This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town

Megalith

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Back in 2013, Washington state’s East Wenatchee became the target of prospective bitcoin miners thanks to its hydroelectric dams, which allowed for the nation’s cheapest electricity. Now, many years later, the area is home to countless operations, and the power being used is nothing short of astounding.

The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.
 
If this is bothering the city there's a pretty easy solution: Just make rates tiered. Charge $50 for the first mWh, $200 for the second, $500 for the third and so on so forth (just making up the tiers to demonstrate). Make it unprofitable for the miners and they'll be gone inside the week.

Not sure what the problem is here.
 
certainly what I'm about to state, is my lack of understanding....and paranoia

what if, all this bullshit cryptomining stuff, is just false.... ok so I'm not exactly sure how to clearly state what I'm saying, ill try to just interpret it...


what if, they are just giving you false coins, ok not false, I mean, surely your making money, but what if the true use / cause of all this, is simply to brute force crack passwords, or attack websites and so on and so forth....... but they are hiding it behind "hey heres a coin!!! heres false money till you cash out, oh and don't use certain wallets or you will lose said money!!"

k that's just me, I tried it for about 3 days, gave up cause I couldn't be sure and certainly didn't fully understand what was going on beside "hey heres what you've earned!" I dunno I think I had maybe 0.08 or 0.12 ETH or some shit,

I have short term/long term memory loss.... ptsd.... been blown up 3 times in Afghanistan.... disabled veteran.... enjoy sitting at home every day but have isssues with work, remembering, and so forth, so I sit at home living off my lil income, trying to figure a way to make some money elsewhere....


my mouth is clearly to improper to do videos/streams, people may not like what I have to say, my understanding, my sadisitic thoughts, and so forth, this has now divulged a bit farther then I wanted to state, so the end...

edit: so clearly wanted ot point out, have issues getting my thoughts across properly, and I'm not a n00b to hardware, been following this sites and many that don't exist anymore, since prob Celeron 300 days, and certainly had some older hardware too, 386sx25, Pentium pro200, and had my certified pc technician certificate since I was 7, when the school decided to fire their IT tech and had 3 students go get the certificate so we could fix their ,MAJORLY antiquidated equipment (I mean I was running a k62-450 @ 500mhz, and the schools were still using EDO ram and socket 7's and shit...the stuff with the turbo button lulz) (not complaining, got me out of class so I could just hide under a desk pretending to fix a computer when I immediately knew what was wrong)


not sure why I felt like listing said credentials / info above, not that it means anything.. but there ya go
 
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Are these huge operations sustainable if/when transaction fees supplant mining profits as the primary source of profit for miners? I do not totally understand how txn fees work, so my follow up if that were true is wouldn't high transaction fees make it cost prohibitive to send/receive bitcoin? (I.e., use it?)
 
If all this power was being used to produce something tangible and immediately useful I would understand, but this . . . it's lunacy.
Money is tangible and immediately useful.
It does seem a bit insane, I'll admit that, but there is profit in it.
Where there is opportunity to profit, there are people looking to exploit that opportunity.
 
That's a good article.

The story misses out on all the foul play, pump and dumps, front coins, and DDoS attacks on rival pools. It would make good TV, honestly.
 
Money is tangible and immediately useful.
It does seem a bit insane, I'll admit that, but there is profit in it.
Where there is opportunity to profit, there are people looking to exploit that opportunity.
Tangible, noun, perceptible by touch. Coins are not tangible. They have value but only by those willing to pay, same as anything else. To me they have utterly no value and are a waste of resources.

Coins are like a digital version of Pogs.
 
Wouldn't be surprised to see some of this in Texas. They often have more wind power then they can use. Read something a while back that the wind farms were sometimes paying customers to use power. Something like a cent per kw/h because they got 2 cents in subsidies for power delivered.

Kind of sad that a lot of the energy efficiency savings of the last decade are being undone in the pursuit of made up pseudo currency.
 
Tangible, noun, perceptible by touch. Coins are not tangible. They have value but only by those willing to pay, same as anything else. To me they have utterly no value and are a waste of resources.

Coins are like a digital version of Pogs.
He said money is tangible.

Besides, refuting coins are tangible via pedantism, and then likening coins to Pogs -- a tangible. Dude.
 
pretty soon there won't be any coins left to mine... then what?

Then?

