Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Is this somehow a dodge of carbon fees or regulations because it's not going to the grid?
Clearly the couldn't sell energy before if they were about to shutdown, so there must be something different about the miners compared with their usual market, can't just be cheaper.
In the article they seem to be suggesting they couldn't buy renewable power in 2020 which seems odd, but no follow up detail on it, apparently they're phasing coal out in a year so it may just have been a short term thing.
And knowing Montana, it is difficult to get electricity connection there.
Yes, obviously. And what's the downside of that?
And even more obviously—-Not mining/creating a desired product that would allow you to make a profit on your investment.
It's similarly not a "CO2 offset": the offset is latent in the plant remaining dormant, or possibly being scrapped. By turning the plant back on, these miners have converted a CO2 offset into an ongoing source of CO2 emissions.
Since crypto is used for crime and pyramid schemes, zero value so infinite tax = ban
I think an asset that can be secured, transmitted, and stored in self custody cheaply that allows people to escape hyperinflation is quite valuable to society.
I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.
Any or all of these things can be true! But you're going to need to show that Bitcoin satisfies each of these conditions.
Last time I checked, it's a public, immutable ledger that anybody (not just officials with warrants) can track. The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways.
> I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.
I think I understand both central banking and monetary policy well enough (as a non-CS-but-educated layperson) to not require silly computer analogies. Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.
In a closed system, all you see are public keys sending/receiving from other keys. If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address. New addresses can be created on the fly simply by creating a new wallet, which is software that can be run on any device anywhere in the world, thanks to open source code.
> Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.
I don't know how deflation plays out with Bitcoin, no one does. But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.
Sure. Now show me a human economy that's a closed system! We meat-sacks love our groceries, movie tickets, &c.
> If you want to identify or censor a person or their transaction, you need external information linking them to a particular address.
As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money. Bitcoin cannot solve the Big Man With A Stick problem, and ignoring the problem makes it strictly worse than fiat.
> But in 100 years if we want to change it, we can, because its an open source protocol that can be forked and forced to compete with other ideas.
"Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-)
Yes, you're not required to identify yourself when you purchase those things. So a transaction between two parties for the exchange of goods would be private. I can send money to my mom and you'll never know.
> As we've seen with every single legal exchange, this isn't true: you only need to identity the coins themselves as having been laundered or obtained from/otherwise mixed with the produce of a crime, and nobody will accept your money.
No one can stop an address from receiving from another address. You can implement tracing and enforcement to make it difficult for a particular transaction within a particular jurisdiction, but this is a function of social implementation, not the network. And if you want even more anonymity, look into Monero.
> "Just change the protocol" has worked out famously well for every cryptocurrency so far ;-)
Not sure what you mean by that. I think the proliferation of competing ideas and forks is a good thing. Most projects are bad, but over time only the strong will survive.
I was unable to convince them to the contrary on either regard, the necessity nor the sufficiency, despite the existence of all the currencies that work even better without PoW/PoS.
When people succumb to that kind of profit motive, it becomes our responsibility as disinterested outsiders to make a non-compromised evaluation of the state of affairs. That's the evaluation I'm interested in.
I think cryptocurrency is broken in a lot of other ways and may even in in a solarpunk future need to be banned in order to stop a hash-rate arms race disassembling the plane into a Dyson swarm, but even then it’s best to focus on the principles behind the problem rather than the specific technology.
I rarely downvote, but downvoted this because it’s blatantly false.
Literally hours ago:
https://wsau.com/2022/02/18/singapores-carbon-tax-to-rise-fi...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-18/singapore...
Reference in Commercial Greenhouse Industry - https://www.greenhousemegastore.com/equip/co2-generators/
But the planet is going to be just fine, for a very long time.
Unless global warming triggers a nuclear war, humans as a species are also going to be fine.
Not sure why I’m being downvoted - maybe someone smarter than me can explain it better. I’m too tired to figure out how to put this into words. But basically, the earth has a total energy amount that can be used. Bitcoin can use energy in places you couldn’t get to before, so in a sense, you’re able to do work with isolated energy in a given remote locaton and send the output of that work via the internet to somewhere else.
In other words, transporting energy is usually the limiting factor. That’s why you can’t just have all your solar panels in the desert, for instance. Moving power is too difficult. But with Bitcoin, you don’t need to move the power, just the product. So think of all the energy currently devoted to printing money, or running the computer systems that prop up the global financial market - if you transitioned to Bitcoin, in theory all of that power could be saved, as Bitcoin would be entirely using power that cannot otherwise be used.
