Kosovo bans cryptocurrency mining to save electricity
reuters.com
reuters.com
This profiteering situation tends to crop up in places where the cost of electricity is "artificially" low, e.g. the government subsidizes it because of national security, humanitarian reasons, or to promote economic development, or places that cannot meaningfully participate in international bulk electricity export (e.g. distance, politics). These places formed functional market islands until recently, so their pricing was not relevant in the global context.
With cryptocurrency mining, the miners are engaging in a global arbitrage on energy prices. While the environmental costs are already externalized by the producer of the electricity, the electricity producers made those decisions before they foresaw that individual citizen operators could consume large amounts of electricity, and scale their consumption higher with fewer constraints than industrial consumers can.
Solutions are possible, but challenging to implement and enforce. If you switch to progressive pricing, you need better meters, and determined miners will steal or convince people to resell. If you want to regulate mining, you will need enforcement and tackle corruption. If you want to "let the market fix it", poor people won't be able to afford electricity.
Within Kosovo, the Serbian community controls the hydroelectric plant, and the Kosovan community controls the two lignite plants. This adds an extra complication for policymakers.
It's practically easier to mandate discounts or payouts to vulnerable households, than it is to artificially reduce price of electricity.
If you're that avid about crypto mining - you may want to just build your own hydro electric power plant.
What do you think of replacing the subsidy with giving citizens/industries electricity vouchers of equivalent value?
There are other sinks for cheap electricity in an industrial economy. Aluminum is a common one, as the main extraction is an electrochemical process. Canada is the 4th largest producer and Iceland (!) 11th.
> If you want to "let the market fix it", poor people won't be able to afford electricity.
If you want to give poor people electricity, just give them money which they can use for electricity or whatever else they may need. The solution isn't to pretend that electricity is cheaper than it is. Not only does it create issues like miners exploiting the system, but it also encourages wasteful uses of electricity, removes a valuable market signal and removes autonomy of those poor people you're trying to help. Maybe they would trade off some electricity for better housing. Instead you're making the decision for them.
Also "just give money to people" in systems with very poor and sometimes corrupted administrations is a very sure way of ensuring poor people get nearly nothing and it all gets siphoned in the pockets of not very nice people.
Subsidizing electricity, directly or indirectly, is an incentive to do exactly nothing. Power is cheap, so you use it to heat the house - period. Any move to be more energy efficient doesn't make sense.
And, while it is a subsidy of one sort of electricity, it is, I think, not the same as other possible subsidies which simply try to keep the price down.
(terminology : when I say constant-across-people I mean that the number for each person at any given time is the same, but what this number is may change over time, and possibly frequently)
Specifically, instead of the state using a subsidy to pay for a constant-across-people fraction of all electricity costs, it would instead be paying, for each person, a constant-across-people additive amount of electricity costs.
I of course agree that this still distorts the market signals somewhat, but I think it is substantially less, and, in particular, avoids most of the issues of "being a place where electricity is super cheap, where people will therefore try things that require very large quantities of electricity", because, after the relatively small amount of electricity which is free-for-consumers, the price beyond that point is not artificially cheap (and may instead actually be a bit more expensive than would be natural, because of the artificial demand increase caused by the credits).
I'm not an economist, but I think that seems like it would be substantially less distortion-causing than the state paying a constant-across-people fraction of the price in order to keep the price-to-consumers below a given threshold.
You have an algorithm which says who gets energy allocations - and it really doesn't matter if it's approximate, as long as you notify who gets the money. Then you sent the money, and people will make a lot of noise if they don't get it. Sure, the algorithm won't be perfect, but people have a clear way of giving feedback: "I'm not getting money and should", or "I'm not included and think I should be because I'm poor". Just two failure modes, both clear.
Compare this to the totally opaque way energy subsidies work. Government postulates that prices should stay the same, then talks behind closed doors with a handful of companies and gives them a completely non-transparent amount of money that may or may not have anything to do with the price difference. I can probably think of 6 ways in 6 minutes on how this can be exploited.
If you're allowed to decide how to spend your money, you're likely to do a lot of low-hanging-fruit stuff that you wouldn't otherwise, like fix that windy window frame. No governmental program can even come close to this efficiency - they'd just do a "thermal reabitation" on the whole building, which will be 50% better and 900000% more expensive.
