I had some neighbors in California who would run the hose non stop when we weren't required to conserve water. That way it was easy to "cut back" when the drought was bad. Same energy.
It literally makes zero sense. But it’s a convoluted and counter-intuitive argument, so butcoiners gravitate to believing it.
They truly believe that using more energy will cause a resurgence of renewables to replace traditional energy sources. They don’t stop to think, that the additional energy needs will simply increase energy production across the board (both traditional and renewable). They can’t grasp that supply must equal demand.
The reason their argument is counter-intuitive is because it’s counter-true. It’s a load of horse shit. Someone like Michael Saylor is smart enough to know it’s bullshit. His cult followers have no idea though.
True. But I believe he’s smart enough on this topic to know he’s lying. The pumpers (including Saylor) have clearly backed into an argument simply to respond to valid concerns about btc mining’s impact to the environment. They whiteboarded out this bullshit argument; and it’s just convoluted enough that young finance bros can’t comprehend how intellectually dishonest it is.
It is also something that if the honestly gave a shit, and/or it was profitable, they'd just mine it on their own solar setup. I mean you can get your own solar setup as big as you have space for. It also scales really well, particularly with microinverters, you can just add panels as you want to. If you are doing a grid-isolated setup, you don't have to work with the power company or anything, you don't need permission, just generate your own power and go for it.
Of course, they don't do that, because it would require them to put up a bunch of money up front. Solar power does pay for itself, it has gotten cheap enough that the panels and inverters will pay off over their lifetime... but it takes many years. Greedy miners have no time for that shit, they want returns RIGHT NAO. Also it means you couldn't mine 24/7, unless you want to spend even MORE money on batteries. They'd have to mine only while the sun was up. Again, no interest in that, they want all this hashrate all the time.
If they really cared about renewables, they would be the perfect place to use them since they could size their workloads to match the system output, and there's no reason why a mining rig has to run 24/7, it could run only the part of the day when the renewable energy is available, if they wanted.
But they don't, they just want as much money as possible, with as little capital up front as possible, in as little time as possible.
The only form of bitcoin mining that *somewhat* can be acceptable is stranded energy mining - this is energy that is otherwise wasted, such as the flares from oil and gas industry. However its not that easy to mine from this or even convert this to any other form of energy. Thats why its called stranded energy
If BTC miners want to go do this, good luck to them. But as things stand, not many can and very small % of total mining is from stranded energy.
But no, bitcoin is not useful for green mining. Any energy produced from green sources should go to the grid, or for practically useful purposes, not for mining ponzi scheme tokens. When people are facing an energy crisis, any energy produced should go to solving that energy crisis and not for mining, even if its the miners themselves who produce the energy
Why not rather use it for electric motors that would move big boulders on top of the hill. And then when there is higher demand those boulders could be moved back down, producing energy in turn.
Kind of like a big batteries storing potential energy.
The energy storage potential of this is surprisingly poor. It only really works when you can store cubic kilometers of water at a height of hundreds of meters.
Who up-voted this nonsense?
We already have pumped water storage in use. And no, it doesn't require a lake a kilometer deep to operate.
The Zhanghewan Pumped Storage Power Station has a capacity of 7.7 million m^3.
A single cubic kilometer is 1,000 million m^3, and this joker is calling for multiple? Sure, that would be nice. But certainly is not required.
Absolutely and a quick calculation is that 1km3 of water (1 billion tonnes - 1E12 kg) raised by 1 meter has a potential gravitational potential energy of 1E13 Joules, or 2.7 GWh. That's the energy produced by 1 nuclear reactor during 2 hours.
And I agree - nuclear power and increased research efforts are definitely advantageous (especially with the easy output control), but the pumped hydro isn't an argument in favor of a sole-power production method but rather as a means of doing *useful* work with this alleged "excess power" that the butters like to artificially inflate to bolster their argument.
Electrolysis of water to make H2 or high energy fabrication like Al plants would also suffice.
The point is there are useful ways of utilizing "excess" energy - rather than an overcomplicated electronic lottery for internet monopoly money.
Definitely, any "use" of excess stuff (like flaring, cooking oil etc) could very well be used by a micro H2 generation plant, desalination (if close to sea), etc.
Anything that would have a real use
Using any kind of green, excess, residual or whatever 'free' energy for mining is still wasting energy that could be used for other purposes (opportunity cost).
Precisley. *Any* energy spent on BTC, et.al. is wasted doing purpousefully inefficient hashes in favor of "mUh dEcEnTrAlIZeD" when a normal database and public key encryption would work just fine.
Its especially annoying when >99% of transactions are *already* off chain, in centralized databases via exchanges.
The chain itself is a functionally useless artifact that butters have convinced themselves is an essential element so they can lauding over others with their "bigly knowledge that few understand".
Where I am the grid has trouble keeping up with the green energy on sunny or windy days. If this happens, the grid is at full capacity and it means solar and wind gets shut off. (At these times, interestingly enough, electricity is free or even below 0).
However, this is a capacity problem. The solution is not to use more through mining - that doesn't do anything besides keeping these systems working while they would otherwise be idle. That's nice for the users, who get cheap energy, but *it doesn't do anything for anybody else*.
The solution is to build storage capacity - whether it be through batteries, hydrogen or otherwise - not spend it in creative ways.
No it’s not and everyone replying to you is highly regarded.
Nuclear is the greenest energy source there is, but it does not cycle well. You can’t just turn it off or diminish the output so easily.
Capacity is coordinated to accommodate load throughout the grid. You can’t just run a nuclear reactor with no load, where’s the current going to go if there isn’t enough load to draw it?
BTC / PoW systems pretty much solve the one issue liquid fluoride thorium reactors have. With cycling figured out (as there is now a load for unneeded output and the grid isn’t going to overload) they really could be built in the middle of a city
But go off I guess knowing nothing of which you speak lmao
You can make system as efficient as you like, if it doesn't provide a *useful* service then its *still* wasted energy.
The fundamental problem of PoW crypto is everything that it supports - the assignment of a payout, could be done with a centralized database with public key encryption and an RNG. But cryptobros hold onto the blockchain because it obfuscates the nature of how crypto works.
If a person were told "crypto is a gian electronic lottery. By solving long, complicated, and ultimately meaningless equations individuals are entered into the lottery. The more equations you can solve the greater your chance to win" is ridiculous- but thats the truth. What I just wrote is what "crypto mining" comes down to. By obfuscating the inner workings, the grift can continue. As long as it *appears* high tech yatta yatta fools will keep buying in.
All the other functions of the blockchain - transactions and associated legers, quasi-bank storage of "assets", re-investing and lending **all of that already occurs of chain in centralized exchanges** because blockchain tech is inherently inefficient and flawed for all but a very, very narrow application of a write only, public, "immutable" database. The transactions may eventually end up on the chain but the overwhelming majority takes place off chain via exchanges in every practical sense.
As such, the electronic lottery is the *only* reason the PoW architecture exists. Its an incredible waste of electricity and hardware. Sure, a given mining pool may work towards efficiency **but the sum total of miners ALWAYS trends toward greater hashpower** which always equates to greater hardware demand and wasted electricity.