No? Using previously untapped energy for Bitcoin, or for anything, does, in fact, increase global energy output.
I think this is the real point you are trying to make. You don’t have an issue with the use of clean energy, provided you personally believe it is a useful use of that energy.
Bitcoin mining does use a lot of energy, on par, it turns out with all the world’s hairdryers or YouTube. Bitcoin mining is used to create security to safely store ~750 Billion in savings from individuals around the world. By contrast, to secure the dollars in your bank account it requires the world’s largest military as well as countless other carbon sources.[0] Mining gold cannot ever be done in a clean way and instead requires strip mining and polluting large bodies of water.
I choose to protect my wealth in Bitcoin, but I would never prevent you from storing yours in a bank account, even if that bank account is used to store US dollars that cost countless innocent lives over the past century. This isn’t about energy consumption. It is about your ability to decide for others what is or isn’t an approved store of wealth.
[0] https://www.news18.com/news/lifestyle/carbon-footprint-of-us...
Let’s say you live in a house in a place where the sun never shines and have ten dollars. One electricity costs one dollar. But you spend your ten dollars on a wireless solar mining rig that lives in the desert ten thousand miles away. Now you’re using this power, that previously only cactuses could use, to generate Bitcoin. You take the Bitcoin via the net, and buy electricity with it in your home town, which you can do as long as the sun is shining in the desert. Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.
Now generalize this principle to millions of people, and you get the idea.
Using your example, you live in a place without sunlight and you buy a solar mining rig far away. You then use that power to do literally anything that generates money, including just straight selling it to someone or feeding it back into the grid.
Then you use that money to buy electricity in your home. Boom! You've "move[d] energy around the world wirelessly" without bitcoin.
I'll leave out the part about building a "renewable geothermal power plant under your house" because I'm guessing it's a joke.
If you can afford to put PV + compute + internet in a random distant desert, you can afford to put pure PV in a specific and well chosen bit of desert that has people and houses and power lines and an existing internet connection in it. Which means you can sell the power it makes to those specific people right there.
It is, if anything, slightly easier to install PV on the rooftop of a complete stranger in a community in a desert than to install the same quantity of PV in the middle of nowhere the same distance from you.
Bonus points: installing PV on someone else’s roof and selling the energy it makes to the person under the roof is a tried and tested business model.
Second bonus: unlike crypto mining where your equipment becomes rapidly obsolete, PV keeps going with minimal degradation for decades.
And take my space example. I could have a Bitcoin farm on the moon, using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins, and then send them back via the internet.
Bitcoin farms can be placed anywhere, not just where there are people nearby. Which was the original point I was making.
The answer is “they are the same”.
> Land prices near settlements will be high.
Irrelevant, the cost of getting stuff far away from a settlement is higher, even ignoring things like cleaning the panels and replacing obsolete compute. (Plus for your mining rig you need to get internet to it, which is even more expensive and at that point you should be asking serious questions about installing a power line instead of a data line, and yes people already suggest that for the moon with microwaves etc., I’ve had that conversation at least a decade before BTC was even invented).
Whenever the cost of getting to uninhabited places (in a controlled way not e.g. messages in bottles or crashes, which risk the destruction of your equipment and are unlikely to result in good PV orientation) has been lower in the past, people move to those places and make a new community and suddenly it’s no longer far from a settlement.
Also, literal profitable businesses literally put literal PV on literal rooftops literally at zero cost to the people under them and literally fund this by literally selling their output to the people living literally under them, and have done literally for years now.
QED the cost is not prohibitive, money can be made this way because it is already being made this way.
> using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins
The only cooling on the moon is because the sunlight is not uninterrupted. The vacuum of space is a fantastic insulator.
Now a second question. Have you heard of Dutch disease?
Because even if you go back to the setup in the first question and change it to make whatever number of BTC you fancy, money just does not function in the way you’re expecting it to.
No get-rich-quick scheme can be scaled up to a community, even in the rare cases that they aren’t scams. And trying to, breaks stuff.
At best, even if BTC (or whatever cryptocurrency you want) had no flaws and was a perfect system, all money is just a token of wealth, it is not wealth itself.
And this is already happening. There are geothermal remote Bitcoin mines in operation.
Full disclosure, I don’t own any crypto. I’m just interested in the technology. I see it as an inevitable transition.
> The answer is “they are the same”.
