Bitcoin Miners in Nordic Region Get a Boost From Cheap Power (bloomberg.com) 68
The Nordic region once again has become a lucrative place to mine crypto-currencies, thanks to a plunge in electricity prices. From a report: The wettest weather in at least 20 years boosted production from hydro-electric plants, leaving Sweden and Norway with some of the lowest power prices in the world. The resulting glut in the most important raw material for making the virtual coins coincided with a year when the price of Bitcoin almost quadrupled. The currencies are made in giant computer farms that process complex algorithms in halls as big as airport hangars. That makes electricity one of the key inputs, with operations sometimes consuming as much power as that used by 70,000 households. The current market dynamics give big miners alternatives to places where Bitcoin are usually created such as China, Kazakhstan and Canada.
Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.
Their luck follows several years of poor margins from higher electricity costs and lower prices for most virtual currencies. Many of the the miners that were attracted to the region during the last rally in 2017 have left. "The ones that stayed through the difficult period, like us, are quite happy now," said Philip Salter, head of operations at Hong Kong-based Genesis Mining, which operates a data center in Boden, Sweden. "There were times we were not making any profit at all, but during the last year our profitability has more than tripled." Unusually wet weather along with mild temperatures boosted hydro reservoirs across Nordic region to the highest level in more than 20 years, leaving the area awash in generation capacity. The result is power prices close to zero for extended periods. Average prices this year are about a third of those in Germany, Europe's biggest power market.
Don't waste energy! (Score:5, Funny)
That is why my oven is heated with cpus. Our Christmas turkey came with 2 free bitcoins.
Esp. where electric heating is required. (Score:2)
pressure facing the California Energy Commission to require developers of new apartments and single-family homes to install only electric home-heating systems, water heaters, ovens, dryers and stoves.
Also - obligatory KFC bitcoin mining rig: https://www.gamesradar.com/kfc... [gamesradar.com]
KFC launches 4K, 240FPS gaming console with a built-in chicken warmer
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If you think of it seriously there are clear downsides of cpu based heating: you can't run it hot enough. It isn't running when you need the heat. That kind of limits the applications.
Also it is thermodynamically offensive to heat using electricity. What are these Californians thinking?
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Also it is thermodynamically offensive to heat using electricity. What are these Californians thinking?
They aren't thinking.
I was going to type more but that's about it. They aren't thinking and they are not listening. There are people telling California that their energy policy is suicidal but they don't seem to care. Most anyone with enough smarts or money are gone or on their way out.
I'll have people tell me that California has a strong economy, if it were a country then it would be the 6th largest economy in the world. That's great until it is pointed out that California used to be 5th. Before long
Re: Esp. where electric heating is required. (Score:2)
You clearly don't get it. If you want carbon free heating then you have to use electricity, which can be sourced in a carbon free manner. That it may jot be 100% carbon free today is irrelevant. We have to start making the change now, waiting till all the electricity is carbon free before starting to change heating is not a sensible strategy.
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If you want carbon free heating then you need to have affordable electricity first. It might work in California where temperatures are warm, but up here in Canada electric heat is mostly only used in places like Quebec which have an abundance of hydroelectric power and rural communities that don't have natural gas lines.
Re:Esp. where electric heating is required. (Score:4, Informative)
Also it is thermodynamically offensive to heat using electricity. What are these Californians thinking?
In milder climates with temps above 40 most winter an electric heat pump can be pretty damn efficient. It's only when you drop down near freezing where it falls off and a secondary heat source such as electric heating elements needs to be employed.
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"In milder climates with temps above 40 most winter "
Is that Fahrenheit , Celcius, or Kelvin
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And the pros would pump the heat, or the cold, from underground.
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And the pros would pump the heat, or the cold, from underground.
Well if you can yea, geothermal is awesome. Unless you live on a rock or just don't have room for the geothermal grid in your modern, postage-stamp yard.
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"Also it is thermodynamically offensive to heat using electricity."
Well if you are burning something containing Carbon, you're increasing global warming. Electricity can be generated from non-carbon sources.
"What are these Californians thinking?"
And why do they need heat?
Re:Don't waste energy! (Score:4, Funny)
It was a large turkey.
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Bitcoin powered water heaters are a thing; even in warm climates they are a good target for slow continuous heat.
BTC - environmental catastrophe (Score:5, Insightful)
There is now a 100-acre bitcoin mining operation being built in texas. That's 57 soccer fields of concrete and roofing.