The reason giving money works so well is that it is both very flexible, and uses a huge information advantage - each person knows their situation better than the government. It's not about gov being inefficient (tho they may be) it's that it's incapable in principle of approaching the efficiency of "give them money".
Small cash transfers may be one of the most effective form of poverty relief in politically stable poor countries with at least a nascent market economy. In a peer-reviewed trial in Kenya it was found to have substantial positive effects on the local economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiveDirectly#Basic_income_expe...
One of the most common uses of the funds was buy galvanized roofing. It's very expensive compared to thatching up front, but lasts a lifetime and eliminates both the labour and material costs for ongoing maintenance.
That would never have occurred to me. If I had wanted to help them with in-kind donations, I may well have sent something relatively much less useful, lacking awareness of their local context. Very real risk of sending coals to Newcastle, there.
I know that in some developed countries, organizations like food banks also run into this. People will donate food in-kind, but most food banks would rather receive cash to have flexibility in addressing needs as they arise.
Absolutely crazy.
This is basically a crime against humanity at this point.
In other words, bitcoin & co. aren't the first toxic, destructive get-rich-quick schemes, and we as a society have shown time and again we're unable to really resist most of them.
Because this common caricature of "smallpox blanket" is not based in verifiable historical fact. There's no clear evidence that Europeans were literally weaponizing smallpox to wipe out most of native American populations. The understanding of how infection spread happened a good 200 years later, than depopulation.
Incidentally, if you want a good example of horrors meted out, try the residential school system, which does seem to be far less well-known among the lay public. Maybe "we're trying to civilize them!" turning out to involve horrific amounts of abuse (and, yes, death) is too much to countenance?
In the end, Bitcoin's relentlessly conservative approach to crypto will likely be its downfall.
The latter's religion has been based in seeing governments bailout bad actors with 0 consequences & devalue a currency astronomically over a 100 year period. Salaries are not keeping with the rise in asset prices which means the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Buying a house in CA as a millennial is laughable.
Bitcoin or a gold standard is the only system that encourages a thriving middle class economy and keeps the government from poor policy decisions. Bitcoin seems to be better than gold since its mobile, transparent, finite. But i'd welcome a return to a gold standard with open arms.
I believe that 1) not all solutions can be 100% perfect for all problems an 2) a medium of exchange created by the people is our only hope to keep the gov/fed from enslaving with us debt forever 3) Judging what should/should not be able to use electricity is a slippery slope.
How has Bitcoin saved Venezuela? Well it helped a small number of people in the country, sure. It obviously didn't fundamentally make any difference, and it's not going to anywhere else either. For the average person Bitcoin is not easier to acquire, use or manage than USD in locations such as Lebanon, Turkey or Venezuela.
How much crypto is traded to avoid corrupt regimes and hyperinflation? 1%? 0.1%? There's probably a few zeroes in there.
Regarding Netflix, it's better for the environment than buying a blu-ray and blu-ray player or driving to the cinema. Can the same be said about crypto?
You can't know, and that's the point.
You can leave a country carrying nothing but a seed phrase in your brain and with it all your wealth, if you need to. Just the fact that governments know that this can happen can change things.
If you have a pile of Fakeistan dollarydoos you wish to convert into USD, spending those dollarydoos in Fakeistan on electricity to apparate some Bitcoin, then converting those Bitcoin into USD in the USA does not create a foreign claim on Fakeistani economic output. On the other hand, directly exchanging your dollarydoos with foreigners for USD does leave those foreigners holding a pile of dollarydoos, which does represent a claim on future Fakeistani economic output.
It certainly is in terms of being only for entertainment and no deeper use. However the amount of energy wasted here (let’s say 300W on a fairly high end machine) falls into the average area of energy spending per person, and thinks like driving or keeping unnecessary light bulbs on is same or worse. Crypto things however seem a whole other level of energy waste.
According to the New York Times, Bitcoin uses a little less than half a percent of all the electricity consumed in the world [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...
https://www.krik.rs/n1-policajac-priznao-krivicu-u-slucaju-s...
This is doing a terrible damage to the society. It's tearing it apart to two layers, one extremely rich and openly criminal, and the other poor one. It's like if I'm watching Narcos. Crypto is not an issue, the corrupted government is. It would be the same if they got their money from drugs or weapons.
