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Bitcoin

Texas Cryptomining Outfit Earns More From Idling Rigs Than Digging Bitcoin (theregister.com) 161

Bitcoin mining outfit Riot Platforms earned $31.7 million from Texas power authorities last month for curtailing operations -- far more than the value of the Bitcoin it mined in the same period. The Register reports: In a press release yesterday, Riot said it produced 333 Bitcoin at its mining operations in Rockdale, Texas, which would have been worth just shy of $9 million on August 31. All the cash earned from those energy credits, on the other hand, equates to around 1,136 Bitcoin, Riot CEO Jason Les said in the company's monthly update. "August was a landmark month for Riot in showcasing the benefits of our unique power strategy," Les said. "Riot achieved a new monthly record for Power and Demand Response Credits ... which surpassed the total amount of all Credits received in 2022. "These credits significantly lower Riot's cost to mine Bitcoin and are a key element in making Riot one of the lowest cost producers of Bitcoin in the industry," Les said.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) operates a demand response program that allows big energy consumers, like Riot, to earn power credits for using less of it for operations and selling power back to the grid, as well as additional credit for being enrolled in its demand response programs. As we reported in August of last year, the company earned $9.5 million in credits during a July 2022 heatwave as well -- still far less than it earned in Texas's hottest August on record this year.

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Texas Cryptomining Outfit Earns More From Idling Rigs Than Digging Bitcoin

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  • I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

    • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:10AM (#63831846)

      I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

      It's even worse than that. It's giving free money to people who do nothing. Or, as Republicans would say, welfare queens.

      • by indytx ( 825419 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:19AM (#63831858)

        I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

        It's even worse than that. It's giving free money to people who do nothing. Or, as Republicans would say, welfare queens.

        So, it's like agricultural policy.

        • Not wrong but also not entirely equivalent because people need food to live so by it's nature the food market is naturally going to be distorted so interference or subsidies or regulation is warranted to some degree, we just can argue where those lines and measures should be.

          • Ag subsidies also have multiple purposes. Some is to keep prices up if there is a glut, some is to encourage diversification (ie, stop the monoculture that helped create the dust bowl), and some is pork to get people to vote for you. Pork subsidies are often pork.

      • I'm willing to not use twice the power at half the price! I'm filling out the paperwork for the LLC as we speak.
        • You understand the crypto miners are getting their own money back under a tariffed and regulated system? They have been paying for 99.9% uptime and voluntary accepted a planned 99.5% uptime+planned reduction. The minor residential customer gets a lot of value from not being in the dark for multiple hours, and regulators get no phone calls. Residential smart appliances and HVAC systems that can turn off during the 1 hour of near grid meltdown are less than a decade away. in this market crypto is big eno
          • by shmlco ( 594907 )

            Of course, if the miners didn't exist (or were conveniently blown to smithereens), then that excess power wouldn't have to have been graciously returned in the first place.

            I don't see paying them millions not to waste power as a "win", no matter how fast they can switch off those servers.

      • by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @08:33AM (#63832074)
        It's even worse than that. They're giving free money to people who not only do nothing, but who waste tremendous amounts of electricity while doing nothing. Ban proof of work crypto already.
      • by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @08:44AM (#63832096)

        I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

        It's even worse than that. It's giving free money to people who do nothing. Or, as Republicans would say, welfare queens.

        Nonononononono, it's only "welfare" in Blue states. In Red states it's "Freedom, Patriot and Lollipop subsidies", that way no-one has to admit that far more welfare goes to red states.

        Although if Texas has the money to pay off Cryptominers, surely they'd have the fix their electrical grid so it doesn't fail whenever it gets a bit nippy over there.

      • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @08:58AM (#63832130)

        Welfare on the scale of a family needing to eat is bad. Welfare on the scale of shoveling millions into the pockets of those who have plenty is pretty much operating procedure 101 for the Republicans. Gotta keep the top lush so that we can get that trickle-down shit flowing. It's only been forty years or so. Should start any time now.

      • Exactly!!! Texans are consummate hypocrites!
      • Worse than doing nothing. They are holding the grid hostage and getting paid whenever they take a break.

