China's Exiled Crypto Machines Fuel Global Mining Boom (ft.com) 64
China's ban on cryptocurrency mining in May triggered an exodus of miners and a global race to relocate millions of the clunky, power intensive machines they use to solve complex puzzles and earn bitcoin. From a report: Fourteen of the biggest crypto mining companies in the world have moved more than 2m machines out of China in the months following the ban, according to data gathered by the Financial Times. The lion's share of machines was hastily moved to the US, Canada, Kazakhstan and Russia. Bit Digital, one of the largest US-listed crypto mining companies, hired an international logistics firm to extract its property from China and is still waiting for a batch of almost 1,000 machines to be released from the docks at the Port of New York.
"We started our fleet migration in March 2020, which in hindsight was a great move. When the ban was announced we had 20,000 miners in China," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer of Bit Digital. Still, the company said it had to abandon 372 machines in China, which had "reached the end of their useful lives." Eight out of the 10 largest public mega farms based in North America have expanded the number of machines in their fleets since China's ban, the FT's figures show.
"We started our fleet migration in March 2020, which in hindsight was a great move. When the ban was announced we had 20,000 miners in China," said Sam Tabar, chief strategy officer of Bit Digital. Still, the company said it had to abandon 372 machines in China, which had "reached the end of their useful lives." Eight out of the 10 largest public mega farms based in North America have expanded the number of machines in their fleets since China's ban, the FT's figures show.
The grand master plan for crypto (Score:1, Interesting)
The plan for all cryptocurrencies isn't what you think it is. It's more sinister than the egalitarian image the crypto boys portray for it.
After the 2008 financial meltdown, cryptocurrencies were born out of it, declared to be the means by which people could be freed from banks/governments, and promised to avoid any such future meltdowns from happening ever again.
But the crypto boys watched closely the result of that meltdown, and formulated their plan: create a new form of currency, and for it a new fina
Re: The grand master plan for crypto (Score:2)
Your hypothesis is that someone is controlling the value of crypto and somehow its not a free market. But you don't really go into details about how this works. Perhaps you need to study up on how markets/exchanges work.
You realize (Score:5, Interesting)
All these machines do nothing... other than move electrons around to claim fake tokens in a fake economy. But they do create a lot of real CO2.
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Who knew Bit Digital was a down on their luck poor person? Learn something new every day.
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The people who are investing their money buying shitcoins aren't the people who are barely scraping by. When rent is due, you're not going to be gambling your paycheck on magical internet money. The people who are investing in mining hardware aren't the people who are barely scraping by, either.
Cryptocurrency is perpetuated by scummy criminals who have no other means of transferring funds, and legitimately by the same type of people who are actually happy when a barrel of crude oil goes up in value (and I
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That's a poor characterization of people who mine and/or invest in crypto. A lot of them started out in lousy dead-end jobs, scraped together their beer-and-cigarette money, and made bank. Some of the more-recent entrants who are now whales started with a bigger warchest, but that isn't everyone.
To this day you still have a lot of tokens like DOGE and SHIB owned by the same type of investor that got involved with r/WallStreetBets. The majority are not gamblers and money launderers.
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Yeah, back in the day you could buy some pizza with your Bitcoin that you mined using a few spare GPUs. Today, you need lots of mining hardware and access to extremely cheap power, or you're just wasting your time (and money).
And while technically you can buy some tiny infinitesimal division of a Bitcoin (or gamble on some other coin where you can enjoy seeing a bigger number in your wallet) with the money saved from a ramen noodle diet, today that's very unlikely to ever result in a rags-to-riches story e
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Today, the new entrants don't mine anything, particularly not Bitcoin. They buy cheap projects and HODL, or if they do mine it's stuff like Raptoreum. You really don't keep up do you?
There are still some holdouts with small at-home mining rigs running NiceHash but that group is slowly going the way of the dodo. The new kids don't waste their time with that nonsense.
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That's not even true.
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Is that anything like stopping people from going to Vegas?
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How about outright banning them on a global scale!
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Because that has worked with everything else we've tried to ban.
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How about outright banning them on a global scale!
And create a massive tax-free black market? That's a massively BAD idea.
Some people never seem to learn a damn thing from history.
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Sandcastles fall into the sea eventually.
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All these machines do nothing... other than move electrons around to claim fake tokens in a fake economy.
Neat you have just described "World of Warcraft" or "Ultima Online" and every other MMO for that matter as well. You could even apply that language to many of the players (alright well that is kinda mean).
