining is that it makes unsustainable subsidies very obvious.

The difficulty adjustment would just make it a little easier to mine bitcoins, so miners would spend the same money. But at least they'd be using clean energy if the carbon tax were high enough.

This would give an advantage to Bitcoin miners in 3rd world countries where carbon credits and other fanciful notions are optional.

We [the developed world] would be outsourcing our Bitcoin pollution to these 3rd world countries and also contributing to “environmental racism” or whatever the left is calling it these days.

Exactly. We need to ban, and aggressively prosecute the use of crypto to prevent this. Useful side-effect: reduction of ransomware attacks.

That has worked terrible with the war in drugs. How do you think its going to work when no smuggling us required and anyone with a solar panel and a satellite dish can mine?

You're going to have to find a different way to deal with that. Without completely changing the way the US government and justice system works I don't think that's possible.

I don’t know about banning crypto to stop ransomware attacks, if we followed that train of thought we shouldn’t even have an internet where people can steal personal information.

Is this sarcasm/hyperbole? There’s nothing wrong with cryptography.

You can't control everything. The west already scrutinizes many commodities it imports: diamonds, gold, shoes, phones. There's no reason to suggest bitcoin mining sources can't be discriminated against.

So at scale, damage is mitigated.

In the long run, renewable energy from wind and solar are already the cheapest forms of energy anyway.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2020/01/21/ren...

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

Ok so you now have only single-origin bitcoins available that are legal to purchase though a government dealer?

What if it is a worldwide mining pool that is paying out worldwide, like most coin mining pools currently do?

That would result in income earned in many different tax jurisdictions paid to many more tax jurisdictions, kinda impractical as the pool is contributing compute but the winnings are shared among all the miners.

And would we just use the honor system for Monero mined in China/India/Africa/Indonesia/wherever? There is no incentive apart from these hypothetical miners import agreement being revoked to not mix the coins up.

This might sound a little crass, but while I do agree that wind, solar, and nuclear are the future of power generation I also believe that cap and trade and its resultant currency of offset credits are morally equivalent to the indulgence system that the catholic church had set up in the medieval thorough early modern era.

So basically when Bill Gates is trying to offset his carbon credits he's basically paying the priests of his new religion to be able to fly all over the world without a guilty conscience, whilst the poors are agonizing over bagging their groceries with plastic bags because the red states don't want to ban them.

It doesn't have to be so comprehensive. You can incentivize green coin without making it the baseline standard.

Ex: You sold some coin on an exchange for USD? If you can show the coin's origin, you get capital gain credit or something. And vice versa.

> Yup, this would ensure the benefits of bitcoin mining would not outweigh the costs, and it would make most of it unprofitable.

How did you conclude that the price or difficulty factor would not adapt to make it profitable?

The difficulty goes down as a direct result of less mining being done. Long term, blocks will be generated at the same rate, but each block would have less work behind it.

The reward for Bitcoin mining is fixed. The work required is variable. If electricity costs globally shot up, there would be far smaller mining operations but the payout would be the same because the Bitcoin network adjusts its difficulty.

PoW is a beast that consumes everything it can.

Sure but the issue is the power consumption (which would go down) not the payout.

>PoW is a beast that consumes everything it can.

It doesn't really "consume everything it can" like a paperclip optimizer would. Like you said the reward for mining is fixed, so the amount of money/resources it can consume is limited to (mining reward * bitcoin price).

If you tax all CO2 emissions you will not “incentivize clean energy” because “clean energy” produces more CO2 emissions.

You will incentivize nuclear, though, which is the cleanest energy.

A much more efficient way to do that, though, would be to simply cut the science denying red tape.

And Legalize drugs so crypto market dies off.

Drugs are not the primary use case any more (if ever), time to move beyond that talking point to something credible.

There are other good reasons to legalize drugs

> Drugs are not the primary use case any more (if ever), time to move beyond that talking point to something credible

If you’re willing to dismiss the argument so vehemently, then it would also be good to follow up with a justification for your dismissal.

Aside from pure speculation, which is fine by me, I really don't know what else they're used for significantly.

What goods or services are regularly purchased in crypto?

Ransomware is the other big area where bitcoin is used for payment.

