Bitcoin mining has driven up energy bills for residents and businesses

> In Upstate New York, where a quarter of US crypto mining takes place, the researchers find that electricity rates have gone up in response to rising demand. Their study demonstrates that because of bitcoin mining’s power usage, households paid an additional $165 million a year in energy costs, while businesses paid an extra $79 million. In China, where more than two-thirds of the world’s crypto mining took place over the past decade, electricity rates are set by the government and inflexible to demand. Crypto miners there were crowding other industries out of the market and forcing electricity to be rationed, the research suggests.

So correlation implies causation?

I'm not sure if the study is just flawed or the article is doing an especially bad job of explaining it.

I won't be reading the paper because of this:

> Benetton and Compiani received financial support from Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative. Ripple Labs supports the cryptocurrency XRP.

XRP is a scam run by Ripple labs. The company routinely mis-states the utility of XRP.

When chain letters (e.g. the Send a Time pyramid scheme) caused impact to the postal system beyond what the system was designed to handle, to the detriment of the intended users of the system, chain letters were banned. Now, Bitcoin serves as a similar, though obfuscated, pyramid scheme that is detrimental to intended usage of the power system for productiviry or enjoyment. I see no reason not to apply the same solution.

I'm not paying Bitcoin's energy bill. Bitcoin is paying its own bill, but the electric grid is a marketplace with a finite supply. So the people who own those companies are raising the rates (supply and demand).

Electricity, much like housing, should not be a place where regular folks can get priced out of the market by corporations.

You just want me to be mad at bitcoin so I don't notice that the system itself is sadistic.

> In the United States, crypto mining could cost residential and business ratepayers $1 billion a year, the researchers estimate.

Is $1 billion a year across the whole country a significant number?

China sure made the right choice to ban crypto. 0.5% of the world's energy is insane

I’m paying to subsidise the fossil fuel industry, I care more about that, I’m just not outages about this.

Price of food, fuel, lumber, metals, stocks, houses, rents, electronics, etc. all goes up: increased demand, supply chain issues, increased money supply/inflation.

Price of electricity goes up: Bitcoin's fault?

> As more of the tokens are mined, the puzzles get harder

Difficulty doesn't automatically increase over time. Rather, it has tended to increase for two major reasons:

1) bitcoin price going up, increasing miner competition chasing the higher reward. The reward halvings every 4 years have done little to counter this uptrend.

2) mining efficiency going up. after transitioning from CPUs through GPUs and FPGAs to ASICs, efficiencies have started to level off now.

Long-term, Bitcoin is reducing everyone’s electric bill by smoothing out the bathtub curve and making it economical to overprovision energy sources.

Bitcoin mining can easily turn on and off as the price of energy fluctuates, so all of a sudden we have the ability to use energy sources like solar which need to be overprovisioned to ensure that e.g. bad weather doesn’t reduce grid capacity too much. Bitcoin mining just turns off if it’s cloudy.

We also all of a sudden have the ability to economically use energy sources which can’t be spun up and down rapidly, like geothermal. You just leave the turbines running all the time and if you have a surplus you fire up the Bitcoin miners.

Same logic could be applied to just about anything that uses any resource at all.

It's interesting that now that there are proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies the "cryptocurrencies are polluting the planet" is now becoming "Bitcoin is polluting the planet".

What I'm wondering is if Bitcoin itself could one day switch to proof-of-stake? Is this something the Bitcoin community may consider if proof-of-stakes turns out to work and be secure?

Is this something that is even remotely possible?

"While the residential and small business rates are among the five most expensive in the country, the industrial rate is much lower, ranking right in the middle among the states."

There's an obvious solution here. Residential rates went up 10% because the local utility has a simplistic demand pricing program that allows cheap industrial demand to drive up expensive residential rates.

Regarding Upstate NY, the externalities to consider from mining are a lot more than the very narrow take this article provides (electricity costs go up!).

I get that the article is about electricity, and not the industry's general impact on a region when it comes in.

That said, who has been to the North Country lately, i.e. really deep up there where these mines are? For those unaware, the jobs are basically:

- Dannemora prison

- One or two small colleges

- light tourism: the seasonal jobs around Lake Placid, niche interest in the 1,000 islands,

- some logging, but most of that area is a state park

- Closer, but not in commuting distance: Ft Drum, a dying dairy industry closer to Utica

It remains to be seen how many jobs come from an industry growing up there. But reading this, from Booth of all places, is sort of like saying electric costs have gone up in the Rust Belt because the first new industry in decades is moved there. NY fought tooth and nail to get Ft. Drum into Watertown/North Country in the 80's for a very good reason - that area is dying.

This is also putting aside that these mines are in dilapidated power plants (fighting the extensive rural (?) blight up there) and pulling ~green energy from the St. Lawrence.

energy is a finite resource sold on a market. if bitcoin miners are willing to pay higher price for it - what's your problem?

if you want population to pay less for energy - vote for a government that will subsidize that.

A lot of the comments are whataboutism and strawman arguments (big corporations, fossil fuel, military). To de-emotionalise the discussion, it makes sense to separate the two aspects:

1. Is the argument from the linked article factually (and semantically) true? 2. If that is the case, what are the moral and political implications?

>Cheap electricity in places such as Texas is expected to make the US a leading refuge for crypto miners.

It's a good thing I don't live in Texas, because otherwise I might be worried considering how shitty and unreliable ERCOT is already without widespread mining.