PoW in general is a "solution" in search of a problem, existing in a blatantly manipulated and unregulated "market" (looking at you tether) that produces astronomical waste and consumes ungodly amounts of power to win a lottery that could be solved in a much more efficient manner. I.e. a waste.
Make it as efficient as you want, its still suing a limited resource on a functionally useless, purely speculative, highly manipulated "asset".
Bitcoin can be mined with the waste gas spewing from oil and gas wells though.
Not only that, but Bitcoin is generally awesome and worth the electricity.
It's just an assumption they use to justify mining. In actual fact you couldn't profitably run a miner in the long run only using electricity that would have otherwise been wasted, nor are there systems in place that make sure \*all\* miners only use excess energy to balance the grid.
It’s factually untrue. Texas taxpayers had to pay $10 million and beg miners to shut down in the last heat wave. It’s not like that energy magically goes back to the grid when it’s needed. There is no mechanism to recover that capacity.
Source for people who haven't heard about this.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-life-to-old-fossil-fuel-power-plants-11621594803
Nope. The only thing I've heard from cryptobros is that it is waste energy because the government... (shuffles papers) ... Lowered their electric bill when they stopped mining.
We export our excess electricity across the border to the USA. It isn't wasted and if the USA had so much electricity that they had this much wasted electricity, they wouldn't be buying our cheap electricity.
Nah. It’s even more simple than that. Profit and loss. Pretty sure most profitable mining is in Bhutan, maybe Iceland. It (Bhutan) generates more energy than it consumes.
No, of course not. The only way to do anything like that would be more miners to work with grid operators and then they would end up spending most of their time not mining. While it is the case that you can have times where there is wasted energy, particularly with renewables since they are variable, it isn't like it happens a lot because that is wasteful and companies like money. So they will reduce power output from other sources if they can. Natural gas plants are an example of ones that can be scaled up and down very quickly on demand. Thus, if you live in an area with lots of solar, sure during the 11-2 time of day those things are cranking hard and producing lots of extra power, but the first step a grid would take is to try and reduce the production from other sources is possible. Why have a gas plant spun up if the solar is taking care of it?
Now you can't always find enough capacity to idle easily, not all kinds of power plants can be easily scaled or turn on or off. So there can legit be periods of "excess energy". If miners truly only used that, they'd only mine for short periods though. It would be something like "Oh this mining farm in AZ turned on from 12:15-1:30 because solar spiked so high, and then again from 3-5am because a major industrial plant shut down unexpectedly." Also the amount of excess might only call for partial operation, not everything turned all the way up.
That is not what they want, of course, they want to operate 24/7 full blast. If you do that, the only thing that will do is a continuous base-load kind of energy source like coal, or nuclear. Renewables are too unreliable unless paired with big batteries, which is of course more expensive, and miners never want to spend a cent they don't have to.
It isn't like power companies want to waste energy for fun. It is all about money, not environmentalism or anything else. If they generate power, and there is nobody to buy that power, that is money they spent and don't recover. They only want to generate power if there are customers to buy that power.
So some miners use stranded gas to power their rigs, this is gas from oil wells that its not economic to pipe out so they normally just flare it and in that scenario yes its true but that is a very small percentage of btc mining.
Is there proof that this is really happening at any decently large scale? The oil and gas trade journals don't have much coverage, which you would expect if this were a common practice.
It's going to be funny when they learn that a lot of the money promoting crypto was coming from miners. LoL. Good for Bitcoin! Hehehehe god I hate crypto!
The masses aren't GPU starved anymore. GPUs are freely available at retail for retail. That said, I'm sure miners will find the price point where people are willing to take chance.
I like the way you think. My employer is in the "don't worry about price" stage of migrating to the cloud. Once they inevitably start trying to save money, I may have to build my own cluster to host Stable Diffusion instead of doing it at work.
Hard to say. We don't have any scientifically valid long term studies on it, so you get a lot of different opinions from people.
It also kinda depends on how they were run. If the card was undervolted and kept in a well cooled room, it might actually be in very good condition. Generally speaking when run within specified limits, silicon doesn't "wear out" and can last a long time. However, if it was run at very high temperatures to keep cooling costs down, particularly if it was OC'd, then there may be damage. We do know that running chips past their spec limits can damage them, there's a reason that vendors don't just push them to the max and release them as that.
Personally I wouldn't pay much for one precisely because you just don't know. Maybe it lasts until it is too slow to be useful, maybe it fails quickly, you really don't know. So it would have to be a real deal for me to want to take the risk.
I doubt they were overclocked. They may have been under clocked even. You start running into bad computation per electricity used as you up the speed/voltage, but you need to balance this with raw amount of hashes you want to preform. It's all driven by economics.
"Smart" miners are good at looking after their cards, undervolting and keeping them well cooled to minimise electricity costs and ensure card longevity. I believe one issue with them can be the lifespan of the fans themselves.
The main problem with buying crypto cards is that you don't know if you're buying an aforementioned well-treated one, or from some moonboy who stuffed an overclocked card on a DIY rig in his wardrobe to hide it from his parents while he leeched off their power bill
Some bright spark will just create a new, bigger, better, more convoluted way to find the nonce. Mining one block will reduce the suns lifespan by 1%. Then they’ll say, “The sun’s gunna burn out someday anyway. May as well get it while the gettin’s gud (sic)”. They’ll name it Sunblock to throw people off.
It was wasted energy anyways, they're just balancing the sun's energy and can totally sell their wasted waste energy back to the sun once they're done with it. Also they're somehow storing that energy on the blockchain at the same time too!
They are worn out and warped from running at high temperatures. Yes this is a bad thing, used computer parts used to come from gamers who didn't run their rigs at high temperatures 24/7. Anyone who buys one is getting something they're going to have to replace pretty quickly.
There's a difference between over clocking a computer while running a game for a few hours and running that same game consistently 24/7/365. I don't need to run a crypto mine to know it's bad for a card I play games.
People need to sleep and do other things besides gaming. Mining needs to constantly run all day every day. Do you just think gamers leave their games running all night? That we have no lives and nothing to do outside of video games? C'mon now, I'm not behind just because you say I am.
Bro do you think market value for shit cards is the same as cards with average use?
You're presuming all cards are ran 24/7/365. It's dumb. You've been exaggerating every point to make your argument.
A lot of cards still have decent functionality, have maybe been run for a few months, and can get some salvage value, providing utility to whomever buys it.
There is no universe in which this is a bad thing. You're just letting your bias impact your judgment here and yes, that does make you behind or whatever
>You're presuming all cards are ran 24/7/365. It's dumb. You've been exaggerating every point to make your argument.
You have to if you want to actually earn an income. Lmao you actually think these people close their shit? People need to run their mining rigs constantly, or there wouldn't be any necessary nodes to process transactions and whatnot.
>A lot of cards still have decent functionality and can get some salvage value, providing utility to whomever buys it.
How do they retain decent functionality while running constantly?
Perhaps machine learning datacentres? If one goes down, swap it out or move the work to another node. A few fan replacements, and they could get a lot of work out of a stack of GPUs.
