But the money that comes from the usage provides income for investment in maintenance and capital investment in increased capacity. Including investment in cheaper, cleaner energy.
Discussion
Except thatās not how utilities budget or build their infrastructure. If heavy usage is in a location that was built for typical residential use, then the income from that usage doesnāt afford the utility the ability to upgrade the potentially hundreds of miles of transmission lines that brought the electricity to that spot. The electrical usage needs to be in the proper PLACE in the network, not all locations are built equally. Thatās why there are wooden poles with one wire some spots, others with three, others larger and steel with 3 thicker wires, others with 6 thicker wires. Electrical transmission is both complicated and expensive business, one that is hardly ready or designed for bitcoin.
Then the utilities are under-charging for electricity.
I donāt think you understand my point, it isnāt about the price of electricity, itās about how electricity is transmitted to the end use point.
If everyone runs a miner at their residential address, that does an end around on the price of transmission lines. Typically heavy electrical users must pay for a transmission line that is adequate for their use case.
I am getting it. But my point is if miners are over-taxing transmission lines, then that's on the utility to address with fees and rules.
They already have the rules. which is why miners are not the same as every other user, they are a high electric user customers. And there are rules about where those customers are allowed to be located(mostly āindustrialā areas), how much they will pay, etc.
Income that otherwise wouldnāt be there. Price should play a major role in self regulation of the system.
Bitcoin miners need very cheap prices to be profitable (I heard something like approx 5 cents/kWh).
The unused and stranded energy makes it possible.
They can also sell there services to turn a profit, like grid stabilization or selling or using the heat from the miners.
Iād side with #[2]ā here. And Iām not saying any government should actually dictate how much energy bitcoin miners consume. The real point is that lots of energy has been used for bitcoin mining and so that process is not at all efficient.
Letās pretend we all stopped eating food, heating/cooling our buildings, watching sports, browsing social media, lighting our spaces, buying & building stuff, and going places. And we did that to the point that the only energy consumption was for mining bitcoin. Seems to me that world would be exactly the opposite of what we want for humanity.
New technologies should be reducing the carbon footprint, not increasing it. We need to find a way to increase the efficiency.
I appreciate your support, but Iām going to push back on your statement that we need to find a way to increase miners efficiency.
Thatās not at all the answer.
The answer is that mining bitcoin should happen where it is appropriate to do so when considering all externalities. A great example is Bitmainās mining location at what was once the worlds largest aluminum smelter. An energy intensive facility designed with a co-located power plant repurposed for bitcoin mining.
Humanity itself is energy intensive. The more we grow, the more energy intensive we become.
We need to stop bickering and fighting over this fact, and embrace its realities.
Carbon neutrality is a red herring. Energy efficiency is simply a way to use old infrastructure to support more electrical usage.
My only real point in this long discussion is that all electrical use is not equal, and there are specific infrastructure demands that high electrical usage creates. If everyone in the country added a home miner to their house, most likely circuits would trip all around.
Where I would agree with your statement regarding efficiency, is with the electrical grid on a whole. That is the real discussion to be had. Electrical infrastructure around the world is both fragile and inefficient.
Bitcoiners need to stand with electrical utilities to embrace nuclear energy, transmission lines, and updated circuits to embrace the next 100years of energy intensive activists we are embarking upon.
Thanks for the reply.
Can we fix old infrastructure by retrofitting sub-systems in it?
Can we also build new infrastructure?
Can we consider improving bitcoin mining efficiency?
I say non of these are mutually exclusive, right?
Yes is the answer to all except Bitcoin mining. I would argue that bitcoin mining efficiency is constantly improving, but it doesnāt matter, because the difficulty adjustment prevents those efficiencies from earning more bitcoin.
There is no way to prevent the inefficiencies of human competition from spoiling those gains.
Ie- the only viable solutions are improving the efficiency of electrical generation and transmission.
You completely missed the point of bitcoin mining. The energy expenditure is the main factor that keeps the network secure.
ASICS get more efficient all the time and hashrate keeps going up because of it, but the thing that should be looked at is energy expenditure. That's the real cost of network security.
So, if someone could figure out some big leap that reduced the energy expenditure, then that could reduce network security?
Efficiency improvements have been happening the whole time and energy expenditure isn't going down.
Why do you think that is?
Asking this question reveals the lack of understanding about the topic.
If somebody invented an ASIC that is so powerful that just one machine replaces the entire current hashrate, what do you think will happen?
Will everybody except that one guy with that one ASIC just stop mining and leave OR will they try to get a few of those as well?
The limiting factor, in todays world, is energy.
This person gets it. And that energy is Electricity in particular. And electrical power works within parameters of current, voltage, and resistance, within conductors for transmission like copper or aluminum. These create physical restraints to delivering electricity to where itās needed, further expanding the limitations of todays world for bitcoin mining.