This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town

So the electric company is making more money. What is the big deal? If they can keep up with demand then all is good?
 
Christ there are some stupid people here who lack a basic understanding of economics... "whaaaa it's not real, it's not actually valuable, it's not useful"

If we are going to go full retard on the concept of "real" "value" and "usefulness", let's get rid of the video game industry since that doesn't really produce anything useful to the world (100B+ industry), let's get rid of the NFL since that's nothing but people throwing a ball around, or let's go ahead and just nuke Las Vegas since all that gambling and money wasting aren't useful in a traditional sense. I don't understand why Magic the Gathering cards can be worth several thousand dollars but you don't see me whining or complaining we should ban it or hope that industry collapses.

It's 2018 - value and worth of digital assets are a thing, like it or not. Most people here are butthurt they can't buy a luxury item at a reasonable price due to a shortage of GPUs.... that's like me crying online I can't buy a Ferrari because they are too expensive and there aren't a huge amount being produced relative to "normal" cars.

There are countless things in this world I don't give a crap about or understand on a hobby/enjoyment level, but that doesn't mean I go on some crusade to ban them. At the end of the day, the $1 in your wallet is just as powerful as the $1 in a cryptominers wallet. In a free market system you choose what you want to do to maximize your utility.
 
aaronspink said:
Nuclear weapons and the most powerful military on earth vs ephemeral bits in the ether. I know which one I think is real.
Click to expand...
And what value do nukes and a military that couldnt even stabilize a bunch of goat herders in the desert possess? Like seriously I want to hear how this plays out in your mind.
 
NeoNemesis said:
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.
Click to expand...

I thought everywhere did that anyhow. That's how it is here. Even for residential power, which is cheaper than commercial power, you pay more per kWh as you use more. They zone it in like 0-500 500-1000 and 1000+ kWh. For commercial it is even more complex based on total demand, time of day, power factor and a bunch of shit. It is strange that this place wouldn't do that. Maybe they just had so much excess power they didn't have to worry about it. But as you say, there is an easy solution: Just change around the price scale until they are paying enough you are happy with having them around (or they leave).
 
aaronspink said:
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.
Click to expand...

Gold standard hasn't been around for ages... and when you boil it down the US dollar is backed by nothing but words from the government. "backed by nuclear weapons" is your argument? If we take a page from your logic book, I can just shove a gun in your face and tell you one DOGE coin is worth $1 now, and if you challenge me on it, I just pull the trigger and blow your face off as an example that 1 DOGE is actually $1.

Value is subjective, I wouldn't give you a dime for season tickets to whatever popular sports team is out there, but that fact doesn't stop others from paying thousands for such goods.
 
These things are sitting in the middle of nowhere full of expensive GPU's? Can't see what could possibly go wrong?
 
d3athf1sh said:
pretty soon there won't be any coins left to mine... then what?
Click to expand...

Last I read, there was more than 30,000 different coins. That was a couple of weeks ago and there was something like 500 new coins launching each day then. So I would imagine that, even with a 40% fraud rate, there are even more of them now. There is no risk of running out since you can just make up a new one every few seconds.
 
Natchee is for wheelin and that's about it, maybe some deer huntin'. NOT CRYPTO MINING. Get out.
 
DigitalPanhandler said:
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....
Click to expand...
Firstly, I appreciate your service and hope it can get better for you with time. I wish I knew the answer myself, but this youtuber my kids watch apparently pulls in close to a million a year. Absolutely ridiculous, his name is Blippi and apparently was in the Air Force at one time. He just acts goofy as hell, he's actually pretty good and my kids love him.
 
aaronspink said:
Nuclear weapons and the most powerful military on earth vs ephemeral bits in the ether. I know which one I think is real.
Click to expand...

And how does that help Joe Schmo like you and I? I don't remember THE GREAT MILITARY using nuclear weapons during the Great Recession but sure as shit the banks all made a killing while the average idiot like us lost our homes, credit, jobs, 401K's, etc. The banks, the government, the mighty USD did not give two shits about any of us.

You seem to put a lot of faith in a government and a banking system that has summarily been shown that it can't find it's ass with both hands and could care less if you or I were dead or alive.

Oh, and I wouldn't be too proud of the U.S. NuCLeAr aRSEnaL. It seems the U.S. has fallen behind the times a bit. I guess racking up trillions in debt will do that to you.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nukes-silos-20141110-story.html

I doubt you will read it so here is an excerpt:

Now, a 6-foot-high digital translator must be used to convert tones and whistles into signals a computer can read. The computers use 8-inch floppy disks that became obsolete even before the era of personal computers. Spare parts are so hard to find that on occasion they've had to be pulled from military museums.

It's not just the missile launch centers: Each of the U.S. nuclear delivery systems is approaching obsolescence. The Air Force's largest fleet of bombers dates back to the Kennedy administration. The Navy's armada of missile-carrying submarines is nearing the end of its designed life, and the warheads they carry are nearly three decades old, on average.
 
nysmo said:
Man you people really dont understand how value works at all do you. When gold becomes increasingly difficult to mine does that cause its value to plummet or rise?
Click to expand...

Neither since the vast majority of gold has never actually been used for anything and it is the closest thing to a real world pointless and useless cryptocurrency with all the idiocy that entails. OTOH, gold does have actual real world uses but the commodity pricing for gold is as much a ponzi scheme as anything cryptocurrency based.
 
Im just waiting to see what happens when mining becomes less profitable and the market is flooded with thousands of pascal cards. I always wondered how these mega farms source so many GPUs as well.
 
