After Kosovo Suspends Cryptocurrency Mining, Miners Scramble to Sell Off Their Equipment (theguardian.com) 47
The Observer reports:
For bitcoin enthusiasts in Kosovo with a breezy attitude to risk, it has been a good week to strike a deal on computer equipment that can create, or "mine", the cryptocurrency. From Facebook to Telegram, new posts in the region's online crypto groups became dominated by dismayed Kosovans attempting to sell off their mining equipment — often at knockdown prices. "There's a lot of panic and they're selling it or trying to move it to neighbouring countries," said cryptoKapo, a crypto investor and administrator of some of the region's largest online crypto communities.
The frenetic social media action follows an end-of-year announcement by Kosovo's government of an immediate, albeit temporary, ban on all crypto mining activity as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis....
Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country's rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government. The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.... Kosovans spent the final days of 2021 in darkness as domestic and international factors combined to cause energy shortages and rolling blackouts across the country....
Since the Kosovan authorities made the decision, police and customs officers have begun conducting regular raids, seizing hundreds of pieces of hardware. While a 60-day state of energy emergency remains in place, the prospect of upcoming regulation and energy bill price rises leaves the future anything but certain. "There are a lot of people who have invested in crypto mining equipment and it's not a small investment," cryptoKapo said. "People have even taken out loans to invest and the impact now is very bad on their lives."
The frenetic social media action follows an end-of-year announcement by Kosovo's government of an immediate, albeit temporary, ban on all crypto mining activity as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis....
Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country's rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government. The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.... Kosovans spent the final days of 2021 in darkness as domestic and international factors combined to cause energy shortages and rolling blackouts across the country....
Since the Kosovan authorities made the decision, police and customs officers have begun conducting regular raids, seizing hundreds of pieces of hardware. While a 60-day state of energy emergency remains in place, the prospect of upcoming regulation and energy bill price rises leaves the future anything but certain. "There are a lot of people who have invested in crypto mining equipment and it's not a small investment," cryptoKapo said. "People have even taken out loans to invest and the impact now is very bad on their lives."
Crossing my finger (Score:4, Insightful)
Here is to hoping NFTs take the rest of the crypto-crap down with it.
CryptoCancer (Score:4, Insightful)
Crypto money is cancer.
Especially for electricity grids, environment, and democracy.
Rice burner (Score:2)
I can't wait till we see a crypto currency based on burning food. Or one based on letting water spill over a dam instead of being diverted to agriculture. Oh wait we have that now .
Re: (Score:2)
Or they could get into electrochemical synthesis. Hydrogen, alkanes, etc. All very useful, all very power-hungry forms of chemical synthesis that become manageable when power is cheap-as-in-free.
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Who said anything about that? Hydrogen has numerous industrial uses. It can be sold on the open market. Also, hydrogen storage isn't that difficult. Gasoline and similar alkanes are far more volatile, and we store huge tankers full of the stuff all across the country.
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Who said anything about that? Hydrogen has numerous industrial uses. It can be sold on the open market. Also, hydrogen storage isn't that difficult. Gasoline and similar alkanes are far more volatile, and we store huge tankers full of the stuff all across the country.
Gasoline will live happily in steel or plastic tanks while hydrogen will erode through common steel, leak through most metals, requiring some rather expensive tanks and pipes for transporting. Ethanol has a similar problem in that it will dissolve seals on existing pipes built for moving petroleum products, meaning we have to move it by train which costs far more. Perhaps in time we will build up an infrastructure to move alternatives to hydrocarbons with the costs to build them spread out over time to ma
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Yeah because nobody has figured out how to store hydrogen. Or ethanol. Anyway, I also mentioned alkane synthesis already so I don't know why you chose to go through all that rigamarole to reinforce my general point.
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Then convert CO2 to carbon and oxygen, help saving the planet.
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Not sure I understand your point. The fiat currency isn't based on these things - these are unintended consequences of aspects of the economy, not the currency.
NFTs are here to stay (Score:2)
If only because there are a lot of rich fools in the world who'll part with a lot of money for "exclusivity" especially if it comes with some techo lustre attached even if that exclusivity is essentially utterly meaningless because the NFTs impart and imply nothing legally wrt the object they reference.
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Same here. Usually the criminal and the criminally minded eventually overdo it because of unlimited greed. The NFT thing may have done it.
Can someone explain this point to me (Score:2)
where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades
How does that work? Couldn't the government just refuse to recognise the population as having paid for electricity and turn it off?
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Rich reserves in question are mostly in the North. That's one of the main reasons the Kosovo land grab went all the way to Serb majority areas, in spite of it being sold to Westerners as "Albanians were oppressed, we need to give them a nation state".
So you cut off their power, and they cut off your coal. Everyone gets to sit in the dark.
Re:Can someone explain this point to me (Score:4, Informative)
The origin of the free-power to the Serbs in the North is the tense state of affairs between Kosovo and Serbia since Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence in 2008.
Nobody wants another war.
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Fist of all, ignore the earlier comment by Skinkie. [slashdot.org] It's conspiracy theory peddling. [lboro.ac.uk]
Now, let's first get some actual numbers.
The "Serb-majority population in the north" amounts to about 22530 in North Mitrovica, 17935 in Leposavic, 15850 in Zvecan and some 13900 in Zubin Potok (2015 population estimates).