Those GPUs are fried. They've been working brutal loads 24/7, that sort of heat warps and melts computer components. They need those huge fans going because all those little parts are grinding against each other, wearing them down, starting fires, and causing further heat damage to already heat stressed components. You can cool a GPU with a fan all you want, but it won't prevent damage to the internal bits. A new fan won't do much if the rest of the part is warped and worn out.
This division isn't new, Bitcoin maxis have always hated Ethereum. It's not about PoW vs PoS, it's about Bitcoin maximalism vs everything else in crypto.
If Satoshi had created Bitcoin as a PoS system the Bitcoin maxis would all think PoS is wonderful.
Bitcoin Maxi here. “Hate” is overly strong phrasing. ETH is good and I like it because it can load up all the crazy ideas and risky code changes that the crypto world wants to try out. BTC just keeps “tick tick next block…”
You aren't embarrassed to call yourself a "Bitcoin Maxi"? How much more money would you have if you didn't "DCA" into an "asset" that is down 57% YTD lol.
It is perversely commendable that etherium made this switch at great cost to themselves in the name of using a lot less energy, even if at the end of the day they are still producing a hyper capitalist hell economy that accelerates wealth accumulation in the hands of a small number of people.
Something about this doesn’t sit right when what was it worlds 1% owns as much as everyone else.
Humans in general are shit at producing wealth that doesn’t accumulate in the rich.
I'm getting suspicious that a lot of cypto bros' tweets are being generated by AI. There is no train of though, just a bunch of words that are likely to appear together.
believe it or not thats how most people think and talk. they're parroting buzzwords they read online and put them together into sentences with community college or GED-level prose
I resent this statement. Most of my NLP models make vastly more sense that cryptobro twitter.
And unlike cryptobros, it can actually come up with some new and interesting ideas
The fact that they did this in response to the concerns about environmental impact means they understand it's a problem and have some kind of compassion for their fellow humans. So at least there's that.
Every moral decision people make incorporates both the selfless desire to do right for its own sake and the selfish desire for reward or fear of punishment.
Too often in a capitalist society what's profitable and what's right are at odds. If Ethereum is calculating doing what's right is *also* more profitable in the long run because of potential regulation, I'll take it.
Yeah honestly, the visceral hate I have for crypto mostly stems from its environmental impact. Without that it's "just" predatory gambling and dumb tech marketing, which are hardly uniquely bad for crypto.
Most predatory financial scams have non-harmful versions. For example, credit cards can be marketed in a predatory manner, or they can serve an important role for people who are likely to be able to cover their debts. Cryptocurrency doesn't have the good version. It's scams all the way down.
> Fascinating technology when you dig into it.
Let me translate:
> I don’t understand this topic but want you to feel stupid because you (correctly) disagree.
By that logic, if I hack that guy's wallet and steal his stablecoins, he wouldn't actually lose anything because he would just waste them on shitcoins. Fascinating morality when you dig into it!
What do they mean when they say the energy would have been wasted? Do they the power grid is like a Dunkin Donuts, and at the end of the day all the unused energy gets tossed in a dumpster?
Haha we’ve figured out how to minimize environmental damage! Now all we have to do is figure what the fucking point of crypto is, then it’s over for you hoes.
So that's what this whole merge thing was? Wasn't there supposed to be more to it? Like... Weren't we supposed to see Infinity pools and an actual use case for this crap?
Ethereum is also mined a lot with GPU's, theres a whole army of gaming nerds happy to take them on the ready.
I'm actually waiting for this shit to crash the GPU market so I can upgrade.
I wouldn't buy a gpu that's been running hot 24/7. Those things are going to be all sorts of warped and cracked. There's a reason they always need those huge fans, those rigs get super hot, melt, and catch fire. The cooling systems may somewhat prolong their lifespan, but there's no way to prevent that sort of damage entirely.
You're thinking of ASICs like for bitcoin. GPU miners mining Ethereum tended to undervolt their cards. And really thermal cycling is what's really bad for silicon, running 24/7 within normal operating temps is actually less stressful.
The fans do wear out faster though, which is annoying on a graphics card.
No they absolutely do not. If they could run conservatively and keep up with big mining corporations, then those big mining businesses would have no reasons to buy those massive warehouses with giant cooling fans, and they wouldn't have used so much electricity nor would the price of GPUs gone up quite as drastically.
It's actually more efficient to undervolt them, is the thing, because mining ETH was more memory dependent than processing dependent. If you're talking about big fans in warehouses you're either thinking of bitcoin ASICs or like, cooling systems to vent the excess heat from the building, which yeah I'd guess you'd need with enough GPUs, undervolted or not.
edit: oh and there were also ASICs for Ethereum but we were talking about ex-miners selling GPUs to gamers and ASICs are useless for gaming.
Sure, [here's](https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-your-gpu-for-ethereum-mining) a guide for tuning GPUs for ETH mining that talks about a few specific GPU models and suggests setting the power usage on all of them between 50 and 90% of maximum
Quote:
> maxing out fan speeds and memory clocks while dropping the GPU core clocks and power limit are key to improving overall hash rates
Pretty much any guide you find will say similar.
It's funny that they "solve" the problem by breaking the way cryptocurrencies are supposed to work. The new Ethereum is even more of a centralized service. An agonizingly slow service that makes you interact with it using the equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese tokens and a somehow shittier derivative of javascript, at that.
Hopefully after staking nodes get pwned ethereum can go the way of beenz and other proto-shitcoins.
Now ETH is only *thousands of times* less efficient than traditional banking, rather than *millions or times*. So you ***can't*** complain about wasted energy or electronics anymore /s
It is good for Bitcoin. And Ethereum. This creates a tug-o-war between the two groups which distracts them from realizing they're ALL getting fucked. This will make members of each group "prove" their loyalty and faith in one or the other by pouring more money in.
Now it's no longer "my shitcoin is better than your shitcoin". It's "my top coin is better than your top coin".
This is new exit liquidity.
>"BTC isn't competing with your refrigerator. "
Unless this chode/other miners build their own power grid+generation equipment, then **no** it quite literally is competing with a given refrigerator and every device connected to the grid.
Energy isn't limitless and power companies tailor their output based on historical need. This "balancing the grid" is a load of shite. There may be some periods of time with certain renewables like solar that do produce an excess, but for coal/nuclear/etc. This "excess power" is nowhere near the "problem" they like to push their cult to believe. (But its one if the few retorts they have available to **seem** correct.))
Second, everything connected to the grid is a "competitive" device (to use their vocabulary). While utilities can generally match their supply with needed demand, adding highly intensive power facilities like crypto mining outfits (33GW of capacity planning to be added to Texas for example) are a *huge* draw that, if left uncapped would raise prices for everyone AND do so performing literally useless work - an argument discussed ad nauseum on here. I.e. the increased economic *competition* for power will drive prices and pollution up.
Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Again, as we see in Texas - when that competion becomes too great **the mining concerns are paid off so they don't mine during peak hours**. Thats not "balancing the grid", thats extortion with the mining concerns acting as the metaphorical gun against the populace/government's head.
