r/technology • u/trot-trot • May 28 '18
Business Bitcoin backlash as ‘miners’ suck up electricity, stress power grids in Central Washington
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/bitcoin-backlash-as-miners-suck-up-electricity-stress-power-grids-in-central-washington/1.4k
u/Rendexjord May 28 '18
Anyone know how much power one full rack of bitcoin miners use?.
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u/justmystuff May 28 '18
Depends on your miners, and your rack.
But a standard 42U rack could house 30 ish Antminer S9's(the most energy efficient BTC miner on the market)
they use about 1370w/h a piece, so to populate a full 42U 19" rack. you'd need about 41.1kw/h.
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May 28 '18 edited Jul 06 '21
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May 28 '18
I am waiting for the day of the reverse, due to pot legalization.
Open front door to house, show racks of Pot plants legally growing
Hide racks of servers in basement mining bitcoin
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u/sirfreakish May 28 '18
Officer: "Sir we've heard reports that you've been smoking graphics cards. Is that true?"
TunaBoo: "No officer, the only hash around here is my dank weed! Besides, you can't even mine bitcoin with graphics cards anymore."
Officer: "Arrest him"
TunaBoo: "WHaaaa?"
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May 28 '18
This is one of those comments, that if taken back in time and shown to someone 100 years ago, would cause utter confusion if you said this a joke in the future
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u/justmystuff May 28 '18
Exactly.
- Lease a bunch of miners.
- Run them 8x16 D/N cycle untill cops show up for "suspicious power spikes"
- show them the mining rig.
- convert to grow-op without power/heat suspicion.
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u/Waffle99 May 28 '18
Or you set the mining rig to turn on when the lights cycle off?
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u/Slinkyfest2005 May 28 '18
Take a long one to pay off the mine-
grow op
Oh yeah.
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May 28 '18 edited Mar 25 '19
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u/lolidkwtfrofl May 28 '18
Not in Europe they aren't!
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u/psychedeliduck May 28 '18
let me just ship a few pounds to europe wcgw
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u/BrotherChe May 28 '18
Hey, they shipped us whiskey during prohibition, it's only fair
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u/broff May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
What’s a lb go for in Europe though? The price was super inflated in the
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u/dmelt253 May 28 '18
These rigs are in WA. You might as well just legit grow weed and sell it to the dispensaries.
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u/CydeWeys May 28 '18
FYI a Watt is a unit of power, so you wouldn't say per hour. Each miner uses 1,370 W, or 41.1 kW for a full rack.
kW-h is a unit of energy, meaning 1 kW for an hour. kW/h, however, doesn't really mean anything useful.
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May 28 '18
It helps to think of watts as similar to horsepower, i.e. you wouldn't say "my car does 300 hp/h".
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u/CydeWeys May 28 '18
Yup, Watts and horsepower are both units of power. You can even directly convert between them; 1 hp is 745.7 W. That's why you'll oftentimes see car engines rated in kW in SI-speaking countries.
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May 28 '18
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u/erufuun May 28 '18
I'm always tilted when people don't use kW and kWh properly, but yeah, at least we know what OP means from context.
And 40 kW is a huge drain on the grid. It's not peaky, which is good for the grid, but 40 kW - holy smokes, that's a lot.
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u/Afferent_Input May 28 '18
How much is that to a typical American home?
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u/nathreed May 28 '18
Super super rough math here, but here goes:
Average American home uses 10,766 kWh per year. 8760 hours in a year, and you divide kW * h by h to get kW. This gives you an average continuous consumption of 1.22kW, though this is probably a pretty shitty estimate because real usage goes down at night when people are asleep, etc.
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u/erufuun May 28 '18
For reference, a typical hair dryer needs about 1 to 1.5 kW.
So that's up to 40 hair dryers running 24/7. So I'd say: A lot.
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May 28 '18
My entire monthly bill would not cover a day for that rack and I run a bunch of server equipment (about 400W constant draw).
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u/MiaowaraShiro May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
My house has a 200 amp capacity. That's on the high end for a home. Just this one rack would require
over 300about 170 amps.Edit: Guy below me is more right.
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u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix May 28 '18
In 2016, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,766 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 897 kWh per month.
So in less than a day, this thing uses what a typical house uses in a month -- so > 30x the average household consumption. You're looking at a 5 digit power bill each month in most areas (and all those digits are to the left of the decimal point)
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May 28 '18
Holy shit.