      • by poptix ( 78287 )

        Not quite..

        If they hadn't been using the power they were, it would not have been available on the grid to begin with for them to shed.

        An equivalent would be Nestle promising to buy up all the extra water from your desalination plant when there's an excess, but not taking any when there's a drought. (Ignoring the evils of bottled water..)

        They both provide a financial incentive to deliver the extra output while also being flexible enough to back off when needed.

        • by shmlco ( 594907 )

          "If they hadn't been using the power they were, it would not have been available on the grid to begin with for them to shed."

          Say what? A typical gas-fired plant has 500 MW of capacity, regardless of whether or not some idiot is wasting some of that power burning bits.

          If the miners didn't exist, the plant simply wouldn't be running at full capacity.under normal circumstances.

          All shedding the miners did was let the utility company divert some of that wasted energy to homes that needed more A/C than normal.

          And

    • by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:16AM (#63831852)

      Bitcoin miners figured out how to landlord energy. Good gawd we're so doomed.

    • I wish I had a Bitcoin mining farm so I could threaten to turn it on and get paid by the government not to. (Am I misunderstanding how this works?)

    • by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @08:34AM (#63832076) Journal

      I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

      Indeed.

      I would go on to say that anytime someone is getting paid to NOT engage in some economic activity it strongly suggests the regulatory environment is broken. I'll acknowledge there could exist some exceptions to that rule like say paying business to stay closed during an epidemic for a limited time. However I think payments in exchange for any kind of reduced or non-activity should trigger HARD looks at the policies and forces behind them

    • It's Texas. What ain't grift is graft, and vice versa.

      Their whole electrical system is designed to enable egregious rent-seeking, which adds absolutely nothing to the economy.

      What's bananas is that in much of the state (all the places where you'd want to live, really) the property taxes are so severe that given your overall tax burden you might as well live in California. I know a guy who lives in Travis county and has a pool, his taxes are higher than they would be here. For the privilege of having shit we

      • A couple years ago, I ran the numbers between CA and TX mortgages. Turns out homes are pretty close to price parity over a 30 year mortgage. The difference is in CA, you're left with way more equity, while that money all goes to the government in TX.

    • I'd say giving a bitcoin miner millions in essentially free cash is gratuitous interference in the market.

      I'd call it 'voluntary extortion', except that the taxpayers who ultimately fund this kind of crap have little or no say in the matter.

    • They are paying to timeshift their energy production. The miners essentially are funding fixed infrastructure costs when they're running, and then collecting credits when they stop. That's de rigueur for big energy contracts. The only thing that makes it "news" is the word "Bitcoin".

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Heh. Texas doesn't hate government interference, they just have a differnt idea about the proper role. Massive corruption is one of the reasons certain businesses flock to them.
  • Blackmail (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:07AM (#63831836)
    That's a nice power grid you've got there... would be a shame if something happened to it.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 )

      I just figured out a way for Texas to save hundreds of millions of $$$ - ban bitcoin mining in the state.

      Who do I talk to about this idea?

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        I'd say the very sick and elderly. Statistically they'd probably be the ones who died when the grid couldn't keep up with the record demand this summer.

        This is an incentive program to utilize bitcoin to pay for expanding the grid capacity... they have this incentive on purpose, they sometimes NEED that extra capacity and the other 99.99% of the time this program gets the mining company to pay the bill. The rest of the time, the market pays the bill due to the higher rates collected at time of high demand.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:07AM (#63831838)
    Paying bloodsuckers just to not destroy the public's energy infrastructure. Meanwhile these same assholes have been violently enraged by the existence of public education, healthcare, and welfare for half a century...
  • Not charging enough (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @06:23AM (#63831870) Homepage
    If mining Bitcoin is even remotely profitable, clearly ERCOT isn't charging big users enough for electricity. Following that up by paying them *not* to use power? Seems pretty dumb...
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Texas is becoming uninhabitable unless you have air conditioning. 40C is not survivable for some people.

      Unfortunately that means high electrical demand on hot days, while also causing heat related problems for some generators. Texas' lack of good interconnects with other states doesn't help.

      The obvious solution is massive solar farms, and better insulated homes. The former is disliked by the ruling party, the latter is too socialist to even consider.

