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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

The people who were mining ETH didn't give a toss about the environment. They invested in PoW hardware and they're not going to stop using it because ETH is now PoS, they'll just mine something else.

I just hope the PoW markets collapse now ETH is moving on.

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That is rude. I care about the environment, still I am mining.

How is it good for the environment? I only mine when my house and battery does not need electricity and our solar is producing over 1kw. Everything I earn (around 100-300$ a month between February to Oktober) I invest in the next environment project. My miners need about 500w. This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid. If I would not do this, our new heating system wouldn't be financed yet.

That's good on you. And yet, obviously, not what is happening on average with crypto mining.

You are certainly right. However I am under the assumption that you only mine where electricity is cheap. If you are not stealing it, there is only nuclear, wind, water and sun produced energy left => Miners are kind of forced to use environment friendly energy.

It's better for the environment if we build expensive cables to send that power to areas still emitting CO2, instead of selling it cheaply to miners. At least up to some pretty large distance.

There's a case to be made for using the spikes of solar power to run miners, on a grid dominated by renewables, but that requires the economics to work out just right with very cheap silicon that can sit idle a big majority of the time.

Yes, germany is already doing that with electric cars. I have a Wallbox in our garage, with seperate electric because it is sadly 300 meters away from our house. So I can't use our solar. However this connection is terminated via GSM when many people are using the grid. This is usually around morning and evening. If the grid isn't exhausted they will turn the electricity back on. I really like this approach. It works well.

It would be nice, if this would be mandatory for big official mining operations. Pretty sure they would just move somewhere else but still.

You should also go burn entire forests for energy and then invest the profits to plant forests to restore what you just did.

Dont want to be snarky, but thats the summary of what you just said.

Please keep conversation productive on HN, thank you.

Pointing out the absurdity of someone's position via an apt analogy seems productive to me. Certainly more so than dismissive cries to hn guidelines.

When someone says

> Dont want to be snarky, but...

it's a bit like saying "no pun intended" right before intentionally saying a pun. It is literally easier to just make the point.

I forgot to mention that I only use solar energy from our roof. I updated my comment. Wrote the initial comment in a rush. Sorry for that.

So no, I only use overproduction to mine and only a fraction of it. Everything else goes back into the grid.

Unless your “new heating system” is a euphemism for a gpu array, you’re being pretty dishonest here.

Mining takes energy that is likely created by fossil fuel, that would otherwise be used to some necessary purposes, and burns it.

Unless you are generating green energy yourself, you’re likely hurting the environment.

I’m not saying you need to stop, and I’m not saying mining rigs are the end of the world (lord knows at least they aren’t frivolous airline flights), I’m just saying the previous poster isn’t being rude… it’s a valid point.

I was under the impression that when they said "This is a fraction of the amount I put back into the grid", it implied that they are generating their own electricity to use for this, most likely from solar panels.

This is an assumption though, they could be running a large diesel generator for all we know.

Yes, what you are impling is correct. Forgot to mention that we have a 8kw solar system on our roof.

I updated my comment.

are you connected to the grid? if so, not mining would resell that power back to the grid. I'm honestly more interested if you're off grid

I didn't mean to be rude.

I think anyone involved in a PoW system (holding, mining, spending) is legitimising wasting energy. Even if you're using a sustainable source, others aren't, and the power you're using could have been used elsewhere.

Your personal impact might have been small, but it still takes serious compartmentalization or blissful ignorance to be involved in crypto and profess care for the environment.

My understanding is that Ethereum PoW used traditional GPUs whereas for example Bitcoin uses ASICs - "PoW hardware" is not as interchangeable as you're implying.

Depends on the hashing algo -- some make sense for GPUs, others not so much.

I think RandomX, the one related to Monero, is still relatively viable for example.

Ironically this one is still a bit more friendly to CPUs, which everyone seems to have forgotten about.

RandomX is pretty GPU-hostile. If you have a lot of VRAM, you could theoretically make it work okay, but I don't know of a GPU miner that has any semblance of performance (or perf/watt) that is close to a CPU.

Gotcha, CPUs have been most of my experience with it.

I dabbled with GPUs but it seemed like I'd have to do a lot of clock/voltage tuning to make it worthwhile. This was way before energy prices jumping, too

There are a 1000 other coins using GPUs for mining. E.g. "Ethereum Classic". Miners will switch to these. There are ETH ASICs btw, they just aren't as dominant as BTC AntMiner ASICs.

Yes but Ethereum accounted for 94% of GPU hashpower. The other coins can't absorb all that and stay profitable.

ETH ASICs weren't much better than just getting the latest GPU.

There are lots of other coins that still use GPUs to mine, though. I imagine most people who are running profitable operations will switch coins. Hopefully the popular coins will switch to PoS and the mining operations cease their profitability and shut down.

But there are a lot of sh1tcoins that is similar to ETH POW and then can be exchanged to the real asset: Bitcoin.

It is only worth it though if the shitcoin is worth more than the cost of electricity used to generate it. At the moment and for many miners, that just won’t be the case.

Most shit pins probably have few miners, and are pretty susceptible to market manipulation. I large influx of miners across the market could dramatically change the price.

Also, many miners are already using software that automatically changes their hardware to target whatever coin has the most profitability. It’s expected that this will continue just without ETH

The profitability of a GPU miner has dropped by about 2/3 with this overnight. So it remains to be seen where they actually go.

They've actually forked Ethereum to keep the original mined version, ETHPoW ($ETHW). They'll keep mining on the original PoW chain as long as it remains profitable.

https://blockworks.co/proof-of-work-ethereum-fork-pow-rally-...

I'd expect the value of ETHW to crash fairly rapidly, though, because there are not many buyers interested in buying into a deprecated chain without official support or ecosystem buy-in, and lots of sellers who need to sell their mined ETHW to fund mining operations. Then we'll see miners shut off and leave the network, as the mining rewards can no longer support the electricity costs of mining. At some point it might get 51%'d, but at that point nobody will care.

With the price of ETHW currently at $22.80 and the price of ETH at $1500, I can’t imagine mining ETHW would even cover the electric bill. It’s also not clear to me what advantages ETHW would over ETC which is about $37 ea.

Previously ETC was often used as a lower cost dev-testing server for ETH applications that might not be ready for the main-net.

With ETH off there’s going to be a significant loss of profit to be had and people stopping because the expected value of mining has gone negative. Store stocks of graphics cards are booming. There absolutely will be a reduction in PoW power usage globally.

Maybe. What are they gonna move to though? If everyone moves to some other coin (not Bitcoin, because that's different hardware), it'll quickly become unprofitable to mine. They'll just sell their hardware, most likely. Hopefully.

Well, there are options. I do not want to point to obvious candidates, because I am biased and it could easily be misconstrued, but RVN just just saw a decent influx of those ETH miners based on recent spike.

Life hates vacuum. Short of outright ban, nothing will change in that space.

> RVN just just saw a decent influx of those ETH miners based on recent spike

That influx won't increase the revenue though... more miners doesn't produce more coins, it's just more secure.

Considering how thin theses margins can be for miners, some will need to stop their production.

I will admit that it is hard for me to make a good prediction here. I ridiculous amount of it boils down to psychology and perception and not any kind of fundamentals. The following statement can be true in some instances, but I am not sure if it is true across the board.

If the PoW markets collapse they'll just invent new PoW shitcoins that will go up.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32853080.

> Only if the next-best thing is still marginally profitable.

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