Be as judgemental as you want but its really just a question of scale. All this Crypto-coin business basically boils down to the same motivations that cause people to sink countless hours into those games as well, including the social factor, they just have to use some out of game channel like boasting on
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> The fact that here we are talking about crypto-coins validates them to a degree.
No. We wouldn't even be talking about them unless shilldot [*] was constantly spamming cryptocurrency articles every bloody week. It is in shilldot's best interest to create controversy. Sensationalism "journalism" has no place here.
[*] Intentional spelling of slashdot
Streaming services, MMO, are something different (Score:2)
All these machines do nothing... other than move electrons around to claim fake tokens in a fake economy.
Neat you have just described "World of Warcraft" or "Ultima Online" and every other MMO for that matter as well.
I think you fail to understand two things.
(1) The vastly greater amount of power that mining consumes.
(2) The entertainment value MMOs provide. Especially when considering the likely alternatives, the big screen tv for example, will consume comparable amounts. Streaming services, MMO, etc are something vastly different than mining.
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As I said its a question of SCALE. One could argue most sports/entertainment are matters of frivolity and represent waste.
Obviously these MMOs and streaming media don't consume energy on the scale crypto-currency does. The similarity is the moving of tokens around fake economy.
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All these machines do nothing.
That's a spicy take on shutting down Twitter+Facebook.
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All these machines do nothing
They secure a distributed financial ledger in the most inefficient manner ever devised by humanity. They also perpetuate a system of oligarchy, wherein those with the greatest preexisting financial resources to buy mining hardware and electricity, reap the biggest rewards.
That's two somethings, right there.
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Currently, yes. But cryptomining could also be a boon to green energy. Right now, you have coal and nuclear that can provide a baseload, hydro and gas that can provide variable load. And hydro has been mostly maxed out, whenever it's already been built whenever it's reasonable. Solar and wind only provide intermittent power and thus can't be relied upon. We should absolutely build them to reduce the emissions of gas plants when renewables do provide power, but we have to keep our existing plants as well as
Re: You realize (Score:2)
Nuclear does not have no lifetime carbon emissions
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Turning massive amounts of electricity back into heat, and waste heat at that isn't a 'boon' for anything.
Boon's for any generation system where you don't want to have to scale with demand would be a sink that is either relatively efficient storage (get back most of what you put in), or some other kind of useful activity. Using peak power to do protein folding for blue-sky medical research or something...
The simple fact is crypto-currencies are basically waste. They offer exactly nothing that can't be deliv
Re: You realize (Score:2)
"They offer exactly nothing that can't be delivered in a far computationally cheaper fashion"
Oh, really? How do create a practical solution to the Byzantine generals problem in a far cheaper fashion?
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Funny comment as tons of people here are in the climate change is fake news camp.
'Cryptocurrency' is a TROLL-MEME (Score:4, Insightful)
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Has never worked in history not in small scale not in big scale, the only way to bring them down is to regulate them out of existence!
And grid collapse in other countries (Score:2)
Re: And grid collapse in other countries (Score:2)
Cryptocurrency mining is a really good fit for Texas's power grid. Texas has all these providers who expose their customers to market-rate electricity. This is how Texas consumers got hit with $5k electric bills during their Winter grid near-collapse.
The more Texas can get sophisticated customers onto their grid - those who turn off consumption when prices rise - the better the grid can react to supply shocks.
Sure, you can get the same effect by overbuilding capacity, but that will increase the consumer cos
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What nonsense. What you've written only makes sense because these farms cause a need for increased capacity across the board. "Can build overcapacity geothermal production" is wrong. "Decide it makes financial sense to build overcapacity geothermal production" is correct.
Yes, one of the side-effects is that for normal, non-predatory consumers, the grid now has more capacity than would otherwise typically need, and a lot of that capacity is going toward mining DerpKoin, which (since it's only worth mining wh
Crypto-mining is evil. (Score:2, Troll)
Make it illegal.
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> Make it illegal.
"Everything I don't like should be illegal!"
-Every Fascist Ever.
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The "Ever Facist Ever" cries gets old when it is used to excuse every possible law out of existence.
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> Make it illegal.
"Everything I don't like should be illegal!" -Every Fascist Ever.
Everything I like should be legal
Every criminal ever.
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It certainly needs to be better regulated. Wild West = Wild Criminals. And the power-consumption needed for some brands is ludicrous.
