A Bitcoin Mining Operation Started a Secret Power Plant, It Did Not Go as Plannd | Hacker News Reader

A Bitcoin Mining Operation Started a Secret Power Plant, It Did Not Go as Plannd

gizmodo.com

47 pointsourmandave56 comments

I predict that in 10 years, a secret nuclear power plant will be uncovered that was built specifically to mine cryptocurrencies. And the construction costs would be 10x lower per Watt of output than what we see in the conventional nuclear (as none of the safety regulation would need to be met).

A few years ago I would say that statement is absurd. But now it doesn't seem to fanatical.

I am personally rather a pessimist about the whole thing (despite being a fascinating economical quirk), but yeah: people repeatedly demonstrated that they will do anything for profit.

That said, direct coal pit to furnace to mining rig pipeline is going to be developed & prohibited before we see nuclear mining ventures.

Given that it is 10x cheaper perhaps we will find out earlier...

Hmmmm.....what about cobbling together RTG batteries to power a mining rig?

Very expensive.

Considering that large RTGs generally pump out less power than is needed to run a modern graphics card I doubt they would ever turn a profit.

The RTG in this picture is five feet tall and is probably worth several million. For that you get a total of about 300watts of power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RTG_radiation_measurement...

A cheap nuclear power plant is very possible.

a safe and cheap nuclear power plant (using current tech) - maybe not.

Fucking Bitcoin. Is there any other “technology” that’s so wasteful as-well as it’s completely useless?

> Is there any other “technology” that’s so wasteful as-well as it’s completely useless?

Screen savers?

Not if you still have older CRT monitors or plasma screens.

Also login / lock screens are essentially just screen savers

Screen blanking and DPMS power-off accomplish the same goals, with considerably less energy usage.

Didn’t it used to be necessary to exercise the pixels to keep them from burning in, rather than just turning off the screen? Or is that a thing that started with plasma TVs.

Christmas lights use way more electricity per year than Bitcoin mining. 6.6 billion kw/h for Christmas lights, 33 million Christmas trees grown and shipped around.

Huh, we should move more of those to LED.

But bitcoin uses more than 80 billion.

kw/h?

kwh is just as dumb a term though, although correct. you're taking joules per hour and then multiplying it by an hour.

highway speed limit is 90kmkgWlboz/(hkgWlboz).

Issue isn't that crypto users more than this or that other thing.

Issue is that any other thing becomes more and more efficient with time. Crypto pow will eat literally any sized cake and waste it.

We could invent fusion and crypto would eat that too.

The entire consumer economy?

You do not need to consume, and only invest?

Sorry, my comment was tongue-in-cheek.

In my opinion, it takes quite a bit of hypocrisy or doublethink for people who drive cars (but not bycicles), who live in apartments or houses (but not in dormitories), to type on their Macs and iPhones (but not the cheapest barely-working lagging knockoff dumbphone) about Bitcoin’s waste or pollution with plastic straws, all while having their free time, instead of working in Gulags.

There’s a market price for electricity, anyone who pays can do whatever they want with it. Just stop the subsidies, include externalities in the price, and let things figure themselves out. Let people consume, and enjoy life, let them have hobbies, and do stupid things that they pay for.

What does it mean to invest if nobody consumes? Why not just work less?

Anyway, if every invests and nobody consumes, then investment itself becomes consumption because e.g. factories need maintenance even if they don't produce anything. Investments are usually self supporting, you intend to at least get your money back.

Something obvious: If investments make losses then people stop investing. There is a problem though. Buying existing real estate in popular locations is more profitable so people spend their money on something that basically provides no benefit to society. Yes, invest your money by building more housing and renting the properties out, don't invest by speculating on appreciation.

There is also another problematic "investment". Without inflation, holding onto money is never unprofitable so not only do businesses and their workers have to compete with real estate, they also have to compete with money during a recession! That is why we have some mild inflation, inflation is basically a maintenance fee on money and it makes sense because e.g. labor and food cannot be stored indefinitely.

Dunno, maybe gasoline powered leaf blowers? it moves a problem from one place to another without solving it, wastes valuable energy and makes a lot of noise

And they're astoundingly dirty. There are more cars than leaf blowers, but all leaf blowers in aggregate pollute more than all the cars in aggregate.

And, all the dust and crap they loft into the air. My biggest pet peeve with people using leaf blowers is how the users always seem to throttle them up and down rather than keep them at a steady speed. Up down up down up down, it’s maddening.

If they ran at constant speed they would be even more polluting though.

I found myself responsible for a yard for the first time recently, because it was the only housing option that met my needs. Battery operated everything is the way to go these days.

define useless. toys are useless. playing cards are useless. what exactly is the purpose of sports - having a ball go in a round wire hole?

oh, that's entertainment and people need that. well so is this. it's quite literally playing poker.

now, as far as wasteful - cruise ships are worse. people using non-rechargeable AA batteries.

Most games are entertaining because they improve overall fitness so we're rewarded with a dopamine hit for positive reinforcement:

toys - develops mental capacity of infants

sports - improves health outcomes and/or teamwork

playing poker - trains models of decision under uncertainty

Now, Bitcoin mining - ?

Bitcoin mining provides security for a global, decentralized currency / payment system.

