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Bitcoin

Inside a Bitcoin Mine At a Natural Gas Well In Texas (vice.com) 51

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
"Motherboard's new CRYPTOLAND documentary series went to West Texas to get into the weeds about cryptocurrency mining and its impact on the environment," writes an anonymous Slashdot reader. From the report: Motherboard visited Giga Energy Solutions in east Texas for the latest episode of CRYPTOLAND, an eight-part documentary series on how cryptocurrency is affecting our world. Mines like Giga's are at the center of heated debate over cryptocurrency's environmental impact. To critics, turning natural gas into bitcoins is emblematic of everything wrong with the growing industry. To Giga Energy co-founders Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh, though, they're undertaking an environmental service -- generating virtual currency using harmful gas that would otherwise be sent into the atmosphere. Instead of combusting surplus natural gas from an oil rig, they're diverting it into a generator, which converts it into electricity to power computers that mine for bitcoin. There's been a lot of skepticism around crypto's impact on the environment as well. The report continues: Alex De Vries, a data scientist at the Netherlands' central bank and founder of Bitcoin energy tracking project Digiconomist who spoke with Motherboard reporter Audrey Carleton as well as Hines and CRYPTOLAND host Krishna Andavolu, says Bitcoin's reliance on the fossil fuel sector is making vast and irreversible contributions to climate change, however.

"Most people are putting their money in Bitcoin simply because they expect the value of Bitcoin to go up," he said. "If that's the situation, where there is just not much possible practical use, but there is a very large energy impact, then my verdict would be that's absolutely not worth it." The full episode is available on YouTube.

In a separate episode published on Wednesday, Motherboard unearthed found footage from one of the first Bitcoin conferences: Bitcoin 2013 in San Jose.
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Inside a Bitcoin Mine At a Natural Gas Well In Texas More

Inside a Bitcoin Mine At a Natural Gas Well In Texas

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  • the bestest stuff in the whole world.

  • "West Texas"
    should be East Texas

    • TFA doesn't say "West Texas". That is just poor editing by the summarizer.

      TFA also clearly states the miner is using gas that would have otherwise been flared. Yet TFS rants about wasted electricity when in fact there is no waste.

      Decent article. Terrible summary.

      • Is it actually true or is it on the same level of the wasted hydro power bullshit which was being pushed not too long ago.

        Sure the flared gas at a discount is nice, but when building a generator plant on site any way getting cheaper gas because of lower distribution cost suddenly becomes interesting too. It's not just a couple % of previously flared gas right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Why do they waste this gas at all? If they can use it to mine bitcoin then surely they could use it to do other, more useful computing tasks. Or just anything that runs from electricity. Or capture it and sell it as gas.

        What are the economics behind burning off something that apparently value?

        • Multiple things. First the margins will eliminate many possible applications, they'll simply be net negative after costs are factored... there is value there but it doesn't matter if it costs more than that value to get it out. The oil industry is particularly familiar with that scenario. People often immediately dismiss this, especially anti-capitalists, but they are forgetting money isn't just magic pixie dust. It is magic pixie dust we made for utilitarian purposes and the most important one is resource

  • ... remains the best description of BC I've heard so far. I wouldn't mind being proven wrong but I don't expect it

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Rei ( 128717 )

      I still like, "Imagine that leaving your car idling 24/7 produced solved sudokus that you could trade for heroin" ;)

      This claim by Giga is so facetious. First off the sleight of hand calling flared gas "released into the atmosphere" (no, it's CO2 that's released when gas is flared, not methane - the same CO2 being released by the generators used by the miners). Or as if you can't use that energy to do actually useful things (worthwhile computing, hydrogen production (and its products, like ammonia or synfuel

      • Your issue is you donâ(TM)t actually understand money and what it is.

        Here: https://cdn.mises.org/What [mises.org] Has Government Done to Our Money_3.pdf

        Itâ(TM)s free to read.

        • Inflation is essentially a tax on not investing your money. Yes, it sucks if you don't earn much and what little you've saved is slowly losing its buying power, but it beats the alternative. Imagine a world where the wealthy just hoard their Bitcoins in their wallets and the economy screeches to a halt because no one invests their money back into businesses, because it's potentially more profitable to just wait and hope your Bitcoin goes moon.

          • > Inflation is essentially a tax on not investing your money.

            That's a great description. And it doesn't have to mean investing in stock market, you can invest it in a business, or in your business, your education and so on.

          • Imagine a world where the wealthy just hoard their Bitcoins in their wallets and the economy screeches to a halt because no one invests their money back into businesses, because it's potentially more profitable to just wait and hope your Bitcoin goes moon.

            It's worse than that. The wealthy (and corporations) are currently sitting on record cash hoards, and I mean actual cash not just liquid investments, the citations are legion so I won't bother. They're not even investing it in shitcoins! If people are wondering why there's not more jobs, that's why.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Klaxton ( 609696 )

        Lots of gas in west Texas isn't even flared, it is directly vented into the atmosphere. But aside from that, bitcoin mining is inherently wasteful to start out with. This is just another instance where it is causing harm, there's no excuse for it. And if the oil wells can't be profitable without selling energy to the BTC scam they should be capped.

      • I knew there was a scam here I couldn't remember what it was. What makes me so angry is how the journalists just run a puff piece and don't even bring up the elephant in the room which is parents last point. Specifically that these wilds would shut down if not for the money the crypto miners are bringing in.