This I suspect is a large(st) use case, also NK (others?) may be using it to circumvent sanctions.

Bitcoin was as created to resist censorship— hence Wikileaks was able to raise money after visa et al banned them. It was created to resist debasement- as a result it maintains its value as inflation ramps up.

Thus you would actually not want to buy things with bitcoin, and instead spend rapidly depreciating USD.

That didn't answer my question at all.

Bitcoin is a tool for turning coal into evading CCP capital controls and financial repression, with the externalities of pollution and emboldening libertarians

The main crypto to goods and services market is drugs.

Everything else is a consequence of the value that family of transactions have added.

> 1) Stop subsidizing fossil fuels.

This should include kerosine for flights.

I’m afraid this would just further incentivize mining in countries who don’t have such taxes. Further centralizing Bitcoin and shifting the energy production to places who are even worse environmental abusers.

Bitcoin: Dumbest clever invention ever.

To quote an old joke: they’re Dunning-Krugerrands.

The irony of this joke is very intense, but you won’t get it.

The thing that is most clever about bitcoin is that hating it only affects your well-being, it doesn’t affect bitcoin.

Bitcoin will continue, it is inevitable.

Until you can buy things with actual Bitcoin, its value is gonna be determined only by market sentiment. So yeah, hating it actually affect it

But Jack Dorsey said that crypto is good for the environment!!! /sarcasm

is it progressive or regressive

Is it progressive or regressive

Here we go again

"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer

We are currently in the second stage for Bitcoin. Based on the comments here, in social media and from news outlets, seems more time is needed before its better understood and appreciated broadly.

I and many others continue to believe a sound money settlement layer technology divorced from arbitrary government intervention is of enormous value to society. One need only look at wtfhappenedin1971.com to understand why. But until then, narratives that cherrypick data and paint Bitcoin in a negative light will continue to dominate.

Patience. HODL. And continue to hope for a better world on the other side of all of this.

> One need only look at wtfhappenedin1971.com to understand why.

A bunch of scary-looking graphs haphazardly thrown together with huge ads abutting either end is not an argument. This comment is guilty of its own accusation: cherry-picking data to paint a dishonest narrative.

Of course these charts are only a starting point of inquiry. Several scholars, philosophers and intellectuals have both predicted such trends and provided rigorous intellectual analysis of their underlying causes.

This is basically fake news. The plant serves regular customers, and since it costs a lot to fire it up or shut it down, during the period where there is excess supply of electricity it is used to mine bitcoin. Unless you have a huge expensive and unavailable (due to constrained supply of cells) mega battery pack you cannot store that energy.

Globally, bitcoins’ entire energy usage is equal to just 1/6th of the surplus energy that is THROWN AWAY.

All this Bitcoin energy usage nonsense is FUD to keep people oppressed and using a currency that the politicians can inflate at will.

Due to the cantillon effect it is very profitable for wall street and politicians like congress to steal from the masses this way. This is the primary cause of wealth inequality.

Bitcoin fixes this, it gives regular people an escape, so they publish FUD against it.

I don’t think you understand how power plants work

This is exactly how old coal and biomass plants work. You can throttle them back when power prices are bad, but shutting down and restarting are expensive, multi-hour processes. Sometimes the spot price is negative, and dumping that electricity into anything is better than putting it on the grid. In some cases before bitcoin they've located aluminum smelters nearby to use excess generating capacity in the same way.

"Bitcoin fixes this, it gives regular people an escape"

Really? It seems to have made a small group of early adopters very rich, a small group of insiders very rich, and a large group of people suckered into buying at 60k+ very poor.

I'm not really bullish or bearish on cryptocurrency, but it has a long way to go until it's something for "regular people".

I don't think you understand. The mere fact that it COULD potentially be used by anyone is a defense against all complaints. Because democracy. Like a magic charm you see. No I have never read any theory or heard the phrase "material conditions" why do you ask.

I'm exaggerating but I fucking swear this is the level of sophistication we get from actual crypto fiends in here.

It’s sad you refused to mount an actual argument and instead are engaging in ad hominem based on a strawman you erected.

But that’s fine, keep believing bitcoiners are dumb and keep bashing bitcoin.