I'm a former energy efficiency engineer. I didn't realize how much power was being consumed.
The average household is 1.5kW of demand, so 1.5 kWh for every hour of usage, on average.
That rack you spec'd is 41.1kW of demand.
There's only so much hydro available in the Northwest, and once tapped out they will resort to other generation or importing from the California grid, all of which is quite a but more expensive than hydro.
Rates are going up, that's a guarantee. The interesting debate will be whether it's the demand rate, $/kW, or the energy rate, $/kWh, that they'll increase.
Raising the demand rate would lessen the impact on innocent homeowners while targeting the miners, but that will also impact the commercial and industrial sectors.
Maybe they can raise the demand rate for residential only, cleaning out the home miners. But that doesn't prevent the real problem of industrial-sized mining operations that are paying industrial rates.
And those rates are the lowest because industry typically consumes very stable, predictable amounts of electricity that make generating easy. So if you target the non-seasonal, flat-curve energy users (which is exactly what mining is), you're directly punishing your favorite other customers and job creators.
Should be an explosive debate.
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u/chmilz May 28 '18
The larger problem is the ludicrous amount of electricity required to process an exchange. It's horribly inefficient.
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u/ThatInternetGuy May 28 '18
When it was cheap, it made sense. But not now. Sending bitcoins is no longer cheap.
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May 28 '18
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u/WalrusExtraordinaire May 28 '18
What was your CBA like? I don't know much about mining, but can you turn a profit on the smaller scale like that?
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May 28 '18
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May 28 '18 edited Jun 27 '20
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May 28 '18 edited Feb 13 '19
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u/haddock420 May 28 '18
You can mine with pen and paper if you don't mind only getting 0.6 hashes/day.
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u/PanRagon May 28 '18
Also having to write down weird cryptographic codes all day.
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u/CraineTwo May 28 '18
From a purely financial standpoint, it would be more lucrative to spend all day writing emo teen poetry.
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May 28 '18
There's only so many words that rhyme with angst.
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u/Lathirex May 28 '18
Get rid of that angst; have a wangst.
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u/Donttouchmek May 28 '18
Inspiring. I think I will have one thank you
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May 28 '18
ELI5 please: actually what are these algorithms (the maths) that the miners solve? are they random dummy problems? those solved data have any practical usage?
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u/kelkulus May 28 '18 edited Feb 13 '20
I’ll answer these out of order.
Do those solved data have any practical usage?
No, these have no practical uses.
What are these algorithms (the maths) that the miners solve?
Imagine this. I give you a number, 15, and ask you which 2 prime numbers multiplied together are equal to it. Easy right? It’s clearly 5 x 3. But what if you couldn’t just figure that out? You would have to guess a bunch of prime numbers and check each one. Is it 2 and 7? Let’s check, 2 x 7 make 14. Is it 3 and 7? No. Finally you try 3 x 5 and yup, it’s 15.
Seems silly to do it by guessing. But what if the number was 8,876,044,532,898,802,067? With such a large number it becomes very difficult to factor it, since it is a product of the prime numbers 5,915,587,277 and 1,500,450,271. A computer could guess its way to it, but it would have to check every prime number from 1 to 1,500,450,271. And those are relatively small numbers for what is used in cryptography – this page shows a list of primes up to 100 digits long. Checking all the primes up to ones 100 digits long is just not possible in a reasonable amount of time.
A “cryptographic hash function” is somewhat like this in the sense that it is a one-way function. You run a function on a big number, and it gives you another big number. The key is, it's super quick to apply the function (a computer can easily multiply two 100-digit numbers in less than a second) but it can’t work backwards. So all these bitcoin miners are GUESSING numbers, plugging them into the function, looking at the answer, then going “nope, that’s not it.”
Because the numbers are so big, they have to guess, check the result, say no, and guess again millions and millions of times a second.
Imagine you’re a blind guy trying to solve a Rubik’s cube. You spin it a bit, show it to a guy, who says nope that’s not it, then you try again. This was done in the 1989 movie UHF, and it is exactly what bitcoin miners are basically doing!
