The U.S government wants to crack down on the ballooning energy consumption of Bitcoin miners.

Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption::The U.S Energy Information Administration is now requiring large-scale cryptomining operations to report their energy consumption. Inevitably this will bring about new regulations that will restrict the energy consumption of miners in the future.

    • metallic_substance@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      Wow. No kidding. I lost a very close friend who got obsessed with the “get rich quick” aspect of crypto, and these losers sound just like he did. Granted, there were a multitude of other reasons I stopped talking to him, but holy fuck

  • filister@lemmy.worldEnglish
    202·
    5 months ago

    Let’s waste 2.7% energy for some virtual asset with purely speculative value while we warm our planet past the 1.5C. All out of greed.

    • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
      843·
      5 months ago

      Seriously. This is so much bullshit. The bigger operations are out in the north west where hydro power is abundant and cheap. I’m sure plenty of others have made moves to run on solar or wind as well. Power costs make or break profitability for a crypto mine.

      Everyone downvoting this has no idea what it takes to mine crypto. If I cared enough about the peanut gallery here I would find one of my spreadsheets from years ago where I calculated the cost of mining versus buying directly. Most of the time for individuals and those wanting to hold it, buying was the best option. The only way these big operations make any money is getting kwh as cheap as possible and taking a fee from those paying them to mine for them.

      Even with commercial rates, you’d have to be a trump size moron to setup shop in and around any city or town full of people.

        • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
          111·
          5 months ago

          That doesn’t apply to mining crypto and the fact that you think it does tells me that you have no idea what is going on here.

          • stembolts@programming.devEnglish
            10·
            5 months ago

            The concept of opportunity cost applies to everything.

            If you think it does not, then I now know the person that should be explaining crypto electric consumption to me is a person who failed to fully grasp the concept of opportunity cost.

            Enlightening… at least…

            • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
              15·
              5 months ago

              Once again you highlight the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about.

              In generalities, yes, it applies to everything. But with crypto in particular, especially POW coins, it doesn’t apply the way you think it does and the fact that you think as much tells me how little you actually understand about the costs to acquire and run POW equipment as well as the risks of spending money to mine coins that end up worthless. It also highlights just how little you understand about crypto algos as a whole.

              I can’t really sum it up here and to explain it in a way that most of the plebs on here would understand would take several paragraphs and I’m not sure I can dumb it down enough.

              If you are capable of doing the math and extrapolations I would suggest that you look into what the hardware for algos behind coins like btc, ltc dash, eth, etc cost and exactly what you would have mined in the early days and just how much you would have sold off just to pay the electricity bills.

              Long story short. Buying into new crypto or mining new coins with existing hardware is taking advantage of opportunities but buying new hardware and expecting to make money off it long term on even commercial rates is going to be more profitable when you wait for the hardware and the coin to mature a bit.

              For POS coins, yes, take a risk and buy in or mine other coins with existing hardware and then swap for the new one when it hits exchanges.

              In closing. You clearly have no idea what the difficulty trend looked like for btc in the early days. If you did you would know that as soon as btc started taking off even the earliest miners were on a losing treadmill to keep up and keep making a profit.

            • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
              110·
              5 months ago

              Tell me you’ve never mined any crypto without telling me that you’ve never mined any crypto.

              I could attempt to explain it but I get the feeling that you wouldn’t understand it.

      • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        31·
        5 months ago

        You are talking like if this was creating any real value. Replace “mining crypto” with “wasting” in these.

          • riodoro1@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            5 months ago

            Fuck. You can !?

            I’ve been turning off my stove every time i used a hair dryer for nothing?

        • SeaJ@lemm.eeEnglish
          5·
          5 months ago

          I don’t think you understand how electricity works. Like at all. Do you think things max out at using 1 kWh? Why 1kWh and not simply 1 Wh? Or why could they not use 1 MWh? Should I inform the power company that they are clearly billing me wrong since they claim I use over 8760 kWh per year?

          Instead you should be surprised that they are consuming so much goddamn power for something that has little use.

        • Thorny_Insight@lemm.eeEnglish
          4·
          5 months ago

          …what? Are you implying there aren’t enough hours in a year to use up that much energy? That doesn’t make any sense. What do you imagine is the maximum amount of energy a single person can use then?