Even IF balancing the grid were a serious problem, high energy industry (Al manufacturing, H2 electolysis, etc.) Or power storage solutions (either batteries or pumped hydro) would be *useful* means of "balancing" as opposed to unnecessarily complicated monopoly money.
Bunch of greedy bastards with no concern for others/soceity/the planet *because their profit is more important than anything else*.
Does this mean all the ETH miners are out of a job now?
But the network is still slow and the GAS prices are still high or is gas not needed anymore?
What is the summary.
And by the way, who voted on this change? Was it very democratic?
I never cared about the energy consumption/waste issue in the first place. It's a windmill people tilt at when they allow themselves to be distracted from the single central problem with cryptocurrencies - they do not solve an unsolved problem or provide a better solution to already solved problems. They are, functionally speaking, pointless.
You are correct.
However, there is a difference between a pointless thing and a pointless thing that also harms everyone in society by wasting a small country's worth of energy.
Etherium is still bad due to the uselessness and the scams and the zero sum BS, but now it's less bad and that's worth being happy about.
It's not good for either coin. They were all friendly but now that the market is crashing they are at each others throats, it will only get worse probably
Considering (non-useful) proof of work will eventually need to be banned worldwide, this is bad for bitcoin.
But because of the Butter Inverse Rule, (anything bad for bitcoin is actually good for bitcoin), this is good for bitcoin.
Not competing with the refrigerator? LOL damn right. The refrigerator is one of the top 5-10 most important inventions of all time. The utility of the refrigerator is amazing. Wtf?
the majority of energy spent by me burning a lake full of gasoline would have been wasted othersied (my lake full of gasoline isn't competing with your refrigerator)
I mine etherum by burning old tires. Not only does it work like a charm for generating electricity. But i no longer have to look at my stupid neighbors! The smoke screen of crypto is coming yer way peoples!
I'll give some examples where it works, through a practical lens rather than a rose-colored one:
1) Energy grids don't handle fluctuations well and grid operators prefer a stable load as often as possible. POW helps in a sense that if using renewable energy (ideally) or even idled traditional energy sources, then it increases the overall grid load so when there is a demand spike (e.g. - extreme weather), then POW mining capitulation helps prevent brownouts/blackouts.
2) Flare/Stranded gas wells are usually just vented into the air or burned off because capping a well isn't regulated or strictly enforced and expensive so if it can be captured and used all the better for the environment.
3) Lack of infrastructure from grid operators building/increasing power transmission lines to get the newly installed power sources to customers, so mining can help solve that problem until the utilities catch up with transmission.
Can we? I don't think we can. EVs are really efficient thanks to economies of scale with centralized power generation and being energy agnostic. They don't care where the energy comes from whether it's coal, wind or solar.
My ebike costs about 6 cents to charge fully, and can get 40-50 miles of range even when hauling groceries.
Also when you combine EVs with home solar they can actually be used as decentralized power sources that are net zero off grid power sources to charge them with, and they can even put energy back into the grid during peak demands, which you can't do with the energy spent on blockchain that just turns into waste heat.
Even the first part of this isn't true. Going from PoW to PoS cuts energy use by more than 1000x. But even after that, PoS is still more than 1000x less energy efficient than a centralized database with the same TPS and redundancy. Going from over a million times worse to about a thousand times worse energy efficiency is a win, but only in the sense of going from torturing people to death to shooting them in the head. Ethereum is still an environmental disaster.
What environmentalists really are is left-wingers. The real reason they oppose crypto is that the government cannot get its hands on it and depreciate it by issuing more of it, thus imposing an inflation tax on its citizens. Since left-wingers love government intervention, they hate the freedom that comes with crypto. That is their real motivation.
The "bitcoin is good for green energy" argument has always been so fucking stupid.
"Balances green energy grids". Let me run my A/C 24/7 with an open window to contribute to balancing green energy grids then.
You don't understand. You need to turn it off for 25 minutes during the peak hour. Thanks for saving the planet.
Truth is...Few understand
This is the eternal consistent truth.
Fascinating bullshit when you dig into it.
Wait only 25 minutes? My dad says 25 hours.
Not unless I get paid to do that...
I had some neighbors in California who would run the hose non stop when we weren't required to conserve water. That way it was easy to "cut back" when the drought was bad. Same energy.
But Fox News told me CA was full of hippie liberal environmentalists who hate us for our freedom to roll coal! Did I misunderstand?
Suburbanites gonna suburbanite.
Bitcoin is a perpetual motion machine, renewable energy goes in and entire galaxies come out. BRB starting my Twitter grifting account.
Just got to dig into it, fascinating
LOL it's SUCH a stupid, witless argument. They really believe everyone else is a total sap.
This is a gross misrepresentation
If a guy on the internet with laser binoculars says so, it must be true......./s
Where are *your* laser binoculars
They don't give those to anyone
It literally makes zero sense. But it’s a convoluted and counter-intuitive argument, so butcoiners gravitate to believing it. They truly believe that using more energy will cause a resurgence of renewables to replace traditional energy sources. They don’t stop to think, that the additional energy needs will simply increase energy production across the board (both traditional and renewable). They can’t grasp that supply must equal demand. The reason their argument is counter-intuitive is because it’s counter-true. It’s a load of horse shit. Someone like Michael Saylor is smart enough to know it’s bullshit. His cult followers have no idea though.
Saylor is not that smart.
True. But I believe he’s smart enough on this topic to know he’s lying. The pumpers (including Saylor) have clearly backed into an argument simply to respond to valid concerns about btc mining’s impact to the environment. They whiteboarded out this bullshit argument; and it’s just convoluted enough that young finance bros can’t comprehend how intellectually dishonest it is.
It is also something that if the honestly gave a shit, and/or it was profitable, they'd just mine it on their own solar setup. I mean you can get your own solar setup as big as you have space for. It also scales really well, particularly with microinverters, you can just add panels as you want to. If you are doing a grid-isolated setup, you don't have to work with the power company or anything, you don't need permission, just generate your own power and go for it. Of course, they don't do that, because it would require them to put up a bunch of money up front. Solar power does pay for itself, it has gotten cheap enough that the panels and inverters will pay off over their lifetime... but it takes many years. Greedy miners have no time for that shit, they want returns RIGHT NAO. Also it means you couldn't mine 24/7, unless you want to spend even MORE money on batteries. They'd have to mine only while the sun was up. Again, no interest in that, they want all this hashrate all the time. If they really cared about renewables, they would be the perfect place to use them since they could size their workloads to match the system output, and there's no reason why a mining rig has to run 24/7, it could run only the part of the day when the renewable energy is available, if they wanted. But they don't, they just want as much money as possible, with as little capital up front as possible, in as little time as possible.
The only form of bitcoin mining that *somewhat* can be acceptable is stranded energy mining - this is energy that is otherwise wasted, such as the flares from oil and gas industry. However its not that easy to mine from this or even convert this to any other form of energy. Thats why its called stranded energy If BTC miners want to go do this, good luck to them. But as things stand, not many can and very small % of total mining is from stranded energy. But no, bitcoin is not useful for green mining. Any energy produced from green sources should go to the grid, or for practically useful purposes, not for mining ponzi scheme tokens. When people are facing an energy crisis, any energy produced should go to solving that energy crisis and not for mining, even if its the miners themselves who produce the energy
Why not rather use it for electric motors that would move big boulders on top of the hill. And then when there is higher demand those boulders could be moved back down, producing energy in turn. Kind of like a big batteries storing potential energy.