All in all, about 70k people in a country of around 1.9 million (2021 estimate).
Estimates are used because Serb-majority municipalities have boycotted the 2011 census. [wikipedia.org]
The actual issue regarding the unpaid e
Booo hooo (Score:2)
You were knowingly abusing the power infrastructure of a poor developing country, for a profit. 90% of the electricity in Kosovo comes from burning lignite, for Pete's sake.
Also, "cryptoKapo"? Really?
Bring on the Radeon price collapse (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully this is the first domino leading to once again affordable graphics cards.
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I would like to see all countries working together to outlaw cryptocurrency mining.
Re:Bring on the Radeon price collapse (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a real shame that a lot of this mining gear is now e-waste too. It's either ASICs that can't be re-purposed, or GPUs that have been hammered.
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It's a real shame that a lot of this mining gear is now e-waste too. It's either ASICs that can't be re-purposed, or GPUs that have been hammered.
Indeed. Just shows even more how demented and immoral the whole thing is.
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GPUs that have been hammered.
You say this as if its a bad thing, but the reality is these GPUs are often, undervolted, well cooled in open environments and run at a constant duty cycle reducing thermal stresses on components. I.e. they are more likely in a better physical state than one that has been in your kid's gaming rig for the past 2 years.
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Most of those dGPUs were run at low voltages. Fans might be shot though.
Stupid but constitutional (Score:2)
Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that there's a great many things that are stupid but constitutional. We can't outlaw cryptocurrency mining in the USA because there's no authority given to the government to do so.
Another point made about the constitution of our government, possibly a point also made by Justice Scalia, is that the constitution is not a suicide pact. The meaning of that is under dire circumstances the government can take actions not normally allowed for the purpose of saving life. We cou
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If they can't ban it, can they tax it to the point of it being uneconomical?
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If they can't ban it, can they tax it to the point of it being uneconomical?
What does the constitution say? The US Constitution was written for the average person of the time to understand, a time when (according to a quick search of the web) literacy rates of the adult male population was something like 60%. It does not take a law degree to understand. It is not a "living document" as most people interpret it. It is "alive" in that it can be amended and in that it still defines our government. We can, should, and must, interpret the meaning so that it remains relevant to the
Re: Stupid but constitutional (Score:2)
TL;DR. I take it by your long-winded answer about why don't like taxes that you don't know the answer. Iâ(TM)m not American BTW, so please don't patronise me about your constitution, which I have as much desire to read as do the Russian or Australian constitutions, or any other country's.
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TL;DR. I take it by your long-winded answer about why don't like taxes that you don't know the answer.
I suspect that you did not make a counter argument because you lack the ability to make a counter argument. See that? I can insult people too, but insults don't win arguments.
I made a long winded answer in anticipation of the most common counterarguments I've seen. Had I replies with insults, or a shorter and incomplete argument, then we'd be going back and forth for days on this and get nowhere slowly. I chose to make as complete an argument I could up front to hopefully avoid going nowhere slowly. It
have consequently not paid for electricity (Score:2)
> where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.
So turn off electricity. It got nothing to do with protesting against independence. If you don't pay the bills, you don't get the service.
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And they in turn cut off coal. And everyone gets to sit in the dark.
The main reason why Kosovo was partitioned by the West alongside the Serb areas while being sold as "nation state for Albanians to protect them from the evil Serbs" is because much of the mineral wealth is in the Serb areas in the north.
People have even taken out loans to invest... (Score:2)
A fool and his money...
Can the world afford crypto mining (Score:2)
This shows the political problem with Cryptomining in stark detail. Faced with a choice between the population being cold and in the dark versus allowing cryptomining, the government of Kosovo decided to crack down on cryptomining. Not a hard choice.
The recent crackdowns on cryptomining in China preceeded the current energy crisis (where china is central to that crisis), and it would seem to have been to mitigate some of the energy crisis they knew was about to happen.
Faced with a struggle to keep the light
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Faced with a struggle to keep the lights on vs allowing cryptomining, governments will always choose to crack down on energy intensive crypto mining.
No crypto mining in Kosovo but still no light.
Re: Please tell me this is just a bad dream... (Score:2)
In the year 1999, the level of technological integration/interoperation/accessibility that you take for granted would not have been sustainable.
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I'm old enough to remember the riffraff-free Internet, when you had to be university-affiliated just to connect to it and every email message was from the .edu domain. What it consisted of in the good old days was lonely nobodies flaming each other on an ever-expending list of Usenet discussion forums. Each of them nurtured the earliest versions of the great conspiracy theories of the 21st century.
At least spam hadn't been invented yet.
Eternal September and spam (Score:2)
You must be young: Eternal September and spam were both a thing well before 1999.
That said, your point about why we can't have nice things still applies.
Are you sure that (Score:2)
Bans, not suspends (Score:2)
Summary says "suspends", as if the same person who started mining has decided to walk back that decision. This is talking about a criminal ban, it threatens legal trouble.
By the way, one-off bans like this are not scalable enough to fix a shortage. Prices have to change to reflect the new availability/scarcity of resources.
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Correct. A country that can be crippled by Bitcoin mining operations is not going to be able to support actual industry at economically-viable scales.