What is the point that you are making here? The supply schedule of bitcoin is fixed. When more energy is used by rational economic actors to mine bitcoin, it would just have to be supported by an increase of demand rather than supply.
The most efficient use of energy is always to produce internet tokens that have the same tech as hundreds of other tokens /s.
If everyone does what you do, then you get one of two effects depending on which unwritten assumption you prefer:
1) if the conversion rate from joules of sunlight to number of bitcoin remains constant, then (first 1 then 1 million) people have more bitcoin than they did before, but the immediate actual production of electricity in your local area is exactly the same as it was before any of you scenario happened, and therefore the local market price for electricity goes up because that’s how supply and demand works
2) if the supply of bitcoin continues to follow the existing rules, then going from one person to one million people has exactly zero impact on the supply of bitcoin, so instead of 1 BTC/unit of time/person, you get… 1 BTC/unit of time/million people (and likewise for your $ investment, 1 BTC/unit of time/$ becomes 1 BTC/unit of time/million $); in this case you still don’t have any more power being produced locally, but nobody notices the local price per unit of electricity changing because the BTC itself is too dilute to do anything
> Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.
If money is the limiting factor, you can apply for a loan to install a renewable power source. As a bonus, you get the money sooner and therefore the power sooner. Economically speaking, this is in fact such a great idea that at least one solar company announced free-at-the-point-of-installation PV systems funded by their potential future earnings.
And let me put it to you like this - when you turn on your power, what do you do with it? Well, you use it. You heat your home with it. You cook with it. You turn on your lights with it. What’s the difference if you make money with it? You’re using that energy. It’s really quite simple - in my example, you’re simply using unusable energy, and converting it into money, which you can use to do work.
Money, any money, even cryptocurrency, simply does not do what you think it does.
If you want stuff then invest in that specific stuff — you should only be investing in or building a financial network when that in particular is what you need, not when you want something else like “electricity” or “food” — and if you’re really going to call out the $10 as a serious number, at that level food is a higher priority than any of the equipment you’d need to take part in even a low-cost digital payments and micro-financing system like M-Pesa (it’s not just banks that do loans!), you certainly shouldn’t be considering paying for random hardware to be installed in a different continent (which is implicit in your scenario)
Thus my previous point about getting loans is still entirely valid.
I've used the oil barrel analogy before: an empty oil barrel is a proof that someone has used the oil within it, much like a Bitcoin is proof of a certain amount of work. But I can't show up to another power plant with that empty oil barrel and expect them to manifest power from it: they have to burn another barrel of oil to produce the energy equivalent. This is of course also ridiculous, since nobody would accept payment for energy in the form of a proof of previous energy wasted. And yet, that's fundamentally what Bitcoin is, except laundered through a tokenization layer to obscure that fact.
To tie it together: Bitcoin can only ever double the token-equivalent demand (not necessarily volume) for energy, never reduce it. Using Bitcoin for energy exchange is always roughly half as efficient as fiat.
Money is analogous to work. You can’t just conjure up money (that would be illegal).
If I have 50 dollars, I can pay someone to mow my grass. I have just converted potential energy (money) into work.
In the same way, if I have a geothermal power plant in a remote Scandinavian wilderness, I can use that power to generate Bitcoin, and use that store of value to transfer to me which I can then convert into work by employing people, either directly as a service, or indirectly through a good.
I hope that makes more sense now.
To use your oil example - it would be like me mining a barrel of oil in location A, then converting it entirely into Bitcoin, sending the coin to me via the internet, then using the Bitcoin to buy another barrel of oil close to my home. I now have a barrel of oil I did not previously have, because I’ve transferred value (energy) from remote place A to local place B virtually.
This is wrong, but it's wrong in ways that are entirely irrelevant.
> If I have 50 dollars, I can pay someone to mow my grass. I have just converted potential energy (money) into work.
No, you haven't. You've applied a medium of exchange to a business transaction. You haven't "converted" any amount of energy. Converting energy means something specific, with real physical implications. Bitcoin doesn't violate the conservation of energy.
> To use your oil example - it would be like me mining a barrel of oil in location A, then converting it entirely into Bitcoin, sending the coin to me via the internet, then using the Bitcoin to buy another barrel of oil close to my home. I now have a barrel of oil I did not previously have, because I’ve transferred value (energy) from remote place A to local place B virtually.
This is just wrong: you can't "mine a barrel of oil" with Bitcoin. You can only burn the resource to prove the energy intrinsic in having possessed it. Once you've burned it, you can't exchange the token you've vouched with it for the same energy: you can only exchange it for more potential energy to burn. More energy is always used (and strictly wasted) than just burning a single barrel to begin with.