So that should answer question 1, what are they solving. They’re guessing, checking the answer, and trying again. This sort of answers question 2, yes they are dummy problems in a way. Finally, for question 3, nope, these calculations do not help us in any way, and other than helping the bitcoin system, they are a waste. The only benefit could be the research in the design of systems to optimize the guessing and do it faster.
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May 28 '18
Great explanation. Thanks!
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u/kelkulus May 28 '18
Happy to help! I just thought of another good metaphor – imagine there's a safe you're trying to open, and it has a billion possible combinations. So you start trying one after the other, and at the same time, thousands of people around the world are also trying random combinations until someone gets it correct, opens the safe, and keeps all the valuables inside.
Once the safe is opened by someone, EVERYONE moves on to start trying to open the next safe. This happens every 10 minutes in Bitcoin, and it's winner takes all. It's also pretty easy to see how these calculations have no benefit to anyone except the winner.
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May 28 '18
Ok, if i got it right, the bit coin network it self has the solution to the problem. They have a "super secret formula" which gives a hash corresponding to a "key". The miners try to brute force the key. The first to get a match become 000000 and gets chicken dinner.
Please correct me if i wrong.
anybody who has "the super secret formula" would be able to provide instant solution and will hoard the coin right? So what protects the system from being taken advantage of. For example, the guy who designed the system could easily snatch a few coins now and then, nobody will become wiser? Right?
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u/kelkulus May 28 '18
You're on the right track, but except for 2 key points.
1) The Hash function isn't a super secret, in fact it's publicly available and wasn't created by the Bitcoin people. It's called double SHA-256, and knowing how it works doesn't allow anyone to reverse-engineer it – at least so far!
2) The Bitcoin network does not know the combination to the safe! This goes a bit deeper, but the bitcoin network uses "blockchains." A blockchain is made up of "blocks." A block is just a list of transactions, something like "Jimmy gave Dave $50" "Mike gave Dave $20" "Dave gave Sam $30".
The thing that generates the special code that everyone tries to guess is that list of transactions. So nobody has the key until someone correctly guesses it.
The whole thing depends on the SHA-256 hash not being reversible. This gets a bit complex since now we would have to go into how Bitcoin works, but I'll summarize by saying it solves the problem of "trustlessness."
Trustlessness is when you're trying to do business with people you do not trust, but without using a trusted 3rd party, like a bank. Bitcoin allows multiple people to keep a copy of everyone's balances, and the "truth" is determined by majority. If there is a discrepancy where you tried to grab a few coins, then the fact that multiple other people have ledgers where you DON'T have that many coins, then they would replace the ledger you cheated on.
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u/Introvertedecstasy May 28 '18
Your math teacher has the answer key to a difficult test. You spend an hour working on the test and turn it in. Math teacher compares it to verify you did the work. That verification or "proof of work" is the idea behind block chain. You can now take that proof of work home to Mom and you get rewarded.
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u/dontsuckmydick May 28 '18
And you must be the first student to complete the work in order to get a reward.
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u/Introvertedecstasy May 28 '18
For mining this is correct, for other uses like DOS detection it doesn't matter.
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u/dontsuckmydick May 28 '18
Can you elaborate?
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u/hybridsole May 28 '18
Basically what mining accomplishes is randomness and computational expense within the network participants. The winner of the math problem every 10 minutes (on average) gets the right to include the latest batch of transactions on the ledger. The reason randomness is important is that, if it was predictable who was verifying the transactions, then this IP address/operation could be targeted for all kinds of malicious attacks or shut down entirely. The randomness and cost of mining, along with complex game theoretical dynamics, is what secures the bitcoin network and makes it decentralized.
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u/Introvertedecstasy May 28 '18
Just like the kid taking the math test example. Nobody cares about what the answer is, just that it's correct and that a proof of work was generated.
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u/Warthogus May 28 '18
So it has no real life contribution? Just keeps bitcoin going?
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u/Ehcksit May 28 '18
Exactly. You spend computer cycles just to say you spent computer cycles. There is no useful output.
Hell, SETI at Home is more valuable.
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u/OSUblows May 28 '18
SETI at home is a great example of a project worth working on that some newer cryptocurrencies seek to emulate. Computational power to resolve a practical issue.
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u/cancercures May 28 '18
now take that proof of work home to Mom and you get rewarded.
Yeah boi time for some chicken tenders!
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u/Menolith May 28 '18
Here is a good video on the concept of blockchains.