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That's actually not a bad direction for Bitcoin (and other PoW coins) to take. There's zero net benefit to the Bitcoin blockchain having that much hashpower available, especially when so much of it is now consolidated. A larger number of small miners bringing less hashpower to the table would make the network more secure AND consume less power overall.
Re: Crypto-mining is evil. (Score:2)
It's only evil if you think electricity is evil. If so, then the solution is higher electricity taxes. That's a pretty well established approach to governance. If something is "bad" (like electrity generation), then you either outlaw it or tax it. You tax it when there are "good" uses. Electricity has good uses. So, the correct approach is to tax it.
Any attempt to tell people how to use their electricity is antagonistic to a free society. It's a way of imposing your own personal ideology onto others.
If you
How many of you have ever used a cryptocurrency? (Score:2)
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When the US government was mad at Wikileaks and tried to defund them by blocking their credit card transactions, lots of people donated money using Bitcoin. And that is why it was invented.
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> I don't know a single person other than myself who has ever used a crypto currency to facilitate a legal transaction.
Depends on the locale. New Hampshire is the cryptocurrency capital of the world. Some people here don't ever use fiat.
Monero is pretty spicy for a Reddit tip - good for you! Quite fungible.
Re: How many of you have ever used a cryptocurrenc (Score:2)
I used it to buy pizza and plane tickets. But when the IRS decided to classify it as a commodity, they made tax reporting a nightmare for anyone trying to use it as a currency. I haven't used it for basic purchases since.
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The only uses that I know of are for making money on speculation and for paying ransom.
Why don't we find all those crypo machines (Score:3)
And put them in big pile and burn them, so they can stop burning our energy for nothing.
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> our energy
How commie of you.
> for nothing
Do Reality TV first.
Because they are guarded by anarcho-capitalists (Score:2)
Why don't we find all those crypo machines and put them in big pile and burn them, so they can stop burning our energy for nothing.
Because they are guarded by anarcho-capitalists. Please reconsider your march on the fossil fuel burning electrical power plant in Texas, Molotov cocktails in your raised hands.
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That fossil fuel plant generates actual value, whereas crypto does not. Plus the people who are generating crypto are more often than not taking that power from the fossil fuel burning plants and turning it into heat and something that will probably be worthless in a decade.
Re: Because they are guarded by anarcho-capitalist (Score:2)
You don't understand the concept of value.
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There is not a person on the planet that can give a valuation on crypto, if they say they can they are lying.
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Chinese anarcho-capitalists? Whoa.
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Chinese anarcho-capitalists? Whoa.
Did you miss the part about the machines relocating to other countries, including the US, and amusingly many going to Texas?
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Did you miss the part about the machines coming from China in the first place?
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Did you miss the part about the machines coming from China in the first place?
No, we are talking about where they are now, not where they came from. You see, to create the bonfire you have to go where they are.
Pseudo mining is just an energy virus (Score:3)
I don't normally agree with China's policies, but the ban on pseudo mining I do support as it's little more than a power virus that will eventually consume all of our finite natural resources and give us back nothing useful in return except speculative trading. If you want to speculate, you would be better off starting a rock market, because at least then you can look at the pretty rocks and they will always have an aesthetic value and once we run out of rare earth elements they'll start going up in value over the long term.
Re: Pseudo mining is just an energy virus (Score:2)
If cryptocurrency is consuming all our resources that means the price will be going to the moon. Time to buy.
Re: Pseudo mining is just an energy virus (Score:2)
If there is no earth left at the end then whatâ(TM)s the point? Youâ(TM)re playing finite strategy in a game that is infinite. This short sighed mentality is exactly why the ban is neededâ¦
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Well geographic diversity is good for Bitcoin (Score:2)
moved more than 2m machines out of China ... to the US, Canada, Kazakhstan and Russia
Well geographic diversity is good for Bitcoin. Having 70% of all mining in one country was a huge security hole for bitcoin. It gave one state the opportunity to control the blockchain.
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Funny how they didn't take advantage of that before banning it.
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Funny how they didn't take advantage of that before banning it.
It was a huge security hole nonetheless. The blockchain is not supposed to be dependent upon the benign behavior of any country.
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BCH was even more tilted towards miners in China. I'm assuming they got knocked out as well, since all the PoW farms are selling their hardware overseas now.
The worst. (Score:1)
It really ought to be illegal across the globe to run these things on anything other than solar, wind or other sources that don't generate any CO2 or cause any notable harm to the environment. What an unbelievable waste.