The BTC community either needs to rapidly move to Proof-of-stake as ETH is doing or be abandoned by all with any shred of environmental concern.
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People get paid for mining bitcoin. Nobody gets paid to capture carbon. Find ways to make money capturing carbon and you are going to have to put a tax on it so people don't take it all out. We need CO2 in the air, like anything else the poison is in the dose.
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I would say, line the ones mining against a wall and shoot them. That would be an adequate comment on their worth to society. As to carbon capture, there are carbon credits to be had. Maybe these should be made more expensive.
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While renewable energy is certainly better than fossil fuel energy it should not, for a moment, lead anyone to believe BTC mining is environmentally neutral. For starters not all mining uses renewable energy. Renewable energy is *not* carbon neutral. And BTC mining requires massive construction with hundreds of tons of concrete, steel, and other materials. Never mind the manufacture of the actual equipment itself. There is now a 100-acre bitcoin mining operation being built in texas. That's 57 soccer fields of concrete and roofing. The BTC community either needs to rapidly move to Proof-of-stake as ETH is doing or be abandoned by all with any shred of environmental concern.
How typical of the Bitcoin boosters to downvote a perfectly valid post.
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AI computing is also an environmental catastrophe.
https://www.wired.com/story/ai... [wired.com]
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Not only that. It is yet another failing attempt to replace competent software engineers with algorithms.
Re: BTC - environmental catastrophe (Score:3)
"The BTC community either needs to rapidly move to Proof-of-stake as ETH is doing or be abandoned by all with any shred of environmental concern."
Which is practically nobody.
Bitcoin is already used primarily for crime, dafuck do the users care about environmental impact?
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"The BTC community either needs to rapidly move to Proof-of-stake as ETH is doing or be abandoned by all with any shred of environmental concern."
Which is practically nobody.
Bitcoin is already used primarily for crime, dafuck do the users care about environmental impact?
Well, as Covid-19 has made amply clear, there is a strong minority in the human race that cares about nobody but themselves. A society that wants to prosper needs to get those under control.
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Think of all the electricity wasted by all the GPUs in the world that _aren't_ mining Bitcoin. Merely showing textured 3d models to gamers.
The gaming community either needs to rapidly move to shitty integrated graphics as we used to, or be abandoned by all with any shred of environmental concern.
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Yes. In this day and age it is really utterly evil doing something like that. These people seem to care not one but that there is a severe long-term environmental crisis going on and that they are making it worse.
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The traditional banking system uses orders of magnitude more power than Bitcoin ever could. Maybe you should target that if you actually care and aren't just shilling for Eth2 with a weak premise.
Also, Bitcoin will never use more electricity than aluminum manufacturing will, and if it becomes the basis of the world economy then that's not a bad position to be in to secure the money supply.
Proof-of-stake is socialist-oligarchic fantasy. It doesn't align the incentives of the customers, security agency, and
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Would love to know how you calculate that. Globally BTC is calculated to use about 0.25% of the electric supply and growing fast.
> it just makes the richest people in charge of security
Like the concentration of miners in China? And all this to support a network that is too slow and expensive to use for any real banking purpose. Nice work.
This is not right (Score:5, Interesting)
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I agree but I guess mining gold and storing it as gold bars into Fort Knox forever is even worse.
Re:This is not right (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree but I guess mining gold and storing it as gold bars into Fort Knox forever is even worse.
That gold can at least be used for other things, even if just for aesthetic purposes. Hard to melt down a bitcoin
Re:This is not right (Score:4, Informative)
If bitcoin used prime numbers instead of elliptic curves I suspect this fact might be understood better. Suppose you wanted to factor an enormous number of "large" pseudo-primes, and that you didnt much care specifically which ones, one way to do that is distributed computing, and the collection of verified results could be called a ledger I suppose. Such a database of large factored pseudo-primes could be very useful to those wanting to break encryption based on them.
The same is true for the discrete logs of elliptic curves.
Still further, bitcoin has been a wonderful survey of badly implemented randomization algorithms, where clever folks have been stealing money from predictable bitcoin wallets for years and years now, and even more clever folks have taken those same weak "random" numbers exposed by the bitcoin thing and applied them to non-bitcoin encryption breaking.
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Random numbers have nothing to do with stealing from bitcoin wallets.
It is just an email address with a password, or hash with a password.
