So I work in the energy sector, and you are correct. The method we use for pricing power at a grid level is "local marginal pricing" - this is a price that is based on the location, the demand for power, and the ability for us to get the power across constraints (that is across a power gradient). It is often uneconomical to transmit power great distances, and loss factors are not insignificant. Not sure about Bhutan's grid, or who they can interchange to, but there are frequently wind farms in TX that have to take a loss to generate power simply because they are forced to generate power, and there is no demand for power in the region, and the buses (power lines) are congested. Also stranded hydropower is common the world over - it's easy to generate that power but difficult to build grid and interconnects to transmit that power - the line losses would be too high. For other types of generators - typically nuclear, often times ramp times for them are in the months, so turning up and turning down power is often difficult which is why an application that is passive, droppable, and can withstand latency is ideal to consume such power.
> ... so turning up and turning down power is often difficult which is why an application that is passive, droppable, and can withstand latency is ideal to consume such power.
Sure, so investing in smart load management is an optimal solution. With EVs and chargers coming online that's a huge load you can send a signal to in order to adjust demand. A country like Bhutan is very well suited to this kind of approach.
Or change the energy mix so you have a balance of baseload and variable load generation.
Or do something with it that isn't guessing random numbers on machines 99.7% of which will never successfully guess a single block and go from factory to space heater to landfill.
Can't remember which miner, but one of the majors, made more money in credits for pausing their waste than they did from the bitcoins that came out the other end last year. It's just extorting the public.
> Not sure about Bhutan's grid, or who they can interchange to, but there are frequently wind farms in TX that have to take a loss to generate power simply because they are forced to generate power, and there is no demand for power in the region, and the buses (power lines) are congested.
So invest in building more power lines.
The myth of stranded energy is toxic. Wasting it on bitcoin mining is an incentive not to connect it to the grid the way it should be connected. Either don't build it, or build it and connect it. The worst case outcome is to build and then waste it.
You’re suggesting Bhutan alter their national energy mix rather than run a Bitcoin mining operation?
Bhutan has 0.15 vehicles per capita, among the lowest in the world. 47% of their popular has no education. You’re saying Bhutan should build a smart grid for EVs rather than run a Bitcoin mining operation?
Bitcoin mining generates literally no value for 99.99% of the population, so anything that improves the infrastructure is going to be more valuable than that.
Not really, I'm suggesting they sell more power to India which is what they do already. They can do that by lowering the price per kWh.
> You’re saying Bhutan should build a smart grid for EVs rather than run a Bitcoin mining operation?
I think that’s kinda ridiculous.
Not just EVs, there's plenty of things you can make demand-responsive. Do something - anything - with it. Electrolyze water for hydrogen. Electric smelters. Power for a data center! The world is your oyster.
What's ridiculous is wasting the power on lotto tickets and e-waste and furthering the single least efficient technology humanity has ever conceived of.
> Or do something with it that isn't guessing random numbers on machines 99.7% of which will never successfully guess a single block and go from factory to space heater to landfill.
By this logic we should remove airbags from cars also-- the vast majority of airbags just cost money to manufacture and don't ever expand or save a life, ending up in landfills unused.
I'm genuinely having a hard time following your argument.
An anti-efficient transaction processing system (that gets less efficient the more people mine) managing 2-3 transactions per second is the same as ... airbags ... because they're not used in the ideal outcome?
The majority of electricity used to mine bitcoin (about 100TWh per year) is coal, and coal kills about 25 people per TWh generated. So it's steady-state responsible for about 1000 deaths per year if we assume only 40% of the power is coal. The Verge says its about 85% coal and gas. [1]
What's the quantity of resources consumed by airbags at rest?
Bitcoin doesn't 'just cost money' to make, it consumes wild quantities of power and yields wild quantities of e-waste. 100TWh per year and 54kT of e-waste.
If we followed this model, would you be ok with each laptop you buy yielding 333 identical laptop in a dumpster somewhere ... because airbags?
Like I said, I'm having trouble following this argument. Is there a chance your argument is less about airbags and more about, er, somewhat heavier bags?
Your argument (I think) is that bitcoin mining machines that don't solve a block directly are a complete waste, and only bitcoin mining machines that that solve a block do anything useful. Since 99.7% of mining machines don't solve a block, bitcoin is 333 times more wasteful than in needs to be. Is that right?
This misses the point that mining is probabilistic. Mining pools pay out based on the number of hashes tried, not the number of blocks solved. Your misunderstanding seems to be that the utility of something can be based on a probabilistic outcome. It is akin to saying that airbags are 99% (or whatever) wasteful because most of them aren't actually involved in a crash, and therefore 100x inefficient. You pay extra for a car with an airbag because it has value in the rare event you do have a crash it has immense value. Similarly, a mining pool would pay a single bitcoin mining rig to mine for years without it solving a single block, because the mining pool would realize the entire value if it did find a block, and so it pays out just under the expected value of this reward times the probability of the event happening.
Second, your argument ignores the fact that the unit of a "mining machine" is completely arbitrary. If mining machines were on average 2x larger and more powerful (but there were half as many of them), then by your argument bitcoin mining would be 2x less wasteful. That makes zero sense.
> Since 99.7% of mining machines don't solve a block, bitcoin is 333 times more wasteful than in needs to be. Is that right?