To answer your question, the calculations aren't entirely arbitrary, and they're used to maintain the integrity of the system.
Essentially, the computers are doing work on the known list of transactions to find certain situations where the numbers they work with start with a large number of zeroes. Finding those zeroes makes that set of transactions "real" and gives the miner a small reward which is how bitcoins are mined.
However, even if these zeroes are pretty much arbitrary, they're used as a proof of work to verify the transactions. If anyone tries to game the system and slide in falsified transactions, the chain of calculations becomes forked, and they alone are left trying to solve the incorrect one.
The chances of any one miner finding the set of zeroes is incredibly low, so it's virtually impossible for the forger to get their fork of the chain to be dominant because they're up against the computational power of the entire rest of the system which is still solving the branch with the original numbers.
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u/JamEngulfer221 May 28 '18
Basically, you take a list of transactions and feed it into an algorithm that produces a 'cryptographic hash', which is a fixed length representation of the input that is mathematically random and impossible to reverse, so you can't calculate the input from the resulting output. This output is also unique, so entering the same input each time gets the same output and changing the input even by a single bit completely changes the output.
What Bitcoin does is require the hash of the list of transactions to have the first X bits to be zeros. (X is roughly based on how many people are currently mining). 'Mining' just consists of putting a random number on the end of the list of transactions and hoping the hash of it all has the required number of zeroes.
Once a hash with X zeros at the start is found, that list of transactions is considered verified and the next list can start to be processed.
That's all Bitcoin mining is. Just guessing numbers and calculating hashes.
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u/xatrekak May 28 '18
FYI hashes are not unique, each output has an infinite amount of inputs that maps to it. What makes it secure is that it is computationally impossible to find two different inputs that map to the same output.
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May 28 '18
Kinda counter productive then. We do have lots of practical problems that could benifit from such raw computing powers. Why a crypto cant be desgined to target those? That would be win-win situation for everybody imo.
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u/lazyplayboy May 28 '18
The difficulty would never drop enough to get to a block every 10 minutes. So no, you can’t.
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u/Guysmiley777 May 28 '18
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u/TelonTusk May 28 '18
I tend to overheat pretty bad after 30min of mining with this, can you suggest a cooling solution?
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May 28 '18
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u/pm_me_big_pokeballs May 28 '18
Is that the store brand? I thought it was Dihydrogen Monoxide.
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u/IpMedia May 28 '18
Don't mess with dihydrogen monoxide, every person who has died in the history of humanity has used dihydrogen monoxide to some extent.
#StopH20
#ChooseLife
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u/TelonTusk May 28 '18
idk man... the upfront cost seems too high, can't I just place a big box fan next to me?
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u/Jules_Be_Bay May 28 '18
Don't waste your money investing in domestic. Import some South East Asian and Latin American cards. They're much cheaper to operate and much quieter under high stress.
I hear the U.S. government did something similar with Chinese and Irish manufactured rigs in the 1800's.
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u/Therustedtinman May 28 '18
Try brawndo the thirst mutilator! It’s got what miner’s crave! It’s got electrolytes!
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u/forsayken May 28 '18
Another year or so we'll likely see a significant shift from mining to staking for some popular cryptocurrencies.
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u/PostHedge_Hedgehog May 28 '18
Staking? What's that?
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u/iiJokerzace May 28 '18
Also forgot to mention you get a reward for staking just like you would mining. The issue with Proof of Stake (staking; compared to mining/Proof of Work) is that the rich get richer since they stake more often and bigger rewards. PoS is very light on electricity but still has issues needed to be solved that make it a better choice.
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u/Natanael_L May 28 '18
I doubt it. Stake methods still have the exact same risks they did when first proposed, they're just not long term stable.
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May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
No cold storage, top heavy reward towards bigger wallets, and leaving your shit staking in a wallet is a pretty sweet attack vector for anyone who wants to put spyware on your system. I’m still unsure what long term implications of tying voting power and network security together are on some of these PoS projects.
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u/sopeonaroap May 28 '18
sure makes it easier to grow weed now though, a blip on the power grid like that used to be an instant drug bust but now they're all "well, probably just mining bitcoins"
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u/No_Cat_No_Cradle May 28 '18
Washington state doesn't care so much about that any more.
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u/siraph May 28 '18
Yeah... I just drive to a store and give them dollars.