Shadow_Foxx said:
Im just waiting to see what happens when mining becomes less profitable and the market is flooded with thousands of pascal cards. I always wondered how these mega farms source so many GPUs as well.
Click to expand...
they prob reg as a computer business like store and then buy as many as they want and fuck over everyone else.
 
Hey just ask Razor1, he thinks it doesn't use more power then a credit card transaction... lol. It's a giant waste of resources and I hope the government moves ahead with a ban of it. Humanity will destroy itself with greed if we are not careful.
 
Gorankar said:
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.
Click to expand...
Yes we are are arguing about how "real" they are. Because haters.

Good on WA for putting some of that surplus power to use.
 
So much waste, such a shame
The concept of 'if you wasted enough resources you get virtual money' is just outrageous , they product nothing

this must stop
 
Twisted Kidney said:
This is going to collapse entire economies.
Click to expand...
Yes it will, we're just too stupid and selfish to care. The only question is will the governments wise up to the economic and ecologic dangers in time (because I'm sure as hell the people doing it won't).
 
M76 said:
Yes it will, we're just too stupid and selfish to care. The only question is will the governments wise up to the economic and ecologic dangers in time (because I'm sure as hell the people doing it won't).
Click to expand...
It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since our government hasn't wised up to general economy and ecological dangers in almost half a century. I don't see them starting now. So the more it fails to enforce stability, ironically, the more value that brings cryptocurrency, since it's seen as the safer long term option.
 
Cryptos will have value so long a the criminal underground has use for it, and/or people have religious faith that this stuff is the way of the future.

nysmo said:
And what value do nukes and a military that couldnt even stabilize a bunch of goat herders in the desert possess? Like seriously I want to hear how this plays out in your mind.
Click to expand...
Oh it can, the word is 'restraint'. We feel morally obligated to avoid collateral damage at great costs to ourselves.
 
SecretStash said:
Cryptos will have value so long a the criminal underground has use for it, and/or people have religious faith that this stuff is the way of the future.
Click to expand...
They'll have value as long as people pretend that they have value. But it will be a little hard to continue pretending when they realize they can no longer buy groceries because even the farmers got into cryptomining.
 
atarione said:
I did live there at one point.. and probably you don't .. it isn't so great.
Click to expand...

Maybe.. Both my inconsiderate neighbors here are annoying though so maybe not. Definitely wish my servers were there. I could run a long KVM maybe.
 
Nolan7689 said:
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.
Click to expand...

Playing video games is a waste of resources.. and yet people do it all day long and spend alot of power doing it as well....
 
pendragon1 said:
except that the millions of other things are ACTUALLY FUCKING REAL
Click to expand...

Bitcoin and other coins are just as real as electricity and air. You can't really touch it, but it doesn't mean that it's not there.
And according to your logic, my money is not real. I have not used cash in 15 or so years. I pay with my card and cell phone for simply everything. Sweden is a cashless society for those who don't want to use cash.
 
Nebell said:
Bitcoin and other coins are just as real as electricity and air. You can't really touch it, but it doesn't mean that it's not there.
And according to your logic, my money is not real. I have not used cash in 15 or so years. I pay with my card and cell phone for simply everything. Sweden is a cashless society for those who don't want to use cash.
Click to expand...

Umm you can touch electricity and in fact can even see it arc out when you touch it and you touch air everyday, kind of no way to avoid that last one. Bitcoin is worthless to society and truly has no value. Even credit cards and cash only have limited value, if the economic system were to crash dont expect to be buying much with it as no one will want it. Your cash is the main way foreign governments pay each other for goods and they set the values for it. We used to have to back things with assets, now we dont so money truly is worthless and if we run out we just print more lowering it's value but covering our debt. Economics is anything but simple tho.
 
collegeboy69us said:
At the end of the day, the $1 in your wallet is just as powerful as the $1 in a cryptominers wallet. In a free market system you choose what you want to do to maximize your utility.
Click to expand...

You can't have a dollar in a crypto wallet. You go on a diatribe and call others retarded, yet you fail to understand.
 
NeoNemesis said:
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.
Click to expand...
Ask city for multiple power meters? Each building is its own "residence" so... That solution may cost the city more in the long run. The invisible hand finds a way around regulations.
 
Wenatchee national forest is amazing... cannot wait to go back there.. could give two shits about data miners...
 
nysmo said:
Man you people really dont understand how value works at all do you. When gold becomes increasingly difficult to mine does that cause its value to plummet or rise?
Click to expand...

Either is the real answer. For example, gold mining was greatly outpaced by population growth, the pool of labor, and increasing manufacturing efficiencies. So being on the gold standard caused deflationary effects. So gold was abandoned. If there is a market with sufficient cash to compete for the scarce resource exists, they become the consumer of said resource.

Gold is priced out in currency. Given the state of the world, that currency happens to be US dollars. The same is essentially true of crypto. Gold as a market has been manipulated, but it wasn't that easy. Between the lack of regulation, and the market cap of crypto, the trustworthiness of any current valuation in dollars is questionable. Beyond that, if the fixed cap is insufficient to meet market demands, the market it services will change. As a transactional medium to replace currency, given it's minimum divisible unit, it will fail to fill that role over time. Which says to me that you are looking at a short term investment that is essentially gambling on the market movements, or participating in mining to feed said gambling. If you are approaching your investment outside of those avenues, you are likely going to get screwed long term.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top