0d98c8edfa10b1c3e57145be8728c567efdf9f4cdb2b68a3dcaf57b8ee2e6095.jpg
 
Solar is the next be thing. Setup your own solar farm in Arizona. :)
 
If this is bothering the city there's a pretty easy solution: Just make rates tiered. Charge $50 for the first mWh, $200 for the second, $500 for the third and so on so forth (just making up the tiers to demonstrate). Make it unprofitable for the miners and they'll be gone inside the week.

The problem with doing that is that it would drive out other big users of electricity that actually produce value and jobs. Industrial operations, data centers, etc.

The figures in this article are just insanity. I hope it all crashes and burns or switches over to algorithms that don't just ramp up the difficulty. And it better do it soon.

Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes.

mining has now reached the stage where the minimum size for a new commercial mine, given the high levels of difficulty, will soon be 50 megawatts, enough for around 22,000 homes and bigger than one of Amazon Web Services’ immense data centers
 
Be as outraged as you like, but it doesn't really matter who uses the power, it's going to get used somehow in the name of short-term monetary gain. It's a race to the bottom, plain and simple.
 
certainly what I'm about to state, is my lack of understanding....and paranoia

what if, all this bullshit cryptomining stuff, is just false.... ok so I'm not exactly sure how to clearly state what I'm saying, ill try to just interpret it...


what if, they are just giving you false coins, ok not false, I mean, surely your making money, but what if the true use / cause of all this, is simply to brute force crack passwords, or attack websites and so on and so forth....... but they are hiding it behind "hey heres a coin!!! heres false money till you cash out, oh and don't use certain wallets or you will lose said money!!"

k that's just me, I tried it for about 3 days, gave up cause I couldn't be sure and certainly didn't fully understand what was going on beside "hey heres what you've earned!" I dunno I think I had maybe 0.08 or 0.12 ETH or some shit,

I have short term/long term memory loss.... ptsd.... been blown up 3 times in Afghanistan.... disabled veteran.... enjoy sitting at home every day but have isssues with work, remembering, and so forth, so I sit at home living off my lil income, trying to figure a way to make some money elsewhere....


my mouth is clearly to improper to do videos/streams, people may not like what I have to say, my understanding, my sadisitic thoughts, and so forth, this has now divulged a bit farther then I wanted to state, so the end...

edit: so clearly wanted ot point out, have issues getting my thoughts across properly, and I'm not a n00b to hardware, been following this sites and many that don't exist anymore, since prob Celeron 300 days, and certainly had some older hardware too, 386sx25, Pentium pro200, and had my certified pc technician certificate since I was 7, when the school decided to fire their IT tech and had 3 students go get the certificate so we could fix their ,MAJORLY antiquidated equipment (I mean I was running a k62-450 @ 500mhz, and the schools were still using EDO ram and socket 7's and shit...the stuff with the turbo button lulz) (not complaining, got me out of class so I could just hide under a desk pretending to fix a computer when I immediately knew what was wrong)


not sure why I felt like listing said credentials / info above, not that it means anything.. but there ya go

I think I understand what you’re trying to get across. Yeah, that’s an interesting scenario...

(Thanks for your service. I hope you’re able to continue your recovery efforts. It’s a long hard road, but well worth it. Not saying I know what it’s like to be in your shoes...)
 
If all this power was being used to produce something tangible and immediately useful I would understand, but this . . . it's lunacy.

I've long said that I'd like to see the computing power not used for solving complex puzzles (as well as the Tx verification) but rather for scientific research and such. Where you'd put up something you need to compute to the mining cloud and it'd get computed (along with transactions being processed), each member getting a "coin" for their computational contribution, and that coin would be funded by the person who put the work into the cloud.
 
Bitcoin mining is simply another form of business. One can use electricity, mine coins, and sell them to others for profit. If I have a factory that makes something like Legos, Marvel action figures, or Nvidia GPUs I'm going to use electricity, make widgets, and sell to others for profit.

Nobody needs any of these things but nobody gets upset about Legos right? Legos are probably a worse drain on our overall economic/environmental system due to what all is involved in the raw material gathering and manufacturing of plastics, not to mention that these likely end up in a landfill at one point or another.

Setting up any type of special electricity costing structure for bitcoin mining is silly when you consider that it's really no different than the millions of pounds of other crap that we produce, consume, and toss aside every single day. Do we also start looking at what other businesses make and decide how much they pay for electricity based on what we feel the value or societal necessity is for their end product?