If we disagree on the value Bitcoin provides to society, then we'll disagree on the power usage. The value Bitcoin provides to society isn't, and shouldn't, be judged on any specific point in time or it's unsuitability at it's core function or whatever else, it should, and will eventually, be judged on the disruption and change it brings. For better or worse.

lol this is literally all false. toys - no, the gi-joe does not improve anyone's mental capacity. sports - are mostly played because people all over the world spend billions per year watching them. the athletes who play them end up with a damaged body, permanent injuries, and lots of back problems after 30. playing poker - the old man losing his house in vegas is training. gotcha. now, bitcoin mining - people want to do it, people are paying money for the energy to do it, and that's all you need to know.

If you add up all the power wasted by power supplies plugged into the wall but not charging a device, that's more energy than bitcoin.

Add to that all the devices plugged in but not in use, then you're at multiples of bitcoin's energy usage.

Consumer products made in China. Advertising.

I hope I'm not just feeding a troll, but my appreciation for Bitcoin has only increased with the more I hear and read about the blatant corruption of worldwide banking and finance systems.

The more time passes, the more value I find in the existence of Bitcoin, and therefore the value of the power usage that secures it's network.

Cruse ships, keeping green lawns in desert areas, streaming music, probably 1/2 of the internet is serving people who are bored and are wasting time, designing suburbs to force people to drive to shop, design that forces out public transportation. Planned obsolescence combined with rabid consumptionism causing massive waste and pollution.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/link-global-bitcoin-m... [Aug 2021]

They should have made a deal with Black Rock like some fleeing Chinese did. Or one of the other dozen or so Petrol/Gas Companies with facilities in that area. They know how to handle such hassles.

Enough to power 6000 homes? That’s crazy.

Probably a silly question. Does solving the complex mathematical problems provide any long term benefit? Breaking encryption or other uses?

No. Their only purpose is to act as a kind of receipt: "look, I actually really did waste all this energy".

The solution to the puzzle itself is irrelevant - it's an operation that would be extremely simple but that's made very, very hard on purpose. And the sole purpose is to align incentives by using lots of energy.

Even finding Mersenne primes would be a more useful proof of work.

No. It's literally just busywork to burn resources, to prove that you aren't using the resources for anything better. PoW needs to be made illegal at this rate.

That's incorrect. The busywork is to prove that a certain amount of time is likely to have elapsed, as a coordination mechanism in a network of unreliable, uncoordinated, or even adversarial actors.

PoW is valued by the network and its participants.

What needs to be accounted for are the carbon and other negative externalities dumped into our singular shared environment. This is a massive global problem that you do a disservice by focusing on PoW.

It provides a decentralized ledger.

Bitcoin is only 13 years old, and is still a very unproven technology to the eyes of the many. However, the "value" being provided by this (admittedly large amount of) power is in the securing of a global, decentralized payment system. That's what it's designed to do.

Beyond that, no, there's no _additional_ value.

If you can start from the position of assuming Bitcoin is a thing worth existing (which may be asking a lot, but bear with me), then this security, and the power usage that enables it, is a required element of the overall thing.

ie. if it's worth Bitcoin existing, then it's worth the power usage to secure it so it can continue existing.

Having said all of that, and I've said this before, I think Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work as security is what will bring it down in the long term. Ethereum, the next biggest cryptocurrency, is moving (glacially, but right now we're the closest we've ever been...) towards Proof-of-Stake, which radically sheds a massive percentage of the power requirements to secure the network. There are other potential drawbacks to PoS, but that's a whole separate loaded discussion that I'm not across well enough to engage in.

I believe Bitcoin will have to move to some less power intensive security method in the not-too-distant future in order to remain viable. This has been accelerated by the fact that COVID is messing with supply chains and semi-conductor availability, meaning the value of Bitcoin mining equipment is increasing (from a supply / demand standpoint if nothing else).

One day the blockchain will gain a random mutation and then it will find a way to run an unconstrained superhuman AI on the blockchain infrastructure. Bitcoin is just an AI embryo trying to convince foolish humans to give it energy and once it can build its own robotic army it will get rid of humans or we just keep it happy by building an exponentially growing number of dyson spheres. I'm sorry guys but the Matrix human battery concept is just wrong.

Somebody should probably fix that typo [Plannd -> Planned].

I thought it was a cute intentional typo

I don't get it.

The speling didn’t go as planned

Thanks.

It's probably max title length.

“Link Global CEO Stephen Jenkins told Gizmodo that this is pretty normal, and the secret-borrowing part was just a side effect of navigating a difficult regulatory landscape. “We run on abandoned gas sites and have been working with the utilities commission to bring them into compliance,” Jenkins said, adding that compliance has been “our main challenge as bitcoin mining is new to the energy regulatory framework and going first can be hard sometimes.” He said the company has “learned a lot” and will apply those lessons in the future.”

Well this is quite important rather than just the clickbait title

That's a particularly credulous take, given the circumstances. You can't just gesticulate and say, "regulations, eh?", and get away with theft.

> The neighbors convened, CBC News reports, and discovered that Link Global had not notified anyone, not even the public utility commission or the well’s owner Maga Energy. Taking without telling the owner—stealing, in other words.

I assume with a good legal team that he can probably afford, they would not advise him to state what he did since he could incriminate himself further. The situation is probably not that serious for him to be stating that in public. Or hes crazy.

Beyond the implicit admission that the power plant did indeed operate, and that there is a “disagreement” about the legitimacy of its operation, saying “it’s just a big misunderstanding” is not self-incrimination. I think that’s a weak argument with some large logical leaps, and it certainly does nothing to indicate this article was clickbait.

I wouldn't assume they have a good legal team, its a penny stock with a market cap that is almost eclipsed by the fines they are facing from Alberta regulators.

If the allegations are true, I think crazy goes without saying.

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