Iran is facing similar power shortages made worse by crypto miners.
Proof of work cryptocurrencies have got to be the worst invention in a decade.
Proof of work cryptocurrencies have got to be the worst invention in a decade.
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.
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.