Our communal selective outrage about cryptocurrencies is kind of laughable when it's put in perspective.
 
I don't get it.. I really don't but that said what fuck ever. Some company dig a big fucking pit in the Earth making it an ecological disaster all to get some rubble which there may be 1 part in 10million of what they want all to become rich, then I'm not going to think any differently about crypto miners doing the same thing. If you want to outlaw crypto mining due to how "wasteful" the power is, then get rid of all these mines, clear cut forest operation, mega-ranches, etc. as well too.
 
Bitcoin mining is simply another form of business. One can use electricity, mine coins, and sell them to others for profit. If I have a factory that makes something like Legos, Marvel action figures, or Nvidia GPUs I'm going to use electricity, make widgets, and sell to others for profit.

Nobody needs any of these things but nobody gets upset about Legos right? Legos are probably a worse drain on our overall economic/environmental system due to what all is involved in the raw material gathering and manufacturing of plastics, not to mention that these likely end up in a landfill at one point or another.

Setting up any type of special electricity costing structure for bitcoin mining is silly when you consider that it's really no different than the millions of pounds of other crap that we produce, consume, and toss aside every single day. Do we also start looking at what other businesses make and decide how much they pay for electricity based on what we feel the value or societal necessity is for their end product?

Our communal selective outrage about cryptocurrencies is kind of laughable when it's put in perspective.

except that the millions of other things are ACTUALLY FUCKING REAL
 
Money is tangible and immediately useful.
It does seem a bit insane, I'll admit that, but there is profit in it.
Where there is opportunity to profit, there are people looking to exploit that opportunity.


Cryptocurrencies aren't money. Aren't commodities. Aren't securities. They are hopes and prayers of a ponzi scheme run wild.
 
except that the millions of other things are ACTUALLY FUCKING REAL

Cryptocurrencies are as real as the money that sits in your bank account. The bank is not holding the money you deposited for you, they are only holding the digital value of that money which likely came from a direct deposit from your employer for work that you did (or didn't) do. You then go to the store and whip out your debit card and buy your ramen noodles or whatever. You never see the actual cash. Is it real? Is your labor that generated all the digital money real?

You work to buy the things you want. People mine cryptocurrencies to buy the things they want. It's the same.

We are all communicating on this amazing thing called the internet and we spend time and electricity typing our opinions back and forth. Is it real? Are we actually creating something? A lot of energy goes into endless debates back and forth all over the world everyday. Does it have value? Someday this forum will cease to exist and all the hours of labor and cost will go with it. Was it ever really real?

The companies that make all those millions of other things don't keep the things they make. They of course sell them for dollars to buy things they want and round and round it goes.

I can take a Bitcoin that I mined with the investment that I made and the expenses that I paid and turn that into dollars. That's pretty fucking real to a lot of people.
 
Disgusting is among the choice words I have. Hopefully bitcoin and all other crypto currencies crash and burn. And all the people lose their shirt over it.
 
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Cryptocurrencies are as real as the money that sits in your bank account.

Complete and unmitigated BS. The Bank is backed by the Fed who is backed by the USG who is backed by bloody nuclear weapons. Cryptocoins are backed by nothing, nada, nix. They are ephemeral bursts of pure nothingness in the void who's only notice is the massive waste of power they cause.

Anyone comparing current cryptocoins to modern currencies, commodities or securities is full of it.
 
Cryptocurrencies are as real as the money that sits in your bank account. The bank is not holding the money you deposited for you, they are only holding the digital value of that money which likely came from a direct deposit from your employer for work that you did (or didn't) do. You then go to the store and whip out your debit card and buy your ramen noodles or whatever. You never see the actual cash. Is it real? Is your labor that generated all the digital money real?

You work to buy the things you want. People mine cryptocurrencies to buy the things they want. It's the same.

We are all communicating on this amazing thing called the internet and we spend time and electricity typing our opinions back and forth. Is it real? Are we actually creating something? A lot of energy goes into endless debates back and forth all over the world everyday. Does it have value? Someday this forum will cease to exist and all the hours of labor and cost will go with it. Was it ever really real?

The companies that make all those millions of other things don't keep the things they make. They of course sell them for dollars to buy things they want and round and round it goes.

I can take a Bitcoin that I mined with the investment that I made and the expenses that I paid and turn that into dollars. That's pretty fucking real to a lot of people.
I deal in cash, thanks. but yes your labour is a real thing and the money you earn for it is real, crypto-mining is NOT the same thing. running imaginary numbers for imaginary purposes for imaginary "coins".
 
