Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Mining Consumes a Mind-Boggling 2% of U.S. Electricity

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I saw a theoretical calculation many years ago saying that bitcoin mining would eventually use 7% of the world's electricity. I laughed at it then, but take it more seriously now. Electricity in the US is expensive, so if it's using 2% here, it must be using more in some other parts of the world.

> Electricity in the US is expensive

It seems very cheap compared to most of Europe though?

I was thinking China. That's where most bitcoin is mined.

The USA is actually the biggest Bitcoin mining nation [https://www.techopedia.com/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-statist....]

China banned Bitcoin mining years ago which caused miners to flee to other parts of the globe. Texas is the current powerhouse.

Connected miners remain in China.

Fake news. Bitcoin is not banned in China, and yet China has "banned" Bitcoin at least a dozen times since its inception.

Taken to the extreme it is an accelerated track to causing a black hole given the incentives of the network and the requirement of computational space having a physical necessity to provide the substrate for it to continue.

> Electricity in the US is expensive, so if it's using 2%

I believe much of it is stolen. Like sysadmins running it in schools during the night. Or someone tapping a communal powerline etc.

There are multiple LEGAL crypto-mining facilities in my mid-sized US South city.

I don't know the specifics, but having spoken with a few of the technicians, it seems our local publicly-owned electric utility has agreements with these facilities for Time-of-Use offsets, which significantly reduces the kWH pricing.

There is a single facility in my city which is allowed to consume about 1% of entire multi-county grid usage, but must agree to seasonal shut-down schedules where local utility can take them offline almost-immediately during emergency demand peaks.

For their predictable baseload usage (21/7) and not-too-damaging shutdownability, the 1% miner gets kWH's at around 2¢+/ea.

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Majority of our base-load energy is hydro/nuclear -generated, so my only remaining complaint is that these AI/crypto -mining facilities ought to somehow be incorporated into a local centralized heat distribution facility, perhaps to generate steam (or possibly even pre-heat existing generating facility water pre-steam/turbine).

Weird thing is that this seems to be irrelevant: there are plenty of PoS cryptos but people are still mining away bitcoins.

Electricity is too cheap, I suppose.

More discussion ended up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232838

What a garbage article.

oh hey look another handwringing about crypto mining without mentioning actual mining waste or video game or movie waste?

How utterly suprising.

How are those relevant to this discussion?

Wow, it’s “mind-boggling” now. Interesting choice of words. I wonder who comes up with these points and what is the mechanism for distributing them to the news outlets worldwide?

Does it matter? Crypto, arguably useless to 99.9% of US citizens is ~~using~~ wasting 2% of all energy.

I believe 25% of US households own crypto at this point [1]. It’s more widely adopted then you think. BlackRock CEO said it’s “bigger than any Government”. And he would know. :-)

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-finds-that-over-25-...

Not all electricity is created equal. I don’t think Bitcoin miners should be allowed to fire up an old coal power plant just for the sake of mining Bitcoin, but in the case of renewables, like hydro, wind, solar, etc., there is going to be, at times, more electricity generated than we can use or store. All other use cases aside, the ability for Bitcoin miners to turn excess or otherwise wasted electricity into revenue is to the benefit of 99.9% of US citizens by way of lower power bills and/or property taxes.

That’s pretty cool if you ask me. Being able to approve and move forward with a big solar or wind farm project because you have a Bitcoin miner willing to partner with you for the excess electricity generated seems like a win-win to me. Again, we obviously don’t want Bitcoin miners using dirty electricity or straining the grid in peak times where higher priority use cases arise, but that’s a matter of governance and oversight.

Is it profitable to be a part-time miner? I thought the equipment was too expensive and short lived to sit idle.

At the per kWh price a lot of these miners contract for, it’s profitable even with older hardware. These arrangements also help extend the lifespan of older hardware.

So just because it's useless now, that means it will never be useful? I guess we should give up on every new technology that's not immediately beneficial.

It's been almost fifteen years and the principle use is crime and ponzi. Not only has it not been immediately beneficial, it's been without benefit for a long time.

How is the mind-boggling... Are you forgetting the impact of EVs? EV demand is mind-boggling... Also, consider the shift in generation https://www.statista.com/statistics/189369/electricity-net-g... While it's disturbing its consumption, it's a misdirection to where the real impacts should be focused...

EVs actually provide real value, you know, like getting people from one place place to another etc.

While this is completely useless. Stopping crypto mining is an extremely low hanging fruit if we we are serious at all about climate change (yes some people might claim that miners might be using renewable energy in many cases but it still could used for something actually useful instead..)

I’ve never understood the take that a crypto network “doesn’t provide value”. Keeping the network secure isn’t valuable? So whose paying for all the energy exactly? How long until they’re bled dry?

> Keeping the network secure isn’t valuable?

Relative to the amount of consumed energy? Not, not at all... Bitcoin is extremely exceptionally very inefficient for what it is.

> Keeping the network secure isn’t valuable?

Keeping the network secure has the same value as you apply to the network. If you're a Bitcoin maximalist this is infinite. If you're absolutely opposed to it it's zero. For most people it's somewhere in between. We can't pressupose that the energy expenditure is valuable because it is functionally necessary to the network.

> So whose paying for all the energy exactly? How long until they’re bled dry?

This is sort of like saying, "if gambling isn't valuable, where is the money coming from?" It's an activity some people want to engage in, and in the interests of liberty and self determination they should be able to do so. But when it has negative externalities of a severity that can't be ignored, something has to give and it had to be curbed to the point we reach a tolerable balance.

To be frank, Bitcoin hasn't demonstrated that it has deeper value than being a speculative financial asset. We've got a lot of speculative financial assets, most of them don't cost 2% of our energy expenditure in environmental externality.

And thats not true.

The energie consumed only keeps stuff ON the chain secure but we do not just use the chain.

You do not just give someone else a bitcoin without anything in return. As soon as anything ofchain is part of the equation, its no longer working. NO power consumption makes sure that you get whatever you bought with your bitcoin.

Its a lie.

And pls don't mention smart contracts, they are as shitty as everything else. It doesn't make sense to block capital for exchange as it only shifts the problem.

Crypto did not solve the 'trust' issue.

If you consider consumption of energy as a whole and not just electricity it would be quite different because EVs are replacing petroleum fuel cars. What type of energy consumption is cryptocurrency mining replacing?

If you consider the consumption of energy required to make an EV versus a die cast combustion engine, you'll see the energy consumption got front loaded.

This is only partially true.

1. the amount of renewable will increase which will mean that this will not count in 50 years while gas cars will still burn fuel.

2. the overall co2 production is relevant smaller with EVs. There is probably a high correliation to co2 vs. energy (otherwise it would be weird).

No one has an EV that will last 50 years. They are also not made from renewables.

CO2 is plant food, and is a red herring to the energy discussion.

Oil is co2 'plants' from a timespan of over houndred thousend years which we burned in 50 or 100 years.

The EV components are primarily reusable.

A gas / fuel car will ALWAYS consume oil. If yo want to switch to greener energye transport systems like plant oil, you can do that, its just not very efficient in comparision to an EV car.

And if you really really ment co2 as 'plants will consume it' no they are not able to consume that excess co2. Otherwise this co2 graph wouldn't look how it looks now: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/

Plants die for lack of CO2. It's their food.

https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/02/the-us-added-1-2-millio...

Adding EVs to the market seems to be a net negative for electricity use. Can you say the same for your imaginary coin machines?

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