I need to get into the business of being paid to not mine crypto. Sounds lucrative, and I have the skillset already.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
359 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59091 readers
4457 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Here I am, not mining crypto for free, like some sucker!
if you're good at something, never do it for free
Catch-2022:
The government paid him well for every coin of crypto he did not mine. The more crypto he did not mine, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new GPUs to increase the amount of crypto he did not mine. Major Major's father worked without rest at not mining crypto.
Sounds like our Agriculture industry. The people that unironically cry socialism when kids get free school lunch and shit...
That’s actually the joke. The book Catch-22 has a story about Major Major ( rank, name) whose father scammed the government for corn subsidies by not farming.
Good book, I would recommend it!
One of my absolute favorites. "Help the bombardier!"
That's a sweet gig, if you can get it. I heard you have to now show you can grow but choose not to.
I would totally read that book.
At first glance, this makes zero sense, but once you dig in and read the details, it makes even less sense
I especially like the part where they say encouraging crypto mining will somehow create power grid innovations. What?
Either you innovate or you pay that company $32M every summer forever
I'm pretty sure their goal is the latter based on the other part of the article which says they can act like padding.
Not in Texas, at least. Our government here is in the habit of actively making everything worse, not better.
Trickle down grid, food, climate, whatever just fucking gimmie peasant. /s
That has the same energy as someone claiming they drive better tipsy than sober
pro tip, be born with a parent who runs a large power grid who can buy your debts
Makes sense to me, just sounds like the crypto company is holding the state's power grid hostage
Who has the keys to free the hostage? ERCOT or the Crypto Mine?
Don't blame the Crypto Mine for the decisions of the State or ERCOT.
TVA doesn't give energy credits. They give you a thirty minute notice that your ¢/kwh is about to quadruple.
It makes sense if it's the renewable energy companies using cryptocurrency mining to keep solar and wind energy from going to waste. It makes zero fucking sense when natural gas is still a major part of your energy supply. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix note the complete lack of a logical sorting on the page.
Even if all you have is wind and solar, you can still turn it into baseload power by pumping water up behind dams, storing it in battery grids, or turning it into green hydrogen via electrolysis. Hell, you could even use it to heat up salts until they turn into a molten salt, which can be used for about 12 hours, going off of solar towers with molten salt generators...
Good point, OP is right then, makes no fucking sense.
Even if that's their strategy you're not guaranteed a return when mining. If you or your cluster don't mine the block all of that energy was absolutely wasted. If we didn't have a shitty ass isolated grid we could just sell the energy to another part of the country.
You know what they say, whenever the stars are over Texas....
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/jg53WYCPCjI?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
ERCOT is issuing power shortage warnings across Texas claiming they are due to "low performance of solar and wind technologies". Absolute fucking liars. It's sunny as fuck and also windy as fuck in Texas lately. If they are so "low performance", why does ERCOT continue to heavily invest in them? Goddamn, conservatives are vile, sub-human pieces of shit.
ERCOT is lying to artificially inflate pricing and increase profits. Governor Abbot has received millions of dollars from them (that we know of), so the lies are effectively state sanctioned.
Fuck Abbot and fuck ERCOT. They are a cancer upon Texas.
There is no such thing as a "good conservative". No. Such. Thing.
I don't know about this specific case but it's a common practice to have big consumers be on specific agreements with national grid so they can be shut off on demand to ensure the grid integrity. The companies are compensated for the inconvenience in exchange for their flexibility. Usually it's with heavy industries like metal, paper and glass manufacturers.
My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.
The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it's "wasted" otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.
The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn't care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It's not that big a deal.
I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it's opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.
Yep. Architected a bunch of software to measure baselines, prove or disprove responses to demands within requested periods etc.
You don't want giant arc furnaces running full tilt in the midst of an energy crunch. It's enough compensation to cover NOT producing anything that day which the ratepayers pay for but also benefit from.
Everything had to work sub-second round-trip, fun stuff, egomaniacal boss.
Shut down the big mines
Maybe if Texas shutdown those miners, their power grid wouldn't be so strained all the time.
Maybe if they didn't have a power grid that was cut off from the rest of the country that wouldn't be a problem. Maybe their citizens wouldn't freeze to death when there's a little snow.
People are still mining bitcoin? Lmao
People will always be mining. The cheaper the value, the less miners meaning more coins to sell. It won't ever fully die.