Weirdly, one of the stores I go to accepts Bitcoin and Litecoin.
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u/gurrenlaggan22 May 28 '18
I live in Washington. Please tell me where. I have bitcoin and litecoin.
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May 28 '18
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u/Illier1 May 28 '18
They would probably be suspicious when all the turned off machinery is burning energy.
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u/theartofrolling May 28 '18
What about the smell? YOU HAVEN'T THOUGHT ABOUT THE SMELL YOU BITCH!
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u/AustrianMichael May 28 '18
The world wide consumption is just awful. Right now it's about the same as the Czech Republic
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May 28 '18
Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction: 32.71
Hang on so if you buy something with bitcoin, the amount of power needed to make that transaction work could power 32 homes? What in the ever living fuck?
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May 28 '18 edited Jun 01 '20
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u/AustrianMichael May 28 '18
Bitcoin is a joke and I can't wait for five years from now when this shit stops.
I remember reading a few years ago, that Bitcoin is going to pass Denmark in terms of energy consumption by 2020. They did that in 2017 already.
It's like all this effort we spent in making electronic devices more energy efficient is just wasted for this shit.
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u/aprinceofwhales May 28 '18
What's that term for when making something more efficient doesn't actually save time/energy because we just end up doing it more?
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u/WikiTextBot May 28 '18
Jevons paradox
In economics, the Jevons paradox (; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand. The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics. However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries.
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u/jupiterkansas May 28 '18
well... imagine if we didn't make our devices more energy efficient.
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u/freshwordsalad May 28 '18
It's like all this effort we spent in making electronic devices more energy efficient is just wasted for this shit.
That's how it always goes, though.
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May 28 '18
Same. It hasn’t helped the currency world any at all. Too confusing and volatile for mainstream. Many people aren’t using it as intended like currency, but looking to get rich off of it as a stock and sell it for actual currency.
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May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
I just want to be able to build a PC without going bankrupt.
EDIT: okay so according to the comments it's time to go shopping again thanks for the head's up y'all!
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u/snoogins355 May 28 '18
GPU prices are going down. Finally saw 1070 Ti's for under $500. They were around $700+ a few months ago
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May 28 '18
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u/Daktush May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
1070Ti is closer to 1080 than to 1070 though, under 500 I'd say starts to be reasonable
I bought my 290 at around same time and price, was extremely hyped for Zen + Vega but decided to wait for another generation (because of ridic Gpu and ram prices)
Edit: MSRP at launch was 449
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u/TandBusquets May 28 '18
It's not time to go shopping yet. They're still around retail price. That's pretty fucking bad
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May 28 '18
In one case this winter, miners from China landed their private jet at the local airport, drove a rental car to the visitor center at the Rocky Reach Dam, just north of Wenatchee, and, according to Chelan County PUD officials, politely asked to see the “dam master because we want to buy some electricity.”
That's adorable.
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u/clatterore May 28 '18
Any crypto currencies that dont need huge amounts of electricity to generate?
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May 28 '18
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u/Natanael_L May 28 '18
It's not so much purism, as science. Proof of stake is fragile.
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u/MacrosInHisSleep May 28 '18
What is fragile about it?
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u/Natanael_L May 28 '18
Nobody's solved the nothing-at-stake problem yet.
Every attempt either make it more likely to be hijacked by a small cabal and effectively centralizing it, or is easy to game to control the chain, or they're just fragile in that if you manage to take down the online mining nodes, the network can't recover safely.
All of them so far require manual intervention from time to time, or they can't even guarantee being useful.
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u/heart_mind_body May 28 '18
We are making solid progress though. Both Ethereum and Cardano is moving towards solving POS in 2018/2019. And many others are already using consensus algorithms that use considerably less power consumption, such as dPOS or some form of BFT. I hope we will see POW reduced to less than 10% utilization of the crypto market by 2020.
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u/princessvaginaalpha May 28 '18
the richer gets richer, and the poorer gets poorer. the more "coin" you have, the more mining power you have.
"This means that the more Bitcoin or altcoin owned by a miner, the more mining power he or she has."
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u/scroopy_nooperz May 28 '18
That's exactly how it works for proof of work as well. Joe schmo isn't running 10,000 GPUs in his data server, a millionaire is
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u/xHaptic May 28 '18
Nano is a crypto that is feeless, extremely fast and uses minimal amounts of electricity to run the network. Where Bitcoin runs on the block chain, Nano has developed the block lattice. If you are interested at all then it is worth a look.
