Power Plant Decides Mining Bitcoin Is More Profitable Than Selling Electricity | Hacker News Reader

Power Plant Decides Mining Bitcoin Is More Profitable Than Selling Electricity

tomshardware.com

52 pointsvyrotek20 comments

For ten years now I've payed a premium on my electricity bill to purchase energy from renewable sources, to incentivize and support renewable power, with the goal of lowering carbon output.

I am _pissed_ these plants are literally wasting energy to mine crypto. Every renewable watt that goes on this is so much less offset carbon.

I hope those that get rich off this can explain themselves to their kids and grandkids.

What I choose to use energy for is valid and worthwhile. What you choose to use energy for is invalid and wasteful?

Maybe we just get on with decarbonizing the energy system, make sure everyone is paying for the energy they use, and then we don't have to worry about making moral judgements.

Whether crypto is “valid” or not isn’t the issue. Externalities are.

When power plants mine crypto, they are offloading costs to people that gain no benefit in the form of pollution. Therefore there is a reason for everyone else to care.

Crypto mining is not free of harm to uninvolved bystanders.

The same thing could be claimed of plenty physical goods though to. How much energy was used to make the aluminum foil I baked on so i don't have to clean the pan? How much money is spend mining gold that im just going to carry around as jewellery that could have instead atleast been mere plating. And when all those things are directly tradable with money, and bitcoins are tradable with money, mining bitcoin is to a consumer no different than mining gold.

Your argument doesn't make the other argument more ore less valid.

You should always consider how much energy something consumed and how relevant it is for our society.

Bitcoin has no future and is not replacing or solving a real problem. Right now it only increaes droughts and crazy weather.

Mining gold is totally different than bitcoin. Not sure why you would even argue in this direction.

Gold can be recycled which reduces the co2 footprint / makes it more and more useful. Gold also creates emotions and supports our society structure as a symbol on rings.

It's critical for scientific discoveries and for computers.

And still we need to make sure we mine gold as co2 efficient as possible with as little impact to nature than possible. Equal to bitcoin just that bitcoin doesn't do any of what gold does.

My ring is a token to my love to mi wife and will be recycled in 80 years. Bitcoin is producing co2 when mined and whenever transfered and the base system needs to run 24/7 even if none is doing anything on the network.

Die Bitcoin die

The fact that the same reasoning can be done for other things does not remove the justification of this reasoning.

This is why there is advocacy for a lot of eco-friendly behaviors, including those you mention.

But the problem of cryptomining is on the heavy side of the harmful behaviors -- and potentially extremely harmful if the frenzy is not curbed, as hinted by this kind of news.

Sure let's do this but it will take time and while we wait and accept that bitcoin is part of the problem let's ban bitcoin until this issue is fixed.

Crypto is special because minging crypto makes mining crypto worse. Almost everything else gets more efficient with scale. It's a positive-reinforcing death spiral.

What ires me over this one is that they rationalize it by thinking "it´s green energy, so it´s not a problem if we waste it". Meanwhile, for every megawatt they put into mining bitcoin, someone burns almost a half ton of coal. They can decide to put it on the grid to offset energy production from other sources, yet they decide to "waste it" on bitcoin. (As a sibling noted, it being wasted is a question of opinion)

Perhaps. But perhaps it will create further economies of scale for renewable energy which will accelerate adoption of renewable energy. The more renewable energy that is used, the cheaper it gets, wasted or not.

The more renewable energy that is built, the cheaper it gets.

We now know that there is a cartel of US miners trying to create "clean" bitcoins (in part to appeal to Tesla and Musk) that will sell at a premium.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57240090

This could increase the pricing differential between clean and dirty electricity sources. However, most utilities don't care and so will buy the cheaper electricity, which means that there won't be a significant push to decrease fossil fuel based generation.

Unless demands from bitcoin mining start to strain clean electricity generation, there isn't really much reason to build more renewable capacity either. The kind of thing described in the OP (the repurposing of existing facilities) is likely to be the main result for the foreseeable future.

"Clean" bitcoins are just "greenwashed" bitcoins.

We don't need to waste co2 to motivate investment in co2 saving technology.

We need less greed and a co2 tax which makes it undesirable to mine Bitcoin over producing energy which actually does something for our society.

People investing in crypto will incentivise more new renewable power plants built than artificial consumer price hikes could ever do.

Suddenly, thanks to crypto, investing into energy generation capacity becomes naturally profitable business.

Two flaws with your argument:

1. We crossed the line on climate change. We need to stop wasting co2 for everything not critical to us and need to start investing and incentivcing green things.

2. I heard this argument often enough and blindly repeated: bitcoin will always optimize for the cheapest energy. Right now it co sums coal energy and it takes away green energy.

There is also no incentive for any Bitcoin miner to invest in green energy. Why would they? If they would it would mean laws make it that they have to because green energy would be the cheapest one. And then they would still consume all of this green energy because that's what bitcoin consumes: Energy.

The only thing left is heat. Heating with energy is the worst way of heating. Heating through thermal energy is more efficient.

Bitcoins value is decoupled from the energy sector. The incentive of burning co2 for money is much higher than what the energy market is optimized for.

Our energy market is often subsidies because people NEED energy.

Guess who wins in rural china? Bitcoin mining or a light bulb for a kid to learn in the evening? Come guess

Energy sector value will get coupled to crypto. It will eventually be one industry. Crypto will become the way for energy producers to capitalize on excess renewable energy.

We don't have storage so it's not enough to get to 100% renewables. We need to get to 1000% production so off peak production will fullfill all our needs. And they need to have a way to get paid for the excess.

Price of energy will be dictated by price of bitcoin, and government will subsidize energy sale to residential consumers so they can afford energy. Commercial ventures will pass the additional energy cost to consumer in prices of goods.

It will all land at equilibrium where mining is only profitable when done with excess energy.

I'm not sure if your analysis is correct about the outcome, but it is a brilliant look at one way forward. Something else that excess energy could be used for is recycling aluminum, possibly for large-scale reissue of aluminum-air batteries. In any case, combining some sort of production to the excess may be far easier than grid-level storage and I hope some people in the right positions listen to you about that.

Grid feeding fossil fuel stations dump carbon into the air, but as part of a public service. Private non-grid fossil fuel stations should be taxed for the dumping of carbon.

I suspect it could be politically favorable to do so.

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