That’s actually better for me. HFSP

There actually is an argument in there I just trusted people to be able to see it through the joke.

Should have known better.

It seems that way because you are not aware if how it is being used in practice. As a savings vehicle, holding for 4 years has never been a mistake. Globally, and for half a decade, it has been protecting poor people by giving them an exit. Millions of Venezuelans have avoided starvation by using it to avoid massive inflation destroying their savings. It is held in every country and every community.

I remember comments just like yours in the past 4 years who pretended like everyone got in at $20k (a price that existed for a day).

Average price over past 4 years is way below todays price. And todays price is only down due to this coordinated FUD attack.

PS— I am the only one who made a substantive comment on this thread and am being heavily down voted.

HN isn't a place of ideas, it is a place where where only a narrow, anti-human rights, ideology is tolerated.

This is total rubbish: "HN isn't a place of ideas, it is a place where where only a narrow, anti-human rights, ideology is tolerated."

If you really believe this then you seriously need to time off to reflect. It simply isn't true. Where is good, the bitcoin community on twitter?

Yes lots of people have made money off crypto. It's hard to say how many as I'm not aware of any research into this figure.

That doesn't negate the criticism thrown at cryptocurrencies. Criticism demonstrates playing with ideas.

Notice your entire response is a downvote and the assertion “that is total rubbish”. Not a rebuttal. Not even an attempt to address the point, followed with a personal attack.

Telling me I need a time out is exactly the kind of personal attack that is really just your confession that you are anti-intellectual and you are upset that I pointed out the hypocrisy.

And of course you want me to take a “time out” because the last thing you want is to be confronted with facts that undermine your bigotry.

So I've asked for an example of a community that is good. Can you give any?

Honestly I'd be really interested in knowing about it.

On Bitcoin, do you honestly not think there is no cult like behaviours with this movement? No shilling? No ignoring inconvenient facts?

I'm not an enermy. I'm happy to have an engaged discussion here.

The idea that hacker news is toxic does strike me as absurd. It's not perfect but it's well designed for polite engagement.

I'm more than happy to discuss bitcoin with you too. I feel like I've been straw manned.

How can inflation cause starvation, can you elaborate? This is novel idea in the field of economics.

I'm very aware of how it's used in practice.

I stand by my point that this has miles to go before it's for "regular people" and you kind of prove it in your response. Sure, if you had cash to put into bitcoin and hold for 4 years, you might have made more - but most "regular people" do not. The swings are far too wild to price anything in BTC (rather than peg it to another currency and convert it to BTC) so ultimately we're all still cashing out for dollars or pounds, and someone has to lose for that to happen. If you're an early adopter, or and insider, you know the perfect time to cash out and "buy the dip". 'Regular people' not so much.

My comment was not an attack on you, cryptocurrency, human-rights or anything else. I'm sure you've done very well from Bitcoin - but it's not ready for my mum.

> This is basically fake news. The plant serves regular customers, and since it costs a lot to fire it up or shut it down, during the period where there is excess supply of electricity it is used to mine bitcoin.

That’s not true.

The power plant in upstate New York has been offline for almost a decade. It was purchased and reactivated specifically to mine Bitcoin. https://www.nysfocus.com/2021/04/13/new-york-bitcoin-mining-...

The power plant in Montana was due to close in 2018, until they realized they could sell the power to Bitcoin miners. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/bitcoin-miner-mar...

Linking to fake news repeating the same spin is not supporting a fake news article. The plants serve retail customers. The “just to mine bitcoin” is a lie told to try and bash bitcoin.

Reality is bitcoin is being mined with stranded natural gas, waste energy etc. Not with expensive high demand electricity— because that electricity is way too expensive.

Here is a direct quote from the NY plant owner’s SEC filing [1]:

> No direct competitor currently owns and operates its own power plant for the purpose of Bitcoin mining.

[1] https://corporate.support.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Gre...

Inflation the primary cause of wealth inequality? What is this nonsense?

> All this Bitcoin energy usage nonsense is FUD to keep people oppressed and using a currency that the politicians can inflate at will.

There is some serious cognitive dissonance if losing 1-4% to inflation a year is unacceptable but a billionaire's tweet costing you 30-40% is completely fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com