A mostly-dormant coal power plant near Seneca Lake in New York was converted to natural gas in 2017 and began devoting much of its power generation to mining Bitcoin in 2019. The plant went from generating a total of 39,406 tons of carbon emissions in 2019 to generating a total of 243,103 tons in 2020, its first full year mining Bitcoin—the equivalent of the emissions that would be produced to provide electricity to around 35,000 households. The plant was operating at only 13% of its capacity in 2020, but has plans to increase its mining operations. Locals who enjoy Seneca Lake for swimming and other leisure activities have said that, due to the plant, Seneca Lake is now "so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub". This is because the plant circulates around 135 million gallons of water a day from the lake to the cool the plant, outputting water directly into the lake at allowed temperatures up to 86–108˚F (though the plant claims its average outflow temperature is 50˚, only 7˚ warmer than the inflow temperature).
Locals of the area have demanded that the Department of Environmental Conservation review the air emissions permit for the plant rather than renew an old one, which the DEC agreed to do, though they have delayed a new decision until March 31. Many pressing for permit review were unhappy with the delay, with the Seneca Lake Guardian reporting, "This delay from the DEC is not benign... Every day that Gov. Hochul and Commissioner Seggos drag their feet on this (permitting) decision is another day for Greenidge to continue expanding operations."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/some-locals-say-bitcoin-mining-operation-ruining-one-finger-lakes-n1272938
The Greenidge plant houses at least 8,000 computers and is looking to install more, meaning it will have to burn even more natural gas to produce more energy.
One of the most bazinga defenses I ever heard for cryptocurrency was "it can be mined with 'green energy!'" with the same weasel words that allow "access to medical care" to pretend to be the same thing as "actually receiving medical care."
This is where that bazinga thinking got us. Sure, the wasted energy can come from less polluting sources, but it is still wasted energy. Fucking idiots. :cryptocurrency: :elmofire:
The Biden canvasser in 2020 tried that synonym shell game shit with me. I said that my no-compromise policy from Bernie's campaign was universal healthcare. They had some canned response about how Biden totally believed in access to affordable healthcare. It was such a ratfucking non-statement of a non-solution that it solidified my PSL vote past any canvasser argument. Still feel great and well-endowed about that vote.
Unrelated but I read transformers are very expensive bespoke pieces of equipment with months-long lead times even in times without severe supply chain disruptions, and can be irreparably damaged by rifles
Hey yeah what was up with that attack on a power station in... the
mid to lateearly-mid 10s? am I remembering that right?https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
1:45 a.m. – The first bank of transformers, riddled with bullet holes and having leaked 52,000 US gallons (200,000 l; 43,000 imp gal) of oil, overheated, whereupon PG&E's control center about 90 miles (140 km) north received an equipment-failure alarm.
and
Former Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Jon Wellinghoff stated that military experts informed him that the assault looked like a "professional job", noting that no fingerprints were discovered on the empty casings.[7] While Wellinghoff described the attack as "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred", a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that they did not believe a terrorist organization was responsible.
lol lmao, just dudes being bros, not being terrorists
They found a hundred 7.62x39 casings. that's one asshole and about 10 minutes if he was really taking his time to line up every shot.
While some nearby neighborhoods temporarily lost power, “the big users weren’t even aware Metcalf had happened”, according to an expert from the Electric Power Research Institute.[1]
:c
Yup, a transformer is just a bunch of wires around a stack of wire plates
How the fuck are you gonna hurt a gigantic sentient robot with rifles? Especially one that can transform into a 2022 Honda Civic Type R™. Civic Nation; Represent.™
Why do I even bother fucking working and creating real labour value for pennies when some parasite can make millions off of a bunch of computers hooked up to a co emissions machine?
so wholesome :wholesome:
in the most rational economic system on earth, imaginary money > supplying electricity to 35k homes. like fuck you can even do your imaginary money thing with way less electricity usage you dumb fucking AAAaAaaa
There are about 2M more bitcoin you can mine. Each one takes longer, each one requires more computing power (and therefore electricity). How much electricity will it take to mine the last bitcoin? We'll find out.
How is bitcoin finite? Tbh I know nothing about it but I thought it was just imaginary money
Bitcoin is a product of early 2000s internet libertarian ideology. They thought the only thing wrong with markets is central banking and government control, and that we should go back to the gold standard. So of course when they made their decentralized money system, they designed it to mimic gold, by having a fixed supply that gets harder and harder to mine.
Also the entire reason it takes so much electricity is that they used cryptography to build the world's most expensive clock.
A decentralized database with an append-only write system is itself also pretty wasteful of electricity and computation cycles.
A decentralized database with an append-only write system isn't that bad. There's good reasons for append-only, especially in finance. And replicating a database only costs as many times more as your number of replicas.
The thing about bitcoin that costs so much is that they need to enforce an ordering between these decentralized transactions, so you can't get free money by spending the last bitcoin in your wallet in two places at once. And they enforce that they slow down the entire system so it takes about 10 minutes per transaction, so every computer can catch up to every transaction before any happen. And to enforce that they use that ridiculous proof of work algorithm, so computers have to do arbitrary cryptography until however much computing power the whole network has still takes 10 minutes.
For reference on just how wasteful Bitcoin is - a traditional database running on my laptop could easily run 1000x as much traffic as the entire Bitcoin network.
that's not actually what consumes most of the power - it's that the decentralized append-only database needs to accept writes with zero trust in the presence of an arbitrary number of hostile entities attempting to subvert it. the reality is that you almost never need that property and if you remove it you get an infinitely more useful class of datastructures called CRDTs - Conflict-free Replicated Data Types.
It's specifically designed to stop giving out coins after 21 million have been mined or whatever because the core idea was to have a finite supply for reason of inflation or whatever. Sycophants will say how good this is because the value with hold steady because it's like "digital gold" but in reality if there's a point where that last bitcoin is mined and there's still a grift to be sold to the poors it's not impossible to see it being rectified so there's more. What that would do to the entire "market" of bitcoin is anyone's guess though. It's fake monopoly money that requires increasingly more waste and process capacity to be wasted on it to simulate a gold mine where as you dig deeper you have to invest more to get those last flakes out of the ground.
There's nothing stopping the chain from being forked, like it was with Bitcoin Cash. Whatever the institutional investors want to happen will happen.
It's a bit more than imaginary money, I would describe it as a clever cryptographic algorithm that can be used as currency. There are other cryptocurrencys that aren't deflationary like Bitcoin.
It is imaginary money built on the idea of a deflationary process. So less "money" is placed into the system.
I was going to answer this question until I realized I wasn't entirely sure either...
We can't just look at the lifetime of electricity consumption and extrapolate into the future?
I actually disagree, if only because to sell or move around your bitcoin involves making new transactions on the blockchain, and therefore emits tremendous amounts of carbon. A bitcoin already owned should be buried in the earth and forgotten, for an inert bitcoin creates no new emissions.
where is the ted kazinsky emoji when you need it.
:a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy: :a-guy:
i hear you usually notice them eating the eyeballs before they get to the brain
New York State is soon going to not renew permits for carbon-producing crypto mining so this plant is probably trying to get all it can done before that.
The ban will only apply to proof-of-work methods, so Etherium will still be fine (even though proof of stake still is useless energy use, but everything in the economy is useless because financialization).
Theoretically building a shit load of solar panels no one can really use remote in a desert and using that for crypto isn't terrible because then maybe people can move to that area later, but of course crypto just piggybacks off using all the extra capacity the bad kinds of energy plants have because why would capitalism ever do something right.
And building solar panels requires a ton of raw materials and space, so it should be reserved for stuff people need to live in the first place.