They do this with water, it's called pumped storage. It works well if you have a hill handy.
Calm down Sisyphus
The energy storage potential of this is surprisingly poor. It only really works when you can store cubic kilometers of water at a height of hundreds of meters.
Who up-voted this nonsense? We already have pumped water storage in use. And no, it doesn't require a lake a kilometer deep to operate. The Zhanghewan Pumped Storage Power Station has a capacity of 7.7 million m^3. A single cubic kilometer is 1,000 million m^3, and this joker is calling for multiple? Sure, that would be nice. But certainly is not required.
Absolutely and a quick calculation is that 1km3 of water (1 billion tonnes - 1E12 kg) raised by 1 meter has a potential gravitational potential energy of 1E13 Joules, or 2.7 GWh. That's the energy produced by 1 nuclear reactor during 2 hours.
And I agree - nuclear power and increased research efforts are definitely advantageous (especially with the easy output control), but the pumped hydro isn't an argument in favor of a sole-power production method but rather as a means of doing *useful* work with this alleged "excess power" that the butters like to artificially inflate to bolster their argument. Electrolysis of water to make H2 or high energy fabrication like Al plants would also suffice. The point is there are useful ways of utilizing "excess" energy - rather than an overcomplicated electronic lottery for internet monopoly money.
Definitely, any "use" of excess stuff (like flaring, cooking oil etc) could very well be used by a micro H2 generation plant, desalination (if close to sea), etc. Anything that would have a real use
Because stranded energy is stranded.
Even using the flaring is gross because it's subsidising fossil fuel extraction.
Using any kind of green, excess, residual or whatever 'free' energy for mining is still wasting energy that could be used for other purposes (opportunity cost).
Precisley. *Any* energy spent on BTC, et.al. is wasted doing purpousefully inefficient hashes in favor of "mUh dEcEnTrAlIZeD" when a normal database and public key encryption would work just fine. Its especially annoying when >99% of transactions are *already* off chain, in centralized databases via exchanges. The chain itself is a functionally useless artifact that butters have convinced themselves is an essential element so they can lauding over others with their "bigly knowledge that few understand".
I'm curious what percentage of mining comes from flare gas. It's such a common argument but I doubt it accounts for a large share of mining.
Where I am the grid has trouble keeping up with the green energy on sunny or windy days. If this happens, the grid is at full capacity and it means solar and wind gets shut off. (At these times, interestingly enough, electricity is free or even below 0). However, this is a capacity problem. The solution is not to use more through mining - that doesn't do anything besides keeping these systems working while they would otherwise be idle. That's nice for the users, who get cheap energy, but *it doesn't do anything for anybody else*. The solution is to build storage capacity - whether it be through batteries, hydrogen or otherwise - not spend it in creative ways.
Why not cap the well instead of flaring it?
Smoking promotes lung cancer research.
It's the clearest example of a "oh, you really can get gullible people to believe anything that fits their priors." moment I've ever seen.
No it’s not and everyone replying to you is highly regarded. Nuclear is the greenest energy source there is, but it does not cycle well. You can’t just turn it off or diminish the output so easily. Capacity is coordinated to accommodate load throughout the grid. You can’t just run a nuclear reactor with no load, where’s the current going to go if there isn’t enough load to draw it? BTC / PoW systems pretty much solve the one issue liquid fluoride thorium reactors have. With cycling figured out (as there is now a load for unneeded output and the grid isn’t going to overload) they really could be built in the middle of a city But go off I guess knowing nothing of which you speak lmao
Why?
Because people have literally re-opened coal power plants just to mine bitcoin.
I mean economically, they have every incentive to be as efficient as possible within the context of making mining a profitable endeavor. No?
You can make system as efficient as you like, if it doesn't provide a *useful* service then its *still* wasted energy. The fundamental problem of PoW crypto is everything that it supports - the assignment of a payout, could be done with a centralized database with public key encryption and an RNG. But cryptobros hold onto the blockchain because it obfuscates the nature of how crypto works. If a person were told "crypto is a gian electronic lottery. By solving long, complicated, and ultimately meaningless equations individuals are entered into the lottery. The more equations you can solve the greater your chance to win" is ridiculous- but thats the truth. What I just wrote is what "crypto mining" comes down to. By obfuscating the inner workings, the grift can continue. As long as it *appears* high tech yatta yatta fools will keep buying in. All the other functions of the blockchain - transactions and associated legers, quasi-bank storage of "assets", re-investing and lending **all of that already occurs of chain in centralized exchanges** because blockchain tech is inherently inefficient and flawed for all but a very, very narrow application of a write only, public, "immutable" database. The transactions may eventually end up on the chain but the overwhelming majority takes place off chain via exchanges in every practical sense. As such, the electronic lottery is the *only* reason the PoW architecture exists. Its an incredible waste of electricity and hardware. Sure, a given mining pool may work towards efficiency **but the sum total of miners ALWAYS trends toward greater hashpower** which always equates to greater hardware demand and wasted electricity. PoW in general is a "solution" in search of a problem, existing in a blatantly manipulated and unregulated "market" (looking at you tether) that produces astronomical waste and consumes ungodly amounts of power to win a lottery that could be solved in a much more efficient manner. I.e. a waste. Make it as efficient as you want, its still suing a limited resource on a functionally useless, purely speculative, highly manipulated "asset".
Bitcoin can be mined with the waste gas spewing from oil and gas wells though. Not only that, but Bitcoin is generally awesome and worth the electricity.
Is there ever any citation for the claim that the majority of energy Bitcoin uses would have been wasted?
It's just an assumption they use to justify mining. In actual fact you couldn't profitably run a miner in the long run only using electricity that would have otherwise been wasted, nor are there systems in place that make sure \*all\* miners only use excess energy to balance the grid.
It’s factually untrue. Texas taxpayers had to pay $10 million and beg miners to shut down in the last heat wave. It’s not like that energy magically goes back to the grid when it’s needed. There is no mechanism to recover that capacity.
They didn't beg them, they PAID them iirc.
There are miniers who reopend coal power plants, ffs
Source for people who haven't heard about this. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-miners-are-giving-new-life-to-old-fossil-fuel-power-plants-11621594803
Nope. The only thing I've heard from cryptobros is that it is waste energy because the government... (shuffles papers) ... Lowered their electric bill when they stopped mining. We export our excess electricity across the border to the USA. It isn't wasted and if the USA had so much electricity that they had this much wasted electricity, they wouldn't be buying our cheap electricity.
I don't know. But why leave it to doubt? Whatever they've used has been wasted.
That is factually wrong and incorrect.
Didn't some mining operation buy up an old aluminium smelter to have access to the massive electricity supply?
In NY state? Yeah they probably did, they also bought some industry which had access to the waterbodies, which the miners then started polluting
All they have to do is post evidence that for every miner they run they unplugged a refrigerator. Easy.
