New York Faces a New Legal Fight Over a Proposed Crypto-Mining Power Plant (theverge.com) 25
Environmental groups are pushing New York state to scrutinize a crypto mining company's purchase of a gas-fired power plant, contending in a new lawsuit that turning the power plant into a crypto mine would go against the state's climate goals and dump more pollution on nearby neighborhoods. From a report: Sierra Club and the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York filed a suit on Friday that challenges the New York Public Service Commission's (PSC) approval of the sale. Under state law, the commission has to give the green light before the transfer of ownership of a power plant can take place. Until now, the commission has mostly focused on whether such a sale would affect residents' electricity rates or create a monopoly. The commission needs to start taking climate change and environmental injustice into consideration because of a sweeping climate law passed in 2019, the new lawsuit argues.
Die, bitcoin, die (Score:1)
Unused wallets are quantum resistant (Score:2)
Second miners still get a fee for transactions even if there is a block reward.
Bitcoin isn't very useful but if you are going to bash it at least have a clue what you are saying.
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As to transaction fees, just how high will they have to be to make it worthwhile considering the paucity of transactions on the bitcoin network? At 300k transactions per day you will see a massive dropoff in the hash rate as it's simply unecenomical to run a ton of equipment with associated costs unless you're charging ex
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I'm surprised that New York wouldn't just raise the property tax or some other tax on the operation making it unviable.
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Fucking Leftard traitors should swing from ropes hung from overpasses instead of being rewarded with cush jobs.
Let us know when you've got off your ass and done it.
Whether the gas powerplant is used for crypto (Score:1)
Was the gas plant running producing electric power there before?
If so, then the GHGs are a wash (no difference) with new ownership of the plant.
People shouldn't be legislating what people use electrical power for.
They should be legislating a phased reduction of all fossil-fuel electricity generation.
If the gas plant was not in use, or only in very limited use before, and now wants to go to full-time high power generation, that's a different story. That should be disallowed just because
Legislation (Score:2)
You don't legislate what types of energy to use. You increase taxes on fossil fuels, slowly over time. What it's replaced with should be up to the market, as there are options nobody might be thinking of yet.
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You will just get investment in low hanging fruit with no investment in high hanging fruit because short time horizon investment mentality. Then eventually the low hanging fruit runs out and you have one or two decades of R&D to go while the taxes can only depress consumption, which won't happen, because politics.
The only way to get net zero in 3 decades is through central planning.
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The only way to get net zero in 3 decades is through central planning.
I'd rather take the climate change, thanks.
https://www.economicshelp.org/... [economicshelp.org]
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You will just get investment in low hanging fruit with no investment in high hanging fruit because short time horizon investment mentality.
This assumes you have a good survey of what technologies are currently being worked on and where they are in their development cycle, which I guarantee you don't, and I'm pretty sure nobody does.
The only way to get net zero in 3 decades is through central planning.
Check out California's high speed rail system for how well large scale centrally planned projects work out in the US. Budget overruns, timing overruns, property management blunders. And this is in a state where, pretty much, the entire government is on board with building the thing. Well, mostly on board, until they
Re:Whether the gas powerplant is used for crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost-benefit analysis changes with the *purpose* of the plant, because it changes the benefits and who gets them even if the costs are unchanged.
When the plant is used to generate electricity for real life--dishwashers, lights, computers, and so on--then perhaps the local residents have decided there's enough benefit to justify the health and climate costs.
When the plant is repurposed for a few people to get rich mining a virtual currency (with arguable real-world utility), that balance changes. The local community gets all the cost, and none of the benefit.
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That doesn't mean the value is not there.
There's a good chance that most finance applications, a good chunk of business transactions, and many other irrefutable record keeping applications will rely on these technologies within a decade or two.
So it's important for the moment that free experimentation with and evolution of these important technologies continue.
Shortsighted, overly conservative
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There can be a legitimite reason to legislate this. This is a society, not a random collection of individuals. Thus the society has a vested interest that no individual can harm others. For "society" replace with "government" if you like, but this also applies to societies without government, as well as anarchic societies that only think they don't have a government.
For this particular issues the problems for allowing unrestricted use of the power plant are:
- natural gas is a limited resource that needs
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natural gas is a limited resource that needs to be shared by all
No more so than gasoline, uranium, gold, diamonds, copper, lithium iron, bauxite, or any other material. If it ain't your, it ain't yours.
Such as electricity generation available for all members, as opposed to only one member. Or bribes are so big that the society looks the other way....because if the plant could be sold off then the plant was clearly redundant and could have been closed. The reason it is being sold is so that the utilities can get some money out of it.
Probably nothing stopping you from putting in a higher bid. Oh wait, you just want to devalue their asset without compensation. Rest assured other industries will take notice and treat your government as a hazard appropriately.
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We have to be off half of our total use of fossil fuels in about 8 years, and off all the rest of it in about 25 years. Or very damaging additional warming and climate changes coming.
That issue, and rational decision making on it, is orthogonal to the issue of a rather small use of electrical power, in the grand scheme of the economy as a whole.
Also, there are benefits to free e
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We've already missed the window. Better off spending our money adapting to the unavoidable future that is higher temperatures and more chaotic storm systems.
You could disappear USA and it still wouldn't matter. That perma-frost is going to melt and we will be forced to adapt.
Furthermore, are you going to demand 1st world drop down to 3rd world standards? Will never happen and you know it.
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2. Re: The USA being insignificant to the problem. In terms of historical cumulative contribution to the problem, USA is the leader, and thus has the
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People shouldn't be legislating what people use electrical power for.
Why not? All sorts of things are regulated all of the time.
How about this ... (Score:2)
Simply make crypto-miners subject to the same rules/regulations as, say, coal miners. That'll slow 'em down. :-)
Just noting that anything about miners always makes me think if this exchange [youtube.com] on Galaxy Quest [wikipedia.org]:
Sir Alexander Dane: Could they be the miners?
Fred Kwan: Sure, they're like three years old.
Sir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.
Fred Kwan: You lost me.
[*snicker*]
What's in a name? (Score:1)
Seems bad long term... (Score:1)
Bitcoin is great but it has failed every goal made. It is legacy tech. Proof of stake coins seem where it is at. Coins with real use cases like BAT etc. are IMHO the future of block chain tech. Souly speculative coins are very brittle. 50 years from now I dont see BTC being a major driver in that space.
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Surely, this crypto scam is nothing like those other crypto scams!
It's not a bad plan. It looks to be just enough to give hope to the hangers-on. Who knows, it might be enough for you to hook an even bigger sucker and exit before you lose everything.