If you can not secure your password, obviously you are in trouble.
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Random numbers have nothing to do with stealing from bitcoin wallets.
If you say so, retard who thinks bitcoin wallets have passwords.
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My bitcoin wallet has a password ...
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You understand that encrypting the local wallet file is not the same as there being a password on the wallet?
Let me explain to my bank that the data on my phone is encrypted with a password, so therefore I dont need a bank account password, because I already enter a password, and thats exactly the same thing.
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You understand that encrypting the local wallet file is not the same as there being a password on the wallet?
No I don't.
Let me explain to my bank that the data on my phone is encrypted with a password, so therefore I dont need a bank account password, because I already enter a password, and thats exactly the same thing.
No it is not, and it is simple nonsense.
Banking apps use client and server certificates, and not the password of the bank account. That would be simply plain stupid if they would.
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Oh sure it can. Still some gold will likely remain in vaults forever to be digitally traded. The second you move the gold out of the vault, it looses some value as it would need to be certified again to be put back in.
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Gold has 50% or so of its market value in industrial value. That stuff is useful! The best that can be said about BTCs is that you can throw them away without making the pollution they cause any worse.
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The simple answer is that they want a means to conduct commerce that is denied by other existing means or as a way to diversify their assets because it presents less risk. I suspect that a lot of
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You're funny, even more energy is used for porn.
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Not quite, it benefits some scum that is willing to tolerate or do strong damage to others for a moderate gain to themselves. One of the original definitions of "evil".
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Somebody - or tiny group of somebodies - here on Slashdot must be really heavily invested in this latest pump-and-dump Bitcoin scheme.
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Somebody - or tiny group of somebodies - here on Slashdot must be really heavily invested in this latest pump-and-dump Bitcoin scheme.
Gotta recoup that investment of buying slashdot somehow.
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Somebody - or tiny group of somebodies - here on Slashdot must be really heavily invested in this latest pump-and-dump Bitcoin scheme.
Obviously. I wonder whether the Slashdot editors are just useful idiotds or part of the scam.
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You think anyone cares about slashdot still?
I just come to laugh at the luddites.
Bitcoin too dangerous to use. (Score:1)
Really free? (Score:2)
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Once the infrastructure is in place, the power is pretty well free. The dam needs to, on average, release as much water as enters the reservoir, whether through a spill gate or through the turbines. Transmission lines need to be maintained whether there is little or lots of power going through them and so on.
It does seem that they overbuilt their generating capacity, perhaps as future proofing.
Rejected /. titles for $1,000 Alex ... (Score:3)
Bitcoin Miners in Nordic Region Get a Boost From Cheap Power
"Bitcoin Miners Boosted by Cheap Nordic Power"
More pump-and-dump Bitcoin stories on /.? (Score:2)
Bitcoin: for the other 1% - that 1% being all the geeks this time around.
FreeRackSpace.com (Score:1)
Just imagine ... (Score:2)
Just imagine that someone invented a method of converting Terawatts electricity and human intellect
into a symbolic currency with no intrinsic value, with no link to any material asset, not backed by any government (except North Korea), and which you can not actually spend at the local store.
Oh, wait ...
It consumes resources and produces nothing. I wish they were curing cancer, folding proteins, solving problems, ... but, no. Money is everything.
Bitcoin is an environmental travesty (Score:2)
For every claim that some "green" power is being used to mine bitcoins, that's power that is not being used for something productive and thus being wasted while keeping some fossil fuel power operational.
I fully understand why Satoshi is staying in hiding. I doubt he could live with the shame of wasting an entire nation's worth of electricity at a time in history when reduction in energy use should be our primary goal.
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Very much so. The whole thing is basically a good illustration why a significant minority of the people on this planet are just utter and complete crap.
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That would be a very small and very poor nation, you think about one in Africa?
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Your immediate neighbour actually. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/art... [thetimes.co.uk]
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And on what math basis would that be even remotely possible?
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Probably addition, subtraction, and maybe even a multiplication or two. I mean we know the energy requirements which go into mining, and we know exactly how much mining capacity exists at any given moment. ... So yes we do need to use multiplication as well.
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I would say: no, we do not know that.
We can only estimate it. Especially how much energy is used.
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You need the infrastructure to ship the power to where it can replace some fossil fuel power. While this winter is warm and wet, perhaps the next couple will be dry and cold without excess power left over to ship making that infrastructure have less return on investment.