If you can still “create value” as a miner in a country that welcomes you, more power (hah) to you.
You're speaking like cryptominers are criminals...
I think this is a different in definitions. Could you define 'criminal'?
Proof of work cryptocurrencies have got to be the worst invention in a decade.
Let's say 5% of Iran's GDP is spent on energy. Not sure what the number is, but whatever. A big chunk but affordable for the economy as a whole. At the market price, maybe 10% of people cannot afford to consume enough energy to meet the necessities of modern life - cooking, not freezing to death, using transportation. If you don't want these 10% of people to be shut off from modern society, you need to subsidize somehow.
Historically, subsidising electricity has worked fairly efficiently, because it wasn't possible to effectively store and re-sell or export it.
2. It has always worked the same: people arbitrage the subsidy by doing energy inefficient labor. Bitcoin mining is just a more efficient arbitrage mechanism.
All those subsidies are given under the expectation that people will behave reasonably and only use what is necessary, because it gets the country running. It's taking a hit so that your citizens can live and thrive. When you suddenly have a bunch of people running thousands of GPU for magic internet money, that is not a reasonable use of it.
In my opinion it would be better to have normal energy prices and simply redistribute the money. At least it would give an incentive to use energy more efficiently
You don't make your economy more effective by having incentives to remain ineffective. This sort of arbitrage (crypto-mining) is a direct consequence of misguided subsidies: If electricity is essentially free you have no incentive to control your electricity consumption and that attracts heavy users, which pushes consumption up in a vicious circle and can lead to shortages.
Iran has oil so they can probably afford to keep energy prices very low but that does not help them over the long term.
A ban on crypto-mining is also very difficult to enforce, IMHO.
From https://www.elliptic.co/blog/how-iran-uses-bitcoin-mining-to...
> In 2019 Iran officially recognised cryptoasset mining, later establishing a licensing regime that required miners to identify themselves, pay a higher (but still very low) tariff for electricity, and to sell their mined bitcoins to Iran’s central bank. Thousands of unlicensed mining farms have subsequently been identified and shut down - including in mosques, which receive free electricity.
So, not quite free - but rather low still. How low is in https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Iran/electricity_prices/
Iran is 0.004 USD/kWh for households with no info for business costs (though its still likely rather low as Iran is the 2nd lowest cost for energy on that list).
For comparison, USA is 0.153 USD/kWH.
The sanctions aspect make this part of the why crypto currency is appealing. They are essentially burning oil they can't sell on the market into electricity for Bitcoin which is hard to sanction.
> The electricity being used by miners in Iran would require the equivalent of approximately 10 million barrels of crude oil each year to generate - around 4% of total Iranian oil exports in 2020.
I'm not nearly as concerned with folks leaving air conditioning on: You never know what sorts of lives folks lead nor if they happen to have a medical condition that makes them need cool air (Multiple Sclerosis, for example, causes heat intolerance. A cool home when you get home from work means you can cook dinner.) And besides, surely there are ways to fight against that as well.
When will "less is more" come into play?
But yes, I would charge folks for using too much.Crypto mining will put you well above the median use. You can have wide margins: 2-3 times median use for the house size and number of occupants - after offering an investigation to be sure folks aren't stealing their power. Few folks would go over this. Realistically folks are mining cryptocurrency to make a profit, making it a business, so we could just switch it over to a business account.
It isn't like the system we use is more than this. We bill people every single month and process their payments as they come in: The vast majority of this would be completely gone. Most states in the US have their own Public Utility commission with their own rules and regulations on top of what federal regulatory agencies have - in part, these agencies set rules on how utilities can bill people, rules about payment plans, and rules about when they can shut people off. So much of this wouldn't be needed either. On top of this, we have a patchwork of regulations to help poor folks with their electric bills - which could be eliminated completely.
I don't know how this is "less". I'm just proposing different, and probably simplified. I think people just get caught up on "But I don't wanna help them" or that it is "free".
EDIT: I'll add that you also pay for things others consume (and steal and ruin!). You do this every time you pay for medical care, groceries, and other things. As a member of society, you cannot escape this.