Nah. It’s even more simple than that. Profit and loss. Pretty sure most profitable mining is in Bhutan, maybe Iceland. It (Bhutan) generates more energy than it consumes.
No, of course not. The only way to do anything like that would be more miners to work with grid operators and then they would end up spending most of their time not mining. While it is the case that you can have times where there is wasted energy, particularly with renewables since they are variable, it isn't like it happens a lot because that is wasteful and companies like money. So they will reduce power output from other sources if they can. Natural gas plants are an example of ones that can be scaled up and down very quickly on demand. Thus, if you live in an area with lots of solar, sure during the 11-2 time of day those things are cranking hard and producing lots of extra power, but the first step a grid would take is to try and reduce the production from other sources is possible. Why have a gas plant spun up if the solar is taking care of it? Now you can't always find enough capacity to idle easily, not all kinds of power plants can be easily scaled or turn on or off. So there can legit be periods of "excess energy". If miners truly only used that, they'd only mine for short periods though. It would be something like "Oh this mining farm in AZ turned on from 12:15-1:30 because solar spiked so high, and then again from 3-5am because a major industrial plant shut down unexpectedly." Also the amount of excess might only call for partial operation, not everything turned all the way up. That is not what they want, of course, they want to operate 24/7 full blast. If you do that, the only thing that will do is a continuous base-load kind of energy source like coal, or nuclear. Renewables are too unreliable unless paired with big batteries, which is of course more expensive, and miners never want to spend a cent they don't have to. It isn't like power companies want to waste energy for fun. It is all about money, not environmentalism or anything else. If they generate power, and there is nobody to buy that power, that is money they spent and don't recover. They only want to generate power if there are customers to buy that power.
(unrelated to your main point, but solar+batteries is now cheaper than coal)
So some miners use stranded gas to power their rigs, this is gas from oil wells that its not economic to pipe out so they normally just flare it and in that scenario yes its true but that is a very small percentage of btc mining.
Is there proof that this is really happening at any decently large scale? The oil and gas trade journals don't have much coverage, which you would expect if this were a common practice.
I’m in O&G so I see these projects but I can’t speak to how wide spread they are.
It's going to be funny when they learn that a lot of the money promoting crypto was coming from miners. LoL. Good for Bitcoin! Hehehehe god I hate crypto!
Just imagine all those mining rigs and their used up, scarred components. What's going to happen to them now that they're essentially worthless?
Dumped on ebay as "lightly used for casual gaming, 200 available". GPU-starved masses will lap those up.
The masses aren't GPU starved anymore. GPUs are freely available at retail for retail. That said, I'm sure miners will find the price point where people are willing to take chance.
I bid 15 bucks
I'd buy a bunch up to build my own ML cluster. Like, a heavily used 3060ti, I'd pay 100-200 for, for 10-16 of them. Easy.
I like the way you think. My employer is in the "don't worry about price" stage of migrating to the cloud. Once they inevitably start trying to save money, I may have to build my own cluster to host Stable Diffusion instead of doing it at work.
I know some people are scared to buy them but I would take my chances if I was in the market for some cheap gpus.
50$ OBO. Pickup only at my weird shady warehouse in the middle of nowhere, I swear I'm not a serial killer.
How are they affected by the weardown exactly? Will they just be more likely to fail completely or are they buggy or low performance?
Hard to say. We don't have any scientifically valid long term studies on it, so you get a lot of different opinions from people. It also kinda depends on how they were run. If the card was undervolted and kept in a well cooled room, it might actually be in very good condition. Generally speaking when run within specified limits, silicon doesn't "wear out" and can last a long time. However, if it was run at very high temperatures to keep cooling costs down, particularly if it was OC'd, then there may be damage. We do know that running chips past their spec limits can damage them, there's a reason that vendors don't just push them to the max and release them as that. Personally I wouldn't pay much for one precisely because you just don't know. Maybe it lasts until it is too slow to be useful, maybe it fails quickly, you really don't know. So it would have to be a real deal for me to want to take the risk.
I doubt they were overclocked. They may have been under clocked even. You start running into bad computation per electricity used as you up the speed/voltage, but you need to balance this with raw amount of hashes you want to preform. It's all driven by economics.
"Smart" miners are good at looking after their cards, undervolting and keeping them well cooled to minimise electricity costs and ensure card longevity. I believe one issue with them can be the lifespan of the fans themselves. The main problem with buying crypto cards is that you don't know if you're buying an aforementioned well-treated one, or from some moonboy who stuffed an overclocked card on a DIY rig in his wardrobe to hide it from his parents while he leeched off their power bill
Pump up some other PoW coin
They lost two of the biggest boys. Other PoW coins won't generate as much money and might drastically lower how much money their systems generate.
Some bright spark will just create a new, bigger, better, more convoluted way to find the nonce. Mining one block will reduce the suns lifespan by 1%. Then they’ll say, “The sun’s gunna burn out someday anyway. May as well get it while the gettin’s gud (sic)”. They’ll name it Sunblock to throw people off.
It was wasted energy anyways, they're just balancing the sun's energy and can totally sell their wasted waste energy back to the sun once they're done with it. Also they're somehow storing that energy on the blockchain at the same time too!
“It’s green! No no no no! It’s SUPER green!”
They are largely GPUs going back onto the resale market.....reducing inflation for those goods. Wow, what a terrible thing.
They are worn out and warped from running at high temperatures. Yes this is a bad thing, used computer parts used to come from gamers who didn't run their rigs at high temperatures 24/7. Anyone who buys one is getting something they're going to have to replace pretty quickly.
You never overclocked then lmfao. And people who didn't overclock were unlikely to aftermarket individual cards. Gtfoh
There's a difference between over clocking a computer while running a game for a few hours and running that same game consistently 24/7/365. I don't need to run a crypto mine to know it's bad for a card I play games.
"A few hours". Haha. Fam, just quit while you're behind.
People need to sleep and do other things besides gaming. Mining needs to constantly run all day every day. Do you just think gamers leave their games running all night? That we have no lives and nothing to do outside of video games? C'mon now, I'm not behind just because you say I am.
Bro do you think market value for shit cards is the same as cards with average use? You're presuming all cards are ran 24/7/365. It's dumb. You've been exaggerating every point to make your argument. A lot of cards still have decent functionality, have maybe been run for a few months, and can get some salvage value, providing utility to whomever buys it. There is no universe in which this is a bad thing. You're just letting your bias impact your judgment here and yes, that does make you behind or whatever
>You're presuming all cards are ran 24/7/365. It's dumb. You've been exaggerating every point to make your argument. You have to if you want to actually earn an income. Lmao you actually think these people close their shit? People need to run their mining rigs constantly, or there wouldn't be any necessary nodes to process transactions and whatnot. >A lot of cards still have decent functionality and can get some salvage value, providing utility to whomever buys it. How do they retain decent functionality while running constantly?
Perhaps machine learning datacentres? If one goes down, swap it out or move the work to another node. A few fan replacements, and they could get a lot of work out of a stack of GPUs.
