The energy use is of captured energy that would be lost in transport to other energy users, because it uses just as much energy or more to transport it.
This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it”
Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't need very good internet, compared to other large computational projects, or any other sector.
Okay, so we got the “ah it uses a lot of energy!” argument over to “ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to literally everything else but I don't respect the use in favor of literally everything else and this must be taking away from that” which is also not true so I’m curious how the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to corroborate what I’ve told you at face value.
It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it is possible for nation states to operate these uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is happening now.
(Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its the same)
If your first paragraph is about rejected energy, then there's not a lot to say here except that rejected energy doesn't mean what you think it does.
If not, then I don't know what it is supposed to be about. No one builds power plants in places where there is no demand for power. Electric power can be carried over pretty large distances though with very low losses, so having say a few hundred km between a hydro-dam and a large consumer is not a major problem.
According to your post the best result would be that Bitcoin farms are powered by renewable energy plants build in places where nobody would have any use for that power anyway, because they're too remote to connect to any consumer. Even if this happens (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms), it's still a net negative because building renewable energy power plants (as well as bitcoin farms) causes a significant amount of emissions. In normal use of e.g. a solar panel, this makes sense because it displaces non-renewable energy sources with higher emissions, so net emissions are reduced. In your scenario, there's a bunch of solar farms in the middle of the Saharan desert mining bitcoins, which - at this point - yes would not be able to displace non-renewable energy, but still represents a net-negative regardless because of the effort required to put all that shit there in the first place.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
> (and from what we're able to tell, it is not, instead we see coal and natural gas plants being ramped up to power bitcoin farms)
like I said, advocate against those specific mining sites. those made headlines in your world, while others did not.
A lot of captured energy mining occurs at remote flare gas sites, where those sites are in the business of pumping oil and flaring off byproducts and not in the business of moving power a few hundred km. These are highly polluting places, and crypto mining is ironically (to you) their sustainability solution, as they provide a use for the energy that would have been flared into the atmosphere as hydrocarbons instead. As these are also fracking sites, the machines can use the polluted water for cooling. Those kinds of sites are only captured and not necessarily renewable, an important distinction because your example was limited to imagining uneconomical solar. There is much more energy like this able to be tapped while reducing hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, and if it was economical for other use cases that you respect more to tap into that energy, you and others had several decades to do so.
It's cheaper for them to just flare the gas. The only thing that has made economic sense, as an alternative to flaring it, is to mine Bitcoin. I understand the energy criticism, but flare gas is an example where Bitcoin mining actually makes something less polluting.
- It's approximately a 180° pivot to go from "unused renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
- It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way. The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other does not. This is only valuable to bitcoin stakeholders, and as has been pointed out up and down all these threads this is either of approximately no value or of negative value to society at large. And overall, creating the equipment to mine bitcoins with flare gas, and deploying that to remote oil fields w/ no use for gas, creates a bunch of emissions that simply don't exist if you just flare the gas.
- There are non-emissive alternatives, e.g. gas re-injection. Note that the great majority of unwanted gas is already dealt with this way. This means that mining bitcoins using flare gas has a very good likelihood of increasing the share of unwanted gas that is effectively flared, again, increasing emissions.
Reducing the amount of flared gas (and putting it through a turbine to mine bitcoin is the same as flaring it as far as emissions go) is in fact an UN IEA goal.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no free lunch and there is NO ecological way of randomly wasting energy.
> - It's approximately a 180° pivot to go from "unused renewable energy" to "flare gas for green bitcoins"
I wrote earlier to avoid this specific derailing. Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually the same. This is one of the cases where it is not the same. To my knowledge, the only other captured sources are at hydroelectric plants, while some parties are interested in geothermal as well.
Noteworthy is that “captured” seems to be also called “rejected” energy in some circles.
> And overall, creating the equipment to mine bitcoins with flare gas, and deploying that to remote oil fields w/ no use for gas, creates a bunch of emissions that simply don't exist if you just flare the gas.
Once. I’m not sure how a one time event is remotely comparable to ongoing issues. Please elaborate?
> It doesn't reduce the emissions. Whether you flare it or burn it in a gas turbine / engine driving a generator to mine bitcoin, the CO2 released is exactly the same, as you are burning ~100 % of the hydrocarbons either way. The difference is that one generates bitcoins, the other does not.
Hmm. Is there anything we can do about that then? Like does that format allow for further processing towards sustainability? The generating of bitcoin making it economical to do more with the CO2 that the oil guys just threw their hands up on decades ago? If this issue has nothing to do with bitcoin mining and the alternative is just business as usual with it going directly to the atmosphere like it already was, then why point fingers at the bitcoin mining?
Thanks for chiming in! Nice to see a new account understanding this issue and joining the fray.
It has been fascinating to me to watch the disbelief evolve. One aspect of this is that negative reporting has been basically allowed and encouraged by miners because they didn't want competition on their cheaper renewable/captured energy sources.
So, for years, many investment groups would discourage their renewable or captured energy activity to be citable source of what is happening with bitcoin mining, because they didn't want others with deeper connections to make partnerships with sites faster.
Its really funny, to me, watching people have to redo their understanding but trying to make that understanding conform to the negative energy impact idea that they were intentionally led on with.
> OK, but those exact same places could power servers instead of miners, taking a load off of wherever the servers are currently hosted.
They don't have good internet. Which I wrote earlier. Crypto mining don't need good internet, it barely needs any good internet speed and barely needs decent latency - by design (blockchains allow anything from 2 seconds - 2000 milliseconds - to 10 minutes - 600000 milliseconds - for the majority of miners on the whole planet to reach the same state together, under the assumption that some nodes will have slow data and low latency. So a 500-900ms latency connection in the middle of nowhere is quite fine, not optimal but good enough for consistent average earnings). Other data heavy computational uses require the opposite of that, these remote sites are not going to get the plumbing for good internet or prioritize it. The main issue is that they won't prioritize it because they aren't interested in it, they are technophobic oil guys that are slowly being convinced by crypto investors to solve their pollution problem. The crypto people don't need anything except a little space.
The issue with imagining that everyone else could do it, is that everyone else doesn't need to do it. A data center can set up in the middle of the desert along any fiber line like they already do. Go ahead and tell them "hey instead of using this readily available property can you go set up at the oil refinery after making an unnecessary partnership with that unrelated business because I don't like that crypto people are doing it, you also need to invest in laying some pipes out there" if you really think that is practical or necessary, be my guest.
Yeah this shouldn’t have been flagged, this part of hackernews is very broken for them to inadvertently allow censorship like this
The stackexchange approach would be better here, where certain power users can vote on flagging and you can see who voted on flagging, other users can vote against flagging and even override it
This means that “renewable energy more than the output of Argentina was always being wasted for over a century every day because it was uneconomical to transport it”
Crypto mining has been unique in that it only needs power and housing to stay dry, low infrastructure, and doesn't need very good internet, compared to other large computational projects, or any other sector.
Okay, so we got the “ah it uses a lot of energy!” argument over to “ah okay its a relatively green sector compared to literally everything else but I don't respect the use in favor of literally everything else and this must be taking away from that” which is also not true so I’m curious how the goal post moves after this - assuming you are able to corroborate what I’ve told you at face value.
It would be more productive to advocate for specific sites to not raise prices for others if they did, or specific sites to use cleaner energy sources. I can understand how that could cause some consternation if your whole cause is not liking crypto mining at all. But it is important to remain vigilante on how these mining operations run, as it is possible for nation states to operate these uneconomically and actually do things that you imagine is happening now.
(Renewable and captured are not synonymous but usually its the same)