That said does anyone have any real data on this or is this one of those internet talking points that just sounds good? Like what percentage of power in these countries is being used by crypto farmers. If its 25% then yeah that seems like an out of control problem. If its 0.25% then it seems like a pointless scapegoat and we would need to start looking at how much of the countries power goes into manufacturing candy or maintaining golf courses or a long list of other things that only a portion of the country consumes.
So close to Sweden.
Ethereum is much less, closer to Senegal in energy use.
https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index https://henvic.dev/posts/bitcoin/#energy-hog
https://old.iranintl.com/en/world/bitcoin-mining-iran-profit...
https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/cryptocur...
https://thediplomat.com/2021/01/bitcoin-mining-and-blackouts...
From that last one:
> The photo of a power bill with an extremely huge price tag, issued for a customer named “Iran and China Investment Company,” has gone viral in recent days. The power bill, which apparently belongs to the Rafsanjan mining farm operated by the Chinese, indicates that the miners have used 58,615,905 kWh of electricity in one month, for which they have to pay over 270 billion rials (some $1.2 million).
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Iran
> By the end of 2013, Iran had a total installed electricity generation capacity of 70,000 MW,
If I did my math correctly ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=58%2C615%2C905+kWh+%2F... ) that one customer represents 0.1% of the max capacity of Iran's power grid.
That leads us to:
> In recent weeks, Iranian power plants have been forced to switch to burning low-grade fuel oil to generate power because a sharp rise in the country’s domestic consumption has led to natural gas shortages. This severely increased air pollution in Tehran and other megacities, increasing public anger toward the government.
You could also work from https://www.elliptic.co/blog/how-iran-uses-bitcoin-mining-to... that has an estimate of 4.5% of all bitcoin mining is being done in Iran to go back to estimating the power consumption.
That's 80 kW of continuous power usage over a month.
China uses 1.5 kWh/household... and if I did my math correct again: 54,000 homes in the power use that a household China would use. Or basing it on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_co... (note change in units) a per capita use of 20,300 people in Iran.
It's so bad that the presidential residence was set on fire a few hours ago.
The presidential residence in Almaty which is a thousand miles from the actual capital where the president and Nursultan are.
Electricity generation doesn't impact gasoline prices, as much as you'd think. If you wish to see evidence - then go check out the prices of natural gas(widely used for power generation) and crude oil... and how they drastically vary in different markets.
And finally - Kazakhzstan is 70% coal power, while the world is only 3.5% on oil and 23% of gas. And there's a lot of spare coal power capacity...
https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix#:~:text=In%202019....
Think about that for a moment... There are a large number of people who just refuse to pay for electricity, and yet it is still delivered to them...
That is the real problem.
I think we have social programs for people who can't pay for electricity. Or at least I hope so...
Like my bill is 900kW/mo for a family of 3 with climatisation in the southern US. I think this is a reasonable amount. Then, you can still mine crypto but know you can't go balls to the wall.
The electric situation has allowed domestic and foreign opportunists to set up extensive mining operations with free electricity, this has cost the Kosovo govt. tens of millions in bills they have to cover. My grandpa’s village is a popular spot, every house is renting out their garages at crazy high prices, I’ve seen videos of rigs worth hundreds of thousands sitting in the barn in shelves next to the cows who use the heat.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/11/5/as-israel-threat...
But if it were to be implemented, it would work. It wouldn't make the electorate happy either short-term, it would be like flushing out an infection with a fever.
Plus, with the delicate nature of the political situation, I wouldn't recommend Kosovo's institutions imposing brownouts on Northern Kosovo, or at least not just on Northern Kosovo.
I'd like to question the "cows who use the heat".
Its the other way around. https://www.vpr.org/vpr-news/2018-01-04/in-deep-freeze-how-o...
> "I read somewhere that each cow generates 2,350 BTUs. We have 255 of them in here keeping this barn warm," Sweet said. "It's hard to believe a barn this size there's no heat in this beside the cows." Sure enough, some sources say cows give off 4,500 BTUs per hour. The barn does have insulation in the ceiling and end walls, and the side curtains have an R-value of 2. They leave the equipment they use daily in the barn so it doesn't freeze up.