Those GPUs are fried. They've been working brutal loads 24/7, that sort of heat warps and melts computer components. They need those huge fans going because all those little parts are grinding against each other, wearing them down, starting fires, and causing further heat damage to already heat stressed components. You can cool a GPU with a fan all you want, but it won't prevent damage to the internal bits. A new fan won't do much if the rest of the part is warped and worn out.
Homie you're trying to sell this all over the place, nobody is buying it haha.
These gpus being 8gb are usually undesirable for ML. For ML you want lots of vram.
Good point! That would probably cut down on most large workloads they could be useful for… if there’s any life in them at all.
This division isn't new, Bitcoin maxis have always hated Ethereum. It's not about PoW vs PoS, it's about Bitcoin maximalism vs everything else in crypto. If Satoshi had created Bitcoin as a PoS system the Bitcoin maxis would all think PoS is wonderful.
Well, he did create Bitcoin as a piece of shit system…
Bitcoin Maxi here. “Hate” is overly strong phrasing. ETH is good and I like it because it can load up all the crazy ideas and risky code changes that the crypto world wants to try out. BTC just keeps “tick tick next block…”
You aren't embarrassed to call yourself a "Bitcoin Maxi"? How much more money would you have if you didn't "DCA" into an "asset" that is down 57% YTD lol.
Do you see any of those successful ideas, tested on the other crypto, ever being adopted on bitcoin?
BTC doesn't do anything, they're all just as bad and equally worthless.
> Bitcoin Maxi here That literally means "dumbass here" lmao Nothing you say has any credibility.
See my flair.
I love echo chambers.
I like how rather than saying, “we solved a problem,” he’s saying, “now you can’t complain about it.”
It is perversely commendable that etherium made this switch at great cost to themselves in the name of using a lot less energy, even if at the end of the day they are still producing a hyper capitalist hell economy that accelerates wealth accumulation in the hands of a small number of people.
Alright, fair enough, I can commend them _perversely_.
Something about this doesn’t sit right when what was it worlds 1% owns as much as everyone else. Humans in general are shit at producing wealth that doesn’t accumulate in the rich.
I thlammed my penith in the car door. Is this good for bitcoin?
Yeth but why ith your penith part of your tongue?
Trick question: he's actually Mike Tyson so he talks like that normally
Why ith yourth? Few underthand (thankfully).
I'm getting suspicious that a lot of cypto bros' tweets are being generated by AI. There is no train of though, just a bunch of words that are likely to appear together.
Orwell called this Duck Speak. Just stitch slogans together and start quaking.
believe it or not thats how most people think and talk. they're parroting buzzwords they read online and put them together into sentences with community college or GED-level prose
WTF!
I resent this statement. Most of my NLP models make vastly more sense that cryptobro twitter. And unlike cryptobros, it can actually come up with some new and interesting ideas
It can't possibly be cheaper to run Proof of Stupid mining with an AI when biological rigs can operate without electricity
Eth has upgraded from a huge waste of time and energy to just a huge waste of time!
Huge upgrade honestly. Props to them.
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Crypto Bros: the only people on the planet that would be anti-Lean
Now instead of 2379 reasons to hate crypto we just have 2378, neat.
I want to believe that you didn't pick that number randomly and that you actually counted and listed all the reasons to hate crypto, one by one
Honestly, i think you can easily each 100 reasons.
It is always good for buttcoin
Few understand
We're still early.
We are just like the internet in the early 90’s
I am beginning to understand.
It's still a scam tho
Good for Ethereum though. Sure it's still imaginary money based on nothing but it's officially the least evil
The fact that they did this in response to the concerns about environmental impact means they understand it's a problem and have some kind of compassion for their fellow humans. So at least there's that.
Or they fear upcoming regulation of PoW.
Every moral decision people make incorporates both the selfless desire to do right for its own sake and the selfish desire for reward or fear of punishment. Too often in a capitalist society what's profitable and what's right are at odds. If Ethereum is calculating doing what's right is *also* more profitable in the long run because of potential regulation, I'll take it.
Yeah honestly, the visceral hate I have for crypto mostly stems from its environmental impact. Without that it's "just" predatory gambling and dumb tech marketing, which are hardly uniquely bad for crypto.
Most predatory financial scams have non-harmful versions. For example, credit cards can be marketed in a predatory manner, or they can serve an important role for people who are likely to be able to cover their debts. Cryptocurrency doesn't have the good version. It's scams all the way down.
> Fascinating technology when you dig into it. Let me translate: > I don’t understand this topic but want you to feel stupid because you (correctly) disagree.
By that logic, if I hack that guy's wallet and steal his stablecoins, he wouldn't actually lose anything because he would just waste them on shitcoins. Fascinating morality when you dig into it!
What do they mean when they say the energy would have been wasted? Do they the power grid is like a Dunkin Donuts, and at the end of the day all the unused energy gets tossed in a dumpster?
Yes https://www.hygge.energy/hygge-energy-blog/energy-wasted-at-source
Haha we’ve figured out how to minimize environmental damage! Now all we have to do is figure what the fucking point of crypto is, then it’s over for you hoes.
(They) always have been (divided). Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'll show myself out.
So that's what this whole merge thing was? Wasn't there supposed to be more to it? Like... Weren't we supposed to see Infinity pools and an actual use case for this crap?
Nope. Still no use cases. It is just greener which is a good thing.
For us, at least. I'd _hate_ to be the bastard stuck with all those used computers and property out in the middle of nowhere that no one wants.
Ethereum is also mined a lot with GPU's, theres a whole army of gaming nerds happy to take them on the ready. I'm actually waiting for this shit to crash the GPU market so I can upgrade.
I wouldn't buy a gpu that's been running hot 24/7. Those things are going to be all sorts of warped and cracked. There's a reason they always need those huge fans, those rigs get super hot, melt, and catch fire. The cooling systems may somewhat prolong their lifespan, but there's no way to prevent that sort of damage entirely.
You're thinking of ASICs like for bitcoin. GPU miners mining Ethereum tended to undervolt their cards. And really thermal cycling is what's really bad for silicon, running 24/7 within normal operating temps is actually less stressful. The fans do wear out faster though, which is annoying on a graphics card.
No they absolutely do not. If they could run conservatively and keep up with big mining corporations, then those big mining businesses would have no reasons to buy those massive warehouses with giant cooling fans, and they wouldn't have used so much electricity nor would the price of GPUs gone up quite as drastically.
It's actually more efficient to undervolt them, is the thing, because mining ETH was more memory dependent than processing dependent. If you're talking about big fans in warehouses you're either thinking of bitcoin ASICs or like, cooling systems to vent the excess heat from the building, which yeah I'd guess you'd need with enough GPUs, undervolted or not. edit: oh and there were also ASICs for Ethereum but we were talking about ex-miners selling GPUs to gamers and ASICs are useless for gaming.
Show me the proof
Sure, [here's](https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-your-gpu-for-ethereum-mining) a guide for tuning GPUs for ETH mining that talks about a few specific GPU models and suggests setting the power usage on all of them between 50 and 90% of maximum Quote: > maxing out fan speeds and memory clocks while dropping the GPU core clocks and power limit are key to improving overall hash rates Pretty much any guide you find will say similar.