And to your former ‘points’: I think the issue we’re having here is that I’m talking about an abstraction. To you, the potential energy of a $100 bill is the ability to light it on fire to light your cigar, for example. For me, the potential energy is all the work you can do with it as an exchange of value.
Money is a way to exchange work. Work is analogous to energy. Therefore, money is analogous to energy.
I think where you’re getting bogged down is you Don’t see that to earn an income, you must burn energy in the form of food, money and time. With the Btc farm, you’re saving most of this energy by tapping into a renewable resource to generate the income which you can convert back into value.
In short, there is no other way to derive value from a geothermal plant in the middle of nowhere, within reason. Certainly not significant financial value, other than as a crypto mine.
Money is a medium of exchange. You can use it to exchange anything. But that doesn't move energy; it exchanges the token for the object. You cannot move energy using money; you can only move it using a conduit that conforms to the laws of physics (and we have plenty of those).
It is not energy itself: you can mint as much of a medium of exchange as you want to satisfy the constraints of your economic system. That's why there is no capital limit on the number of dollars in circulation, and why there is no one "count" of how many dollars exist: the dollar is an abstract source of liquidity that facilitates exchange. Its value comes from its ability to provide that liquidity, and from the Men With Big Sticks who will hurt you if you threaten it (the thing we usually call "fiat").
These are basic economic facts, the kind you learn in an "econ 101" class. Bitcoin's profitability is no more of a threat to them than any profitability is: tokenization of energy spent is valued because we've chosen to value it, not because it intrinsically violates the laws of thermodynamics. Economic actors can make "value" decisions based on anything, including Bitcoin's artificial scarcity and proof-of-work. But again, this does not a perpetual energy machine make.
The "other way" you're looking for is called a high-voltage power line. We've been using them for quite some time, and they don't require us to tokenize energy (i.e., waste it) in exchange for future energy produced elsewhere.
Stepping back a bit: I re-read your comment, and I think "analogous" is where the misunderstanding comes from. Analogies are weak abstractions. In a weak sense, money is analogous to (potential) energy. But this isn't a useful sense when talking about actual energy, the kind that power plants produce. Unless you actually move that energy with the token (via power lines, or any other means), all the token represents is the energy's production. It can't represent anything else without violating the laws of thermodynamics.
Funnily enough, you argue the case for BTC quite well. Money only works when it cannot be created, nor destroyed (sound familiar?), and anything else is essentially corruption/inefficiency (hence why in the 1920s, a dollar had the buying power of $100 today).
You can use money as a representation for energy, using a simple exchange mechanism that allows us to represent our efforts in the form of an agreed standard that is ostensibly finite and scarce. We’re able to convert our efforts into a medium of exchange using an abstraction.
BTC is actually a far better way of achieving this, as it is not as susceptible to corruption (particularly in developing economies), as well as its convenience, safety, transparency, and so on.
But I think we are not being honest with ourselves here if we continue this debate, as it is not meaningful. You can either choose to see what I’m saying, or you can continue to believe in pure materialism - thats fine, but keep living in your cave where BTC cannot possibly represent a way to move energy from a place inaccessible to power lines, while I believe that it can, and drive around in my Ferrari (hypothetically, of course).
You're suggesting a scenario where, instead of using energy at point A to do useful work, we use energy at point B to generate Bitcoin to buy energy at point A to do the useful work. In this scenario,
1. the same amount of energy is still being generated at point A, and
2. an incredible amount of additional energy is being generated at point B for no reason1) Why would the amount of energy at point B be "incredible"? It would be proportional to the amount of energy that is needed at point A. Either both are incredible or neither is, all that matters is the scale of this example.
2) Why would there be "no reason" for doing this? The reason is clear and you obviously understand it-- to buy energy at point A.
3) Energy can not be generated. Humans can in some cases make use of energy for some other purpose. The total amount of energy is always the same. If the stranded energy in this example was geothermal, adding a geothermal energy plant would not increase the total amount of energy, it would just channel some of that energy into something humans can get something out of, rather than it just dissipating to heat directly.
Eventually mining is self-extinguishing as collectively bitcoin holders only lose wealth. There aren't many potential new buyers left at this point, so the set of bitcoin holders can't change that much. On a long time scale bitcoin is a method to make people that think it's a good idea poorer than everyone else, at least in the average case. Social darwinism.