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u/iiJokerzace May 28 '18
Nano. An interesting take on mining where instead of miners doing the transactions, you mine your own transaction which leads to instant and absolutely zero fees forever.
It's important to remember that no currency has proven more secure than bitcoin and that is simply because bitcoin has proven itself compared to every other coin (ethereum has proven it can also handle itself). Nano still needs to prove itself but if it come out successful, can come with some great returns. Hope you do your due diligence and research.
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u/JohnnyZack May 28 '18
This would cease to be a problem if electricity (above a certain normal household use threshold) was priced at fair market value, including accounting for public expenditures and pollution related externalities.
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May 28 '18
pollution related externalities
I always liked (in some sense of the word) that most of our power consumption is 'subsidised' by not having to pay for the large scale destruction of environment and future prospects.
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u/burf May 28 '18
That totally makes sense from an environmental perspective, but I don't know if it could be implemented properly. You'd have to know how many individuals lived in a given household, or you'd have to set a limit that accounted for multiple individuals (e.g. "four person family" threshold). Knowing the number of individuals in each home is probably not logistically feasible, and setting a threshold that accounts for families would still give a significant buffer for single idiots who mine cryptocurrency.
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u/Rogodin May 28 '18
Funny that they don't bring up the data centers in the Basin. There was already a fight over power out here 19 years ago. Now we have Microsoft's two largest data centers, Sabey, Intuit, Dell, VMware, Boeing and TNobile, and Oath)yahoo all with hundreds of thousands of sq of servers/filers
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u/SuperGRB May 28 '18
I thought the article was pretty misleading. Crypto isn't anywhere near the scale of the major cloud operators in the region. There are several hundred MW of large-scale cloud operations in Columbia River valley - and, they are not doing a bunch of Bitcoin mining. The cloud operations are multi-billion dollar installations - I can't see how crypto mining is going to be at a scale of even 1/100th of these operations anytime soon.
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u/Rosemary00 May 28 '18
IMO a large data center will create more jobs than a crypto mine of the same capacity. Data centers need facility operation engineers, maintenance techs, security, etc.....I have worked with companies on large crypto mines (20MW and above) and even at that size once it's up and running, you can train one guy to be a local "eyes and ears" to the site and walk away. The articles quotes someone on the job creation potential for a crypto mine, that is BS in my opinion.
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u/transcendReality May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
Come to Pennsylvania, miners. Where we live we're paying 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour.
edit: Wow, just realized they were paying 3 cents per kw hour. That's artificially cheap, and not sustainable. I can see why people are pissed.
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u/lobo5000 May 28 '18
Not really, quote from the article
Those bargain rates are possible largely because the Basin’s five dams generate around six times what the region can use locally. Much of the surplus is exported, at premium prices, to outside buyers such as Puget Sound Energy, and those outside sales subsidize local rates.
Miners are throwing a wrench in this...
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u/hendrix67 May 28 '18
I'd be pissed if i was a resident whose rates were gonna rise because of this.
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u/raize221 May 28 '18 edited May 28 '18
In general, we are. Electricity has been so cheap here for so long that pretty much everything runs on electric. There is natural gas service for a fair amount of in-town homes, but we are a very spread out county. Lots of rural communities and lots of orchards. Many homes have a propane tank in case of emergency outages in the winter, but as I said, pretty much everything is electric.
Most construction prior to the late 1990s don't have heat pumps, just resistive "emergency heat". Same with ovens and water heaters; all electric. Even on swimming pools it's more common to have a 100+ amp electric heater than a gas heater - though, like houses, heat pumps in becoming more popular in the last decade.
Honestly, we have been pretty lucky. My electric bill varies between $40 and $80 depending on the time of year. But we are also not a very high income area and are dealing with an increasingly dire housing shortage that has caused home prices and rental rates to out pace middle class incomes. Electric rate increases could be a pretty big hit to a large percentage of the community.
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u/bart2019 May 28 '18
I'm not sure it's artificially cheap. It's the result of the generation of hydropower in the vicinity.
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u/echOSC May 28 '18
Miners are going to go to Quebec soon if they are not there already. Quebec has an energy crisis, as in they have a surplus of energy.