      • I always wonder why places likeTexas haven't already gone all in on solar panels ? If only on home roofs to run domestic AC. When's the sun's making it hot enough to need AC then there must be plenty of solar energy to harvest ?

        Then I remember it's America. So corporate interests will have bought laws to prevent people putting panels up and keep them paying for their electrickery :)

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I heard that's exactly what happened. There are hoops to jump through to have grid connected solar, so much so that some people keep the entire solar/battery system off-grid.

          Batteries that charge directly from solar are quite affordable now, and you save a lot of money by not having to connect them to the grid. You can then just plug a window air conditioner into the battery.

        • The problem is Aldo lack of storage. Look up "duck curve" - just as solar is dropping off in the evening, people come home and crank up the AC. That's when ERCOT apparently runs into trouble. If they could smooth that peak, it would help a lot.
    • by sxpert ( 139117 )

      proof that electricity markets are a scam

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      It is dumb.

      If I commission someone to generate some art for me, but then don't want it, would you feel obligated to pay me for not having "used" the resource I contracted for? After all, the art can now be sold to someone else, right? Or if I buy an O8 private Internet connection but only run it at T1 speeds, is the teleco obligated to refund me for the difference?

      Obviously no, in both cases. Then if I commission a pipe that can carry X power and commission the power companies to generate X extra, why shoul

      • by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        "would you feel obligated to pay me for not having "used" the resource I contracted for?"

        It would hardly matter how I 'felt' about it, you bought the art, it belongs to you not me.

      • Lets say I build a facility, get it wired up and sign a contract for power and use that power. However, sometimes there is huge demand for power and the grid cannot keep up. In such cases, the power company comes to me and asks if I could shot down my equipment and NOT use the power for a while. I am not going to o it for free, so they pay me for the time when I cannot use power.

        From the perspective of a power company. Electricity demand sometimes has high peaks and currently it is not possible to store eno

        • Steel mills have exactly the same agreements. Electric Arc mini mills go full bore all winter long and shut down daytime production during the summer. For that agreement they pay .03/KWH while residential customers pay .18/KWH. The cost of power isn't the coal, oil, gas, sunshine, waterdrop or wind...the cost of power is the grid uptime commitment in June-Aug. Whatever the service capactiy rating is mostly last mile.

          The loudest commentors are residential customers who have specifically been put i
      • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Have you ever gone to a hardware store to buy some supplies for some home repairs or building or whatever? Usually what you do is buy more than you think you need, then return the leftovers. Maybe you aren't sure what colour hinges your significant other would like on that new door so you buy the silver, gold and black ones, use one colour and return the others.

        Same thing here. What's missing is how much the bitcoin miners paid for their electricity in the first place. The hardware store is happy to give yo

    • Texas politics. They couldn't get much done on the national level, not enough cash for that, but they've buried themselves like ticks into the legislature there. Texas is, like most southern states, extremely corrupt so it didn't take all that much cash.
      • When it came to powering texas the money was huge commitment to run a power line down nearly every county road, and democrats at the national level pushed for powering everyone, but like today did not pay for it. You just forgot about it because it was 100 years ago. The investors in the power company could have invested in IBM instead and be sitting a pile more money than investments in texas power grid. I love how people throw around the word corrupt about state government and power utilities. Th
  • To provide a bigger and more profitable scam than Cryptomining.

    • Almost any subsidy or credit system that a government imposes winds up having unintended consequences like this. It's not the first time this has happened in the energy sector either. I'd have to look up the details, but over a decade ago there was a big court case involving some power companies in California that found a way to generate more money for themselves by not producing power.

      There's a good example from a few years back in Arizona where they were offering massive tax credits if people would out
      • by SirSlud ( 67381 )

        "almost any" is a vast over simplification due to confirmation bias. The truth is, we hear about poorly crafted legislation whose intent is circumvented because - that's news. Plenty of regulatory market policy works as intended, but it's boring and never gets play outside of industry focused communication channels.