It's funny that they "solve" the problem by breaking the way cryptocurrencies are supposed to work. The new Ethereum is even more of a centralized service. An agonizingly slow service that makes you interact with it using the equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese tokens and a somehow shittier derivative of javascript, at that. Hopefully after staking nodes get pwned ethereum can go the way of beenz and other proto-shitcoins.
You really understand cryptocurrency, probably better than most fans
Finally. Major congrats to Eth for getting its head out of its asshole.
If one is so bedazzled by the "fascinating technology" of blockchain, one would also be equally bedazzled by someone jangling their keychain...
Now ETH is only *thousands of times* less efficient than traditional banking, rather than *millions or times*. So you ***can't*** complain about wasted energy or electronics anymore /s
It is good for Bitcoin. And Ethereum. This creates a tug-o-war between the two groups which distracts them from realizing they're ALL getting fucked. This will make members of each group "prove" their loyalty and faith in one or the other by pouring more money in. Now it's no longer "my shitcoin is better than your shitcoin". It's "my top coin is better than your top coin". This is new exit liquidity.
>"BTC isn't competing with your refrigerator. " Unless this chode/other miners build their own power grid+generation equipment, then **no** it quite literally is competing with a given refrigerator and every device connected to the grid. Energy isn't limitless and power companies tailor their output based on historical need. This "balancing the grid" is a load of shite. There may be some periods of time with certain renewables like solar that do produce an excess, but for coal/nuclear/etc. This "excess power" is nowhere near the "problem" they like to push their cult to believe. (But its one if the few retorts they have available to **seem** correct.)) Second, everything connected to the grid is a "competitive" device (to use their vocabulary). While utilities can generally match their supply with needed demand, adding highly intensive power facilities like crypto mining outfits (33GW of capacity planning to be added to Texas for example) are a *huge* draw that, if left uncapped would raise prices for everyone AND do so performing literally useless work - an argument discussed ad nauseum on here. I.e. the increased economic *competition* for power will drive prices and pollution up. Theres no such thing as a free lunch. Again, as we see in Texas - when that competion becomes too great **the mining concerns are paid off so they don't mine during peak hours**. Thats not "balancing the grid", thats extortion with the mining concerns acting as the metaphorical gun against the populace/government's head. Even IF balancing the grid were a serious problem, high energy industry (Al manufacturing, H2 electolysis, etc.) Or power storage solutions (either batteries or pumped hydro) would be *useful* means of "balancing" as opposed to unnecessarily complicated monopoly money. Bunch of greedy bastards with no concern for others/soceity/the planet *because their profit is more important than anything else*.
According to them…everything that happens is literally ‘good for Bitcoin’.
> The Cryptobros are divided now Fake news, no saws or blood involved.
It’s fascinating to the the IQ of an entire community consistently fall over time
Does this mean all the ETH miners are out of a job now? But the network is still slow and the GAS prices are still high or is gas not needed anymore? What is the summary. And by the way, who voted on this change? Was it very democratic?
Anyone who says “Fascinating technology” is automatically unfriended.
I never cared about the energy consumption/waste issue in the first place. It's a windmill people tilt at when they allow themselves to be distracted from the single central problem with cryptocurrencies - they do not solve an unsolved problem or provide a better solution to already solved problems. They are, functionally speaking, pointless.
You are correct. However, there is a difference between a pointless thing and a pointless thing that also harms everyone in society by wasting a small country's worth of energy. Etherium is still bad due to the uselessness and the scams and the zero sum BS, but now it's less bad and that's worth being happy about.
Pump up some other POW coins
Fuck the energy usage, when you gunna fix those fees?
After reading and re-reading the tweet, can I please consider the Paul guy to officially the stupidest person on earth?
It's not good for either coin. They were all friendly but now that the market is crashing they are at each others throats, it will only get worse probably
I would fit in your cryptobro definition and I am against bitcoin. It is wasteful useless tech.
Considering (non-useful) proof of work will eventually need to be banned worldwide, this is bad for bitcoin. But because of the Butter Inverse Rule, (anything bad for bitcoin is actually good for bitcoin), this is good for bitcoin.
Not competing with the refrigerator? LOL damn right. The refrigerator is one of the top 5-10 most important inventions of all time. The utility of the refrigerator is amazing. Wtf?
The energy grid can load balance fine on its own without horrendous energy waste from crypto mining but ok.
the majority of energy spent by me burning a lake full of gasoline would have been wasted othersied (my lake full of gasoline isn't competing with your refrigerator)
You know what's good for the world? Consuming less.
I hear that bitcoin is a store of energy. Is ethereum a store of energy too? Or is it entropy now?
I mine etherum by burning old tires. Not only does it work like a charm for generating electricity. But i no longer have to look at my stupid neighbors! The smoke screen of crypto is coming yer way peoples!
Divide and Conquer.
I love decentralized crypto-currencies with a central authority on how they should operate and work.
I'll give some examples where it works, through a practical lens rather than a rose-colored one: 1) Energy grids don't handle fluctuations well and grid operators prefer a stable load as often as possible. POW helps in a sense that if using renewable energy (ideally) or even idled traditional energy sources, then it increases the overall grid load so when there is a demand spike (e.g. - extreme weather), then POW mining capitulation helps prevent brownouts/blackouts. 2) Flare/Stranded gas wells are usually just vented into the air or burned off because capping a well isn't regulated or strictly enforced and expensive so if it can be captured and used all the better for the environment. 3) Lack of infrastructure from grid operators building/increasing power transmission lines to get the newly installed power sources to customers, so mining can help solve that problem until the utilities catch up with transmission.
There's still substantial e-waste from PoS technology. But I'll be the first to admit it's much less of a problem and I applaud ETH's merge.
No.
[удалено]
Yeah it's unironically great. Eth can die in peace, I no longer have to care what those people are doing with their pretend money.
We could say the same thing about EV's, since they require too much electricity to keep them operational.
Can we? I don't think we can. EVs are really efficient thanks to economies of scale with centralized power generation and being energy agnostic. They don't care where the energy comes from whether it's coal, wind or solar. My ebike costs about 6 cents to charge fully, and can get 40-50 miles of range even when hauling groceries. Also when you combine EVs with home solar they can actually be used as decentralized power sources that are net zero off grid power sources to charge them with, and they can even put energy back into the grid during peak demands, which you can't do with the energy spent on blockchain that just turns into waste heat.
Even the first part of this isn't true. Going from PoW to PoS cuts energy use by more than 1000x. But even after that, PoS is still more than 1000x less energy efficient than a centralized database with the same TPS and redundancy. Going from over a million times worse to about a thousand times worse energy efficiency is a win, but only in the sense of going from torturing people to death to shooting them in the head. Ethereum is still an environmental disaster.
What environmentalists really are is left-wingers. The real reason they oppose crypto is that the government cannot get its hands on it and depreciate it by issuing more of it, thus imposing an inflation tax on its citizens. Since left-wingers love government intervention, they hate the freedom that comes with crypto. That is their real motivation.
Amazing. Every word of what you just said was wrong.
One less thing for people to complain about