Complete and unmitigated BS. The Bank is backed by the Fed who is backed by the USG who is backed by bloody nuclear weapons. Cryptocoins are backed by nothing, nada, nix. They are ephemeral bursts of pure nothingness in the void who's only notice is the massive waste of power they cause.

Anyone comparing current cryptocoins to modern currencies, commodities or securities is full of it.

Lol. There is approximately $1.56 trillion in Federal Reserve notes currently in circulation. There is approximately 10.6 trillion on deposit in U.S. banks. What happens when there is a run on the banks such as what happened in Greece in 2007-2008? There's no cash to be had. Look up on Wikipedia how many bank runs there have been since 1920. There's not enough cash in the system to pay 10% of what's on deposit in the banks.

Oh wait, but there's insurance! FDIC will jump in if it all goes to shit right? Oh wait, they have about 25 billion "set aside" for just such a problem. Or do they? Hmmm...it seems that there are no laws binding the US government to make good on any FDIC liabilities. It seems they are "backed by the full faith and credit of the US government", the same one who hasn't had a balanced budget in a decade and is more than $20 trillion in debt.

If you want to trust your money to the system go ahead, but please be sure to understand that when things all go to shit the USD safety net isn't all the real either.

It seems that I've led us off topic a bit. My apologies.
 
I'm guessing these people are the ones hoarding all the GPU supplies?
 
Cryptocurrencies aren't money. Aren't commodities. Aren't securities. They are hopes and prayers of a ponzi scheme run wild.
You are not wrong, but a lot of people have, and are still making a lot of money mining, speculating, and running cryptocurrency exchanges. That is a simple fact. What it is not to some people is sort of meaningless. The money it has made people is afaic.

Not saying it's you in particular, but there seems to be a lot of crypto hate in this thread. I dislike what it has done to the price of a video card, but otherwise view it like any other effective and legal money making scheme I have seen b4. Just a little jealous I did not get in on the action in time, or was unwilling to take the risk, and thus did not make a killing like so many others have. So outside of jealousy and the cost of a vid card being a bit high, I am not really getting the hate.
 
Lol. There is approximately $1.56 trillion in Federal Reserve notes currently in circulation. There is approximately 10.6 trillion on deposit in U.S. banks. What happens when there is a run on the banks such as what happened in Greece in 2007-2008? There's no cash to be had. Look up on Wikipedia how many bank runs there have been since 1920. There's not enough cash in the system to pay 10% of what's on deposit in the banks.

Oh wait, but there's insurance! FDIC will jump in if it all goes to shit right? Oh wait, they have about 25 billion "set aside" for just such a problem. Or do they? Hmmm...it seems that there are no laws binding the US government to make good on any FDIC liabilities. It seems they are "backed by the full faith and credit of the US government", the same one who hasn't had a balanced budget in a decade and is more than $20 trillion in debt.

If you want to trust your money to the system go ahead, but please be sure to understand that when things all go to shit the USD safety net isn't all the real either.

It seems that I've led us off topic a bit. My apologies.

Nuclear weapons and the most powerful military on earth vs ephemeral bits in the ether. I know which one I think is real.
 
Are we really arguing about how "real" cryptocurrencies are? They are as real as people think they are. Enough people seem to accept that they are real enough to have value that they do in fact have value. Which makes the arguments that they are somehow "not real", seem sort of silly. It is pretty obvious they are real enough despite just being 1's and 0's.
 
what if, they are just giving you false coins, ok not false, I mean, surely your making money, but what if the true use / cause of all this, is simply to brute force crack passwords, or attack websites and so on and so forth....... but they are hiding it behind "hey heres a coin!!! heres false money till you cash out, oh and don't use certain wallets or you will lose said money!!"

That's a great question! Since blockchain generation is coupled both forward and backward you can't really use it for bruteforcing a different set of hashed data. However, lazy users might install some nasty miner, configure a pool/stratum which is handing out nonce work for a second project, but the client software would have to be heavily modified, and at that point, the fault is on you for using it. Official clients just wouldn't work that way.

As an aside, Bitcoin hardware can't do this at all. There's a good explanation of why it doesn't work here: https://rya.nc/asic-cracking.html

I can't find a good reference for discussion of malware mining clients abusing Stratum pools, but I'm sure it's happened at some point.
 
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