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Access to cheap electricity can make or break a cryptocurrency mining operation, and firms angling to strike it rich in an industry where delays can and will cost digital money will do just about anything to get it, as soon as they can.
The latest move in the quest for bargain-basement kilowatt hours, as quickly as possible: building out local power grids with bespoke electrical substations.
Canadian company DMG Blockchain is building what it hopes will be a fully-functioning substation near the Southern British Columbia town of Castlegar, which is electrified by hydro power. When I spoke to Steven Eliscu, who leads corporate development for DMG, over the phone, he told me that building the substation costs millions of dollars and required the company to build its own access road to haul equipment to the site. The goal: to plug it into the local grid and have it power DMG's expanded mining operations by September.
"At the end of August we'll go through a commissioning process where the utility will test everything as a completed substation and make sure that the town doesn't blow up when we flip the switch," Eliscu told me over the phone.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Friday August 03 2018, @11:20PM (7 children)
They are building a substation. I thought if a factory comes to town, the factory is responsible for constructing their own substation. Lots of caveats apply, but if we are treating miners as industrial sites this sounds quite normal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @12:11AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:07AM (3 children)
-sumption.
There's not a whole lot you can do about BitCoin itself other than to not use it.
Some cryptos use proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work to reward miners. Under PoS you are rewarded based on how many coins you already possess, but there's a rotation so once you've been rewarded you are ineligible until the rotation comes back around to you. There's more to it - I don't fully understand PoS.
Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, is developing a Proof-of-Storage based cryptocurrency. To mine Cohen's coin requires lots of disk space, but storage is absurdly cheap these days. Given that Cohen is well-known as well-funded I expect his P-o-Storage coin to succeed, so I plan to mine it myself.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:04PM (2 children)
I liked how IOTA works. They have something called the tangle and you verify other transactions in order to get your transactions verified. So the more transactions you need verified the more transactions you must verify for others. This makes good sense as you contribute back to the network based on how much you benefit from it.
One thing they need to work on that never gets addressed is the insane volatility. It's hard for me to put my car on craigslist for one crypto coin if the value of one coin could double or drop by 50 percent in one week.
Perhaps they can create a system that can somehow stabilize the value of crypto. I'm not sure how it would work but maybe it can somehow put a tax on crypto coins if the value falls too fast to reduce the number of coins in supply and issue free coins if the value rises too fast. The tax could go to like a centralized ledger account and the coins being issued could come from that account. They would have to figure out who to issue new coins to, perhaps individual accounts can request them from the ledger account and if the ledger account sees that prices are going up too fast it can randomly issue free coins to requesters. Those getting taxed should be those selling coins during times that the price is falling too fast so that they have disincentive to sell during those times.
If there is a system in place to increase the number of crypto coins in supply they should create one to also reduce the number of crypto coins in supply and a way to manage it so that they can stabilize its value.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)
What at first was known as Qualitative Investment went on to transmogriphy into Sub-Millisecond Precision High Speed Trading.
That'w why we really _did_ need to Occupy Wall Street.
That such algorithmic... uh... "investment" robs the to poor to give to the rich has often resulted in calls for a punitive, very short-term Capital Gains Tax but these proposals never found purchase in our Congress' soil.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:57PM
I think congress getting involved is a stupid idea. If I'm a good trader or investor and our stupid society won't otherwise give me a decent opportunity why not make some money trading? You have just as much opportunity as I do and today the retail investor has pretty much all the same tools from technical indicators to access to all the fundamentals of various companies. If I know how to use these tools to invest wisely why should the government get in my way and tell me no?
People complain that big corporations make all this money at the expense of their employees and customers. Some of that is true. Invest in these big corporations, become an owner, and use some of that money to fix some of our social problems. Invest in them and use your stake in these companies to make company votes that relate to how these companies operate. These same companies that no one likes are publicly traded. Participate in the process. If you're so smart invest wisely and become a successful investor.
You can do what I do. I use moving averages with standard deviations (bollinger bands) and regression analysis with standard deviations over relatively long term charts (ie: one day / one year charts but I also look at the shorter term charts as well). There is also moving averages with the average true range (Keltner channels - I don't really use these). Your trading software has all sorts of technical indicators that are useful. Most trading software comes with linear regression lines but with a little scripting or a little excel manipulating you can create more sophisticated curves with sample standard deviation bands such as polynomial or exponential curves and you can get higher R^2 values (but higher doesn't always mean better so you need to know what you are doing).
If you aren't a good trader/investor don't expect congress to fix that for you. It's your own fault. If you don't know what you are doing and want to complain about losing money to someone that does then don't invest/trade. You have no one to blame but yourself.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:56PM (1 child)
Citation needed.