        This is why journalism in America is dying. Journalists stopped doing their jobs and they expected us to keep paying for them. I shouldn't have to dig into a slash dot comment section to find what th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I used to think Captain Planet was a silly children's cartoon. Turns out there really are villains with pollution machines that do nothing useful out there.

      • "First off the sleight of hand calling flared gas "released into the atmosphere" (no, it's CO2 that's released when gas is flared, not methane - the same CO2 being released by the generators used by the miners)."

        Actually he said vented or flared, vented gas is released into the atmosphere.

        "Or as if you can't use that energy to do actually useful things"

        Money is an extremely useful tool. It is that very tool that explains why it isn't being used to do those things, money is a decentralized self-organizing re

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rei ( 128717 )

          Actually he said vented or flared, vented gas is released into the atmosphere.

          It is illegal to deliberately vent methane.

          Money is an extremely useful tool.

          ... which in no way, shape or form requires wasting absurd amounts of energy (aka Bitcoin).

          A ridiculously tiny fraction of gold mining is for industrial use

          One, that's not true (37% of gold used in the US is used in electronics/ industry), and two, nobody here is defending gold. Did you see gold anywhere in the list of examples of actually useful uses o

          • "... which in no way, shape or form requires wasting absurd amounts of energy (aka Bitcoin)."

            Decentralized money DOES require using energy. This is how security works, the expense of the mining operation in terms of resources directly relates to the integrity, the more it costs the more it costs to compromise.

            Yes there are alternatives proposed such as proof-of-stake but the devil is in the details. Proof-of-stake is effectively a ponzi scheme with zero risk to early investors sitting at the top of pyramid.
  • albeit still at a huge markup, but still, supply hasn't increased but you can get cards. That tells me crypto ain't doin' so hot right now. Might be a good time to sell if you don't want to get caught holding the bag for somebody else.

    • albeit still at a huge markup

      Fuck that. They can keep 'em until they're MSRP or below. I'll keep gaming on my Nintendo Switch and my partner's Xbox series S. Gaming doesn't have to blow a goatse-sized hole through your wallet to be fun.

    • It's because Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake. [consensys.net] So yeah, you'll be able to get your precious video cards and you'll be the one fucking up the planet again.
      • They've been saying that for years. It isn't and it bares no relevance on the current availability of GPU hardware. Your "article" is a fluff piece to make it look like something new has happened. It hasn't

  • POW is so old school. POS is the environmentally friendly alternative.

  • data centers use water to cool. And they use lots of it. Yes, you can reuse the water, but that costs a lot of money. Google will do that, but I find it hard to believe an outfit like this does. They don't have the margins.

    And that's before we talk about all the electronics they're dumping into landfills. Many of which are custom ASICs that are worthless on the secondary market.

    • If you have an abundance of cheap/free electricity, you can just run air conditioners. R-410a's critical temperature (above which it simply will not condense back to a liquid, no matter how much you try to compress it) is 161.83F (or 72.13C for the rest of the world), and unless you've done something horribly wrong with your installation, that shouldn't present a problem even with an air-cooled condenser in Texas.

      Most data centers try to use more efficient forms of cooling, because air conditioning can rep

    • Well funded and well built datacentres may have evaporative AC but this operation is entirely air cooled. It's like you didn't watch the video at all before commenting and as such made a completely ignorant and pointless comment. Ahhh never change rsilvergun.

  • ..because these are the kind of people the proof-of-work mining schemes are making rich. The mining rewards go to the Once-lers [youtube.com] who will gladly poison ever last acre of usable land, so long as it fattens their bank account.

    Meanwhile, if the average person tries mining in their spare time on their home PC, they'll burn up more dollars worth of electricity than they'll produce in cryptocoins.

  • Just greed, so no good can come from this. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I see no real added value in bitcoin / crypto currency for real ordinary people, the poor are still getting poorer, the rich needlessly richer and the biosphere is suffering. Definitely not progress just more self-indulgence and economic exploitation, no wonder everything is going downhill fast, given how greedy, selfish and irresponsible most people really are ...

  • Mining stupidly wasteful. This is like growing corn to feed cows only to just slaughter them WITHOUT eating them or doing anything else with them. Would it not be worth using that electricity for just about anything else?
  • I love when Bitcoin or anything else related to finance is called an industry.
  • So taking an ecologically harmful byproduct of the extraction of another ecologically harmful substance, converting it into yet another ecologically harmful substance in order to produce something with no real utility is somehow a net benefit? I am sure that they have actually convinced themselves of this. Hey, why not use that energy to do something actually useful instead?

    • Hey, why not use that energy to do something actually useful instead?

      Gas takeaway capacity from rigs requires gathering pipelines to be built. It is often not economically viable to construct the gathering lines. Gathering pipelines require larger pipes in the area to connect to, which may not exist near enough to the wells due to a lack of density, regulations, etc.

      In this case, they're generating electricity on-site, which itself could be fed into the grid. But again, there would be infrastructure cost that may not be economical, particularly for a relatively small amount

  • ...this is bitcoin drilling!

  • People just don't think they'll be (or people they care about) sharing the costs (economic and physical) for the climate damage. The costs are not concrete enough. It's the tragedy of the commons on steroids.

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