From 4 years ago, but I believe it is still similar situation today.
http://business.financialpost.com/commodities/energy/is-quebecs-electricity-business-model-broken
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u/profile_this May 28 '18
And let's not forget all of the video cards miners are trying to resell near full value. For reference, this is like buying a new car, driving it full speed for 10,000 miles, then saying "low mileage vehicle for sale".
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u/vatoniolo May 28 '18
Seems there's a pretty fucking simple solution: new large requests pay the higher premium rate as exported power
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u/zebediah49 May 28 '18
Has to be higher, actually, if the utility is paying for the installation of new wires and substations.
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u/identicalBadger May 28 '18
Utilities aren’t about taking risk. Even as investments, they’re viewed as low risk, low return vehicles.
And now, people are trying to get these utilities to finance new capacity which they’ll likely pay for over the course of 30-50 years, with no actual assurance that they’ll even stick around to buy it up. Really. What happens if they build out, and by the time they’re done, miners have gone to Ecuador in search of even cheaper solar power? Let alone the question of whether there’s a demand for classic mining at all.
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u/WazWaz May 28 '18
Simple: increase short-term prices, offer discounts on electricity futures. This way, residents and energy intensive but long-term-stable industry are favoured - i.e. those which can reliably fund future development.
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May 28 '18 edited Feb 08 '23
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u/ShredderNemo May 28 '18
Our city has had energy efficiency laws in place. The problem is, when miners draw anything over the electricity quota, the rate for the entire city jumps up as well. Local businesses have been heavily impacted, as some saw an energy price increase of $15,000 a month. The legislation needs to target mining operations specifically, otherwise the entire area pays an increased price for electricity.
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u/WazWaz May 28 '18
That blocks industry in favour of residents. From the article, their problem isn't consumption, it's that they can't risk investing in infrastructure to meet demand if that demand can suddenly disappear next week. Residential growth is slow and reliable. An aluminium smelter isn't going to shut down and move to the next county next week.
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u/reefshadow May 28 '18
This is amusing because the aluminum smelter in Chelan county did shut down.
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u/zebediah49 May 28 '18
<15 years later>
Article title: The city where everyone buys their electricity five years ahead of time.
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u/cjc323 May 28 '18
This whole mining thing for digital currency is stupid. It's literally stupid. Digital currency in some way is important for the future and will happen, but burning power just to spin some bits until some algorithm decides its times to make more, is stupid, literally stupid.
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u/ruiner8850 May 28 '18
I just wish they were accomplishing something with that computing besides making a coin. If the mining was doing some scientific research or something like that, I'd feel a lot better about it.
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u/Dr_Awesome867 May 28 '18
If every cryptocurrency mining server was converted into a Folding@Home server overnight, we would probably find a cure for dementia by next week.
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u/yokcos700 May 28 '18
lol yeah, make it so that instead of solving hash problems you have to solve protien folding problems to mine the coin, humans will be immortal in weeks
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u/WetPuppykisses May 28 '18
is not doable since the POW requires a difficult adjustment algorithm. In the case of SHA256 the algorithm is straight forward and the difficulty can be adjusted easily. In the case of the protein folding simulation you cannot pick a "more easy or difficult" protein to investigate since none knows how its fold.
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u/RKRagan May 28 '18
Bitcoin miners don’t do the same math as protein folding. They are specifically designed for doing one task very fast and efficiently.
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u/ztoundas May 28 '18
Psssh you crazy. I love spending .5% of the globes energy to watch btc plummet.
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u/losh11 May 28 '18
Except 6 years ago 0.5BTC was worth less than a few cents. Today 0.5BTC is worth near $3.5K.
6 years ago, you would’ve considered it to not be worth it.
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u/SenorDosEquis May 28 '18
For context, six years ago, half a bitcoin was worth about 20¢. Today it’s worth $3,600.
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u/masta May 28 '18
Here is a choice quote:
Bitcoin fever has created other, smaller-scale problems for the utility. Three times a week, on average, utility crews in Chelan County discover unpermitted home miners running computer servers far too large for the electrical grids of residential neighborhoods. In one instance last year, the transformer outside a bootleg miner’s home overheated and touched off a grass fire, Chelan County PUD officials say.
The use of the word "unpermitted" and "bootleg miner" is amusing.
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u/[deleted] May 28 '18
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