Absolutely not, it's millions of times more wasteful than that. You don't need to allocate a single miner to a single block and then throw it out. It's just so many order of magnitude more wasteful than it needs to be that it's hard to reason about. You should be able to run the entire Bitcoin network on a single Raspberry Pi. It's literally 2tps, each a few bytes.
> Your misunderstanding seems to be that the utility of something can be based on a probabilistic outcome.
There's no misunderstanding. The kWh and kT of e-waste don't need to happen, it's just a poorly designed proof of concept that ran amok.
> If mining machines were on average 2x larger and more powerful (but there were half as many of them), then by your argument bitcoin mining would be 2x less wasteful.
No, I'm measuring waste by weight, in kilotons per year. In addition to energy consumption. So if a machine was twice as large it would contribute the same amount of waste in both columns.
OK, let's make this a multiple choice question. Assume bitcoin mining machines magically each become twice as powerful, AND twice as heavy, but there are half as many of them, so the total energy and resources used is exactly the same. According to your argument is this change:
a) good, because now twice as many miners actually solve a block, so instead of 99.7% waste it is 99.4% waste.
b) doesn't matter, because I just changed the unit of measurement-- each machine is just doing twice as much work.
c) doesn't matter, because bitcoin is already infinitely wasteful-- in which case pointing out that 99.7% of machines are somehow more wasteful than the other 0.3% does not make sense.
Same quantity of power consumption, same quantity of electronics, same waste. The more powerful the machines get the more 'difficult' the 'problem' is to solve. These machines don't do any work unless they successfully guess the nonce. The bulk of its time is spent wasting power. Doesn't matter how many boxes you split it into or combine it into.
Would you then agree that your original point that "99.7% of machines do not solve a block" is not by itself an argument that bitcoin is more or less wasteful than it needs to be? Because through a bookkeeping trick you can reduce or increase that figure by an arbitrary amount.
Was that really what this thread was about? It's just a way of visualizing how wasteful it is because most people just don't realize what 50,000 tons of electronics per year thrown out means. Or what 100 trillion watt-hours means.
It's 99.7% of machines based on the characteristics of the current most efficient miner.
I gave all the relevant waste metrics. Power, weight. And to help visualize, the quantity of the current best-in-class miner.
This is legendary pedantry. You can multiply and divide out to get any of the three measures of the scale of waste from the others. This whole thread was about you disliking 'P' in 'P=IV' but having no issue with 'I', 'V' or the idea you can multiply them together.
Look, you are touting a metric that you agreed has no bearing on the argument you are trying to make. The number of machines does not matter, it isn't part of any meaningful equation at all. Akin to summing the miles per gallons per car over the number of cars to measure efficiency.
Not to detract from anything you said but I read that Texas specifically is unique in that they don’t want to connect to the national grid to avoid being regulated by the federal government. It creates other problems like we saw in 2021 as well
Sort-of. Transmission for HTHV lines (745kV single circuit cost $2.5-4M/mile with ~1% line loss; 345kV single circuit will cost ~$1.5-2M/mile with 5% line loss). For 1MW solar capacity you typically need about 4 acres. 100GW of solar would require 400k acres of land - and come at a cost of about $3 billion for the panels, not to mention the price of land or entitlements. Add in cost of substations and transmission you’re realistically looking at a $10+ Billion project. Which while doable would not profitability compete with other grid solutions. If panels drop by another 30% and power densities improve the grid will naturally tend towards that direction.
The US already has 121GW of solar installed the majority of that being large scale Grid solar. Which shows the transition is already happening at current prices.
A major part of that equation is there is a lot of land in the US available for under 2,000$/acre, however spending more is a tradeoff to reduce the need for longer distance power transmission etc.
PS: 10B for 100GW at 30% capacity factor for 20 years is 10,000,000,000$ / (100,000,000kW * 0.3 * 24h * 365 * 20) or 0.2c/kWh ignoring interest. So, I think you messed up your estimate somewhere if you think that’s uncompetitive.
One sounds like an expense, the other sounds like a transfer from one pocket to the other while allowing for shifting the public perception any way desired while retaining unparalleled access to capital.
This could be a really BIG deal for healthcare if you do it well. I would love to have a completely encrypted db that I could setup dynamic failover and replication. Also an amazing additional feature would be if it contained built-in access logging.
If you were to do that, HIPAA becomes MUCH easier for other healthcare IT startups using your db.
Can you handle apps with background tasks? In my experience, the backend systems basically end up being a large repository of jobs that need to get backgrounded, and handed off to other systems.
I would be even more excited if you could find some way to create and manage those effectively.
I think the issue isn't that the media is getting worse at it - rather they're just as good as they used to be (not very) but it's a lot easier to catch them when they're bad at it, so they just don't do it as much anymore.
I agree. I wouldn't however mind a successor series in spirit. Something with an entirely new cast in the same universe as Firefly/Serenity. It would be especially cool if done with tie-ins to the events we're familiar with.
This could be an interesting model to do out in the open. Rather than covertly mine cryptocurrency, say that the app is free if you contribute hashes to a pool, or you can buy the premium version that doesn't.
Almost like the "slow" version vs the "fast" version of an app.
The idea of sharing computation cycles certainly did, however, converting those computation cycles into currency so it can fuel other "real" work is most definitely a by-product of bitcoin.
This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.