Another estimate of cow to btu: https://www.farmshow.com/view_articles.php?a_id=908
> "One cow gives off 4,400 btu's per hour. Our Dairy-Aire system recovers 2,500 btu's. A 60-cow herd will easily heat and cool the average 1,500 to 2,000 sq. ft. home," Lussenden told FARM SHOW, noting that the system can also be installed in high capacity hog, poultry and other confinement buildings.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/c...
> It wasn’t long before the inventive engineer realized that, since a single cow gives off 3,500-4,000 BTU an hour, a mere 15 milkers could provide sufficient excess warmth to heat a standard 2,000-square-foot home.
---
The cows don't need mining rigs.
This is a very loaded, technically inaccurate statement. This recent article explains the situation better: https://balkaninsight.com/2021/11/23/kosovo-to-end-free-ener...
"Serb consumers in the four northern municipalities have not paid for their electricity since 1999. According to Radio Free Europe, the total cost of the energy used in the Serb-majority municipalities is around 12 million euros per year."
Whoever really believes that people who haven't paid their bills since 1999 would magically start paying in 2022 is quite naive.
That belief is irrelevant. It's completely different to the article's statement that the population refuses to pay it, when a mechanism for them to pay it has not existed since 1999.
Even 30 years ago, while Kosovo was part of Serbia, people didn't pay for electricity. But at that time Albanians weren't paying for it.
Later tables turned and Albanians become rulers, but then Serbs refused to pay.
And why electricity was still delivered to the people in both cases - well, with everithing that was/is going on there that's the most benign issue one can think off.
The only allowed programming languages should be the energy efficient ones
A government official shall follow you to the shower to make sure your hot bath is not consuming too much energy for too long
Only serious applications are permitted. Websites that mostly involve jokes are a waste of energy. Google searches that are not strictly necessary should be dropped (those Google datacenters consume to much!). Every ounce of energy should be saved
I think this is the endgame for the government having the power to decide what should and should not spend energy. (With some stretches for comedic effect)
Almost 40 years ago Carl Sagan warned us about increasing coal usage by other countries
He starts discussing other countries around 14:30 and mentions China using increasing amounts of coal around 15m
China now emits almost twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.
What Sagan predicted 40 years ago came true. “Even if the United States and Russia…”
We’ve essentially squandered half a century.
China has over four times the population of the US.
edit: i.e. comparing China to the US is like comparing the US to Germany or France. We're polluting twice as much, and a good amount of the pollution in China is for exporting to us.
However, as Carl Sagan warned, China had huge coal reserves and they put them to use.
Other countries are doing the same , of course.
Hence global coal usage for power generation is at records.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str...
A hot bath, hosting a joke website, and hosting a search engine all consume magnitude less energy than a crypto farm.
This comment is very out of touch. Energy supplies are limited, even more so in developing countries. Governments everywhere have the responsibility to protect the well being of their people. Even most dictatorships at least try to do that. If crypto farms are hogging so much energy to the point of causing localized blackouts for other people, then most governments will want to put a stop to it. Governments failing to address the basic needs of their population is how you get strongmen in power who will use ruthless means to act on their agenda.
It is not a stretch to imagine that in the not too distant future, somewhere in the world, a cryptominer will be publicly executed in front of a cheering crowd. It's not what I want, but crypto bros have got to stop being so arrogant and self righteous.
I think a lot of people here will be cheering along with you. But alas, we can dream...
Want to consume resources with a website that tells knock-knock jokes? Have a great time! Just make sure to pay your hosting bill. Want to host it on 10,000 servers? Again, have a great time. Just know that you'll be paying a ton of money for that website with no hope of an ROI.
Cryptocurrency is different. The more electricity you burn, the more money you make. I know this first hand - the computer I'm typing this on is running gminer to mine ETH on flexpool.io with my RTX 3070 card. I've mined $2,800 of ETH in the past 10 months.
Something that most people don't understand is that there is a finite amount of ETH that can be mined per day. Hashrate determines the size of the slice of that pie you get. Therefore the incentive is to consume infinite electricity! Of course miners can't do that because mining gear (i.e. GPUs, ASICs, FPGAs, whatever) is hard to purchase and electricity isn't infinite.