      • ENRON made more money in CA by telling back room deals with suppliers to go into shutdown at certain times of day. CA was a willing participant in energy markets, they just failed to write regulations to protect the people of CA from energy markets. You will find just about anything that fails spectacular a politician or a lawyer "protecting" the interest of the people was fighting above his/her weight class. The utilities were here before we were born, they will light the funeral parlor when we die.
  • parasites (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sxpert ( 139117 )

    those people are useless burden on society. they should be made illegal and terminated.

  • Texans are morons. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @07:50AM (#63831974)
    Keep voting for the ever more "conservative" Republicans who uses your taxes to pay for scammers.
  • Demand response (Score:5, Informative)

    by RobinH ( 124750 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @07:57AM (#63831990) Homepage

    What's going on here is that the infrastructure has to be sized for the peak energy use. There's a market for energy generation, and when use gets close to capacity the price for generating electricity goes up. So there are these demand response programs where instead of paying companies to turn on more generators, they'll pay companies that use a certain amount of electricity to shut down operations during peak times and pay them as if they generated the equivalent amount of electricity. This makes sense on the face of it.

    I've been a part of these demand response programs before, and unfortunately they create perverse incentives. You get paid for the difference between the energy consumption you had before the request, and the energy consumption after the request. But they give you a heads up hours earlier. One company I knew about has a load tester (a big outdoor heater used to put load on a generator to test it after doing maintenance on it). They're incentivized to turn on the heater in the two hours before the demand response time, and then they can turn it off and collect payment as if they were generating that much power for the duration of the peak, at peak energy rates.

    So in TFA, this is a company that's using electricity to produce something (bitcoin) that has no intrinsic value. They do this by consuming computing hardware and enormous amounts of electricity. Then they get paid enormous sums to turn it off during peak times. It's just absurd. Using this strategy, a company with nothing but banks of outdoor electric heaters could make huge sums of money by heating the outdoors for a few hours every morning where the peak energy usage was projected to be high, and turning them off when asked.

    • The entire Texas grid is perverse as it is designed to create these crises in order to maximize profits for the base energy providers. ERCOT = Energy Reliability Council Of Texas -- when in actuality it is the Energy Profitability Council Of Texas. The more it operates near failure mode, the more often power providers can charge 8X or more than normal per KWH.

      Riot is taking advantage of the flip-side with a contract that effectively gives them credits for as much as 8X for what they are NOT using at ke
  • Tulips on one end, free government cash on the other end. I never thought I'd see the day we reached this level of government ineptitude (or corruption).

    • not general government everywhere; it's TEXAS where they are big on corruption, it's a tradition.

    • I never thought I'd see the day we reached this level of government ineptitude

      Everything is bigger in Texas.

  • by Luke has no name ( 1423139 ) <{fox} {at} {cyberfoxfire.com}> on Friday September 08, 2023 @10:15AM (#63832324)

    Here's a demand response program: for large scale, complete wastes of power like Bitcoin at a time when the power grid is close to capacity, we simply cut their power. We cut their power first. Before houses, before hospitals, before anything else, we cut ancillary services with Bitcoin mining. No paying them.

  • I know you've had some complaints about high power prices and grid instability.

    But I hope that now you can take heart in the fact that you're paying the owners of large-scale bitcoin operations.

  • It would be worth anything.
  • If Riot is really using the 1.7 GWatts they claim then by not using electricity intermittently during 3 months, they get over 3 month's worth of credit on their electric bill. I don't think the seeking Alpha analysts foresaw this gift from the Texas government: https://seekingalpha.com/artic... [seekingalpha.com] when computing Riots profitability, but with Bitcoin above 19,000 Riot should actual make a solid profit this year.
  • |------(line)-----|
    |----resistor----|
    Who's in on this project?
  • ... in DogeCoin.

  • ERCOT already has dynamic pricing where they raise their rates to discourage use. For instance, during the February 2021 blizzard, electric rates went from $2/MWh to over $9000.
    Just raise their rates until they cry uncle and turn off their wasteful machines.

  • by szo ( 7842 ) on Friday September 08, 2023 @04:45PM (#63833442)

    Same scheme with agrarian subsidies, Major Major's father got paid to not grow alfalfa, used the income to buy more land and not grow even more alfalfa.

Elliptic paraboloids for sale.

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