But that doesn't stop miners from trying. I know people that do anything they can to acquire GPUs - they have bots combing the Internet, they buy whole systems that have GPUs, rip out the GPU and sell the system, they've signed up for every GPU manufacturer's wait list, they stalk Microcenter, whatever they can do. They seek out areas with cheap or even subsidized electricity and latch onto it like a parasite. It is nothing like anything else you spoke of.
One could also argue for the banning of video games using the same logic. A relaxing drive to the beach, your wasting energy!
A better solution would be to tax Crypto earnings at a higher rate, and use the tax revenue to build some green energy. I'd imagine Kosovo could become a low cost tech hub , but if you freak out techy expats with strange laws...
I think I'm having trouble reading sarcasm today.
A dmv like government official gets to your home for your scheduled computer search.
> Is this the python binary? You better be ready for a hefty fine.
>> I'm sorry sir! I promise I was only playing around with pytorch and tensorflow! Did you know that they get compiled to much more efficient languages? I'm sure their c++ backends are pre approved!
> Playing? What do you mean by playing? Do you have an energy license for this? Anyways, python is not allowed and this is going to cost you.
>> Most of what I do is c++, don't I get some credits for it?
>Let's see..Is this an old clang compiler? They are 10% less energy efficient but I'm letting you walk with a warning if you update it right now.
>Wait a minute is this an octave binary I see!?! You sir are going to jail
This is actually a theatrical representation of code running in the background of your computer
You don't, which is why I was thinking it had to be sarcasm. That said, it sounds just idealistic enough that someone would blurt it out without thinking.
The other part that is confusing is what's an efficient programming language? The answer is none. It's all about how programmers write their code. Sometimes you're optimizing for performance, but other times you're solving a niche problem.
People are only aware cryptocurrencies exist because a handful of people were wily enough to come up with new ways of burning fuel to make money. Once the idea of crypto is encoded into a whitepaper, it's impossible to completely prevent people from reimplementing it themselves. You can make the technology itself illegal but save for completely draconian measures it's impossible to enforce such a thing.
Maybe our standard for what constitutes a good quality of life should have been frozen in time 7 years ago and we all should have just remained oblivious about how to improve that standard at the cost of the environment and our attention span. Along with crypto, we'd also be running a version of YouTube and other services with 7 years worth of research and whitepapers produced by clever people to increase engagement wiped away.
It would also future-proof us against intelligent, visionary actors that see us allocating larger and larger portions of our attention span to their neat little pet project-turned-hulking abomination that average people will never be able to forget the existence of or escape from. I do not believe that there is an upper bound to how much of some org's KPIs that humble people can be driven into contributing to - except the number of hours we can stay awake per day.
If we continue to innovate at this pace, making our products better and more attractive to where they become irresistible, when will the time come when our allocation of free hours or energy usage becomes completely saturated by unnecessarily things that we can no longer detach our attention from?
It's also very fast. It works like people who have never used Bitcoin think Bitcoin works.
But, I don't expect the ban to accomplish much. The causes of the shortage is environmentalists making huge promises about renewables that didn't pan out. "Don't build nuclear, we have windmills!" It didn't work and now we are paying for it.
Things will get better in spring, but I shouldn't be surprised if winter shortages become a regularity.
Feel free to play with the numbers.
The numbers that I come up with for 6 months (not going to run the heater in the summer) put an earnings of $285 with a cost of electricity of $850 to do it.
And that's before the cost of the device which is a $1000 item (compare with a $60 one that heats more efficiently). That isn't exactly a truck load of cash.
I guess they can pick up and move somewhere if it gets banned. In the meantime they can partner with green energy, raising electricity prices or cost to mine bitcoin which helps push up the price of bitcoin. All while pretending to be green- encouraging wind expansion and hoping for blackouts which they can also profit from - wild swings in prices makes them also enron energy traders.
This will encourage more POW coins... lets launch even more tokens with POW.
The price of bitcoin is not driven by electricity prices, or more generally by the cost of mining. Bitcoin supply works at a fixed rate: one new block of 6.25 BTC is mined (on average) every ten minutes. Every four years the BTC reward per block is cut in half. More mining effort (higher hash rate) just raises the difficulty threshold so that the interval remains 10 minutes per block. Lower mining effort, of course, has the opposite effect. Higher mining costs would drive marginal miners out of business and lower the hash rate but otherwise have no impact on the supply of new bitcoins or the ability to process transactions.