I'm actually kinda curious about if it takes more energy to mine a bitcoin than it takes to mine a bitcoin worth of gold. Sources would be greatly appreciated.
(Also - I must admit I don't know if any currencies currently are tied to gold, but considering it has a long tradition of being the "oh, we _REALLY_ fucked up"-fallback I'm guessing it will keep rotating in now and then)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:18PM
The cyber money is a very smart idea. But you can't decorate your apartment -- or your woman -- with it!!!
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 03 2018, @11:33PM
It's dead-simple to catch metre-long salmon there.
But my true reason for bringing up Labrador is that there is a _huge_ hydroelectric dam there.
Also plentiful ambient cooling, as Labrador is North-East of Quebec.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sonamchauhan on Friday August 03 2018, @11:44PM (1 child)
Useless, useless, useless.
If an adversary of humanity wanted us to waste money, time, effort; burn fossil fuels and waste renewable energy chasing our own mathematical tails, right up till the heat death of the universe, they would have us do what we are doing now mining Bitcoin and friends.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:52AM
I'd be glad that the adversary choose such a poor way to harm humanity. But let's keep it quiet. Don't want the aliens to know that we want to be thrown into that bitcoin patch!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Gaaark on Friday August 03 2018, @11:58PM
i see residentials are charged at a certain rate up to a certain usage, then they are charged more: just charge these guys the same thing but just keep raising the rates for how much they use. At a certain point, they will reach a break even/loss rate and will have to stop or lose money.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 04 2018, @12:04AM (14 children)
Wyoming and Western Nebraska have some very attractive wind-farming profiles, but the problem is getting the power out of West nowhere into the hands of people who will pay decent money for it, without having to pay every municipality and utility between the wind and the power users, almost like the old (really old) Silk road problem with bandits along the route, but these bandits are elected by the local townspeople and have tax collectors backed up by local law enforcement.
However, if you could start a big wind farm in the middle of nowhere and get the value out via cryptocurrency.... Still gotta contend with the NIMBY turbine haters, and other local problems not too dissimilar from what happened to these folks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram [wikipedia.org] but the problem of value transfer is much easier in crypto than it is in kilowatt hours.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:59AM (13 children)
Just don't solve things with biological weapon attacks. I have a suspicion that one can blend some windmills into a rural society much better than a religious cult bent on taking over the place.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:17PM (12 children)
Oh, the Rajneeshees were seriously messed up, not just with their salmonella spreading - there is a series on Netflix that starts out by painting a sympathetic picture for them, but by the time it's over there's no way to make them out as total victims - they fought back as if they were cornered in a life and death struggle during wartime, while also playing every legal angle they could find.
Still, if you roll into West nowhere with $50M and start putting up wind turbines, the locals are going to do what they can to either try to stop you or gouge their share of whatever they can get from your deep pockets. The thing about doing it with crypto value extraction is that there's a much smaller group of people who can mess with your value extraction chain... there's the whole worldwide uncertainty about crypto regulation, but that's a risk you've already signed on for.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 05 2018, @12:55AM (11 children)
It's not rocket science. Roll into several places and stay in the places that don't try to extort from you, dump the rest.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 06 2018, @09:57PM (10 children)
Easily said. Now, you go from town to town in the dust bowl and see if you can find any that don't try to extort from you. Bear in mind, they're not all stupid enough to be up front about it. The more clever will paint a rosy picture up front and then try to gouge you after you've invested significant sums in setting up the operation.
They don't even have to be pre-meditated about it, they might actually genuinely want to help you get started to help local business, jobs, etc., but... once you've got $50M sunk in one local area, rules can be changed, laws can be passed, and if the townspeople are hungry enough, they will eat you until you bleed red ink and are forced to leave - hurting themselves in the end, but that's what homo sapiens seems to be good at.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:25AM
Finally, for all the talk, it's just not that much of a problem now. Businesses have the small town/county angle figured out already.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @12:33AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:36AM (7 children)
Maybe. If you can keep the issues at a state, or preferably federally protected level and pre-establish some protection for your operations with the courts of jurisdiction, then you've got one of those operations that is protected from local looting. If you're at the mercy of a country court....
With wind power, once the concrete footers start pouring, you've got pretty high investment in the site - the towers and turbines aren't cheap to move, and there is always significant up front investment in site selection and prep.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 07 2018, @01:39PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 07 2018, @05:47PM (5 children)
T. Boone Pickens has got it covered, because he's bigger than the local municipalities.
If you're trying to start an enterprise that doesn't outweigh the tax base of the entire county by a factor of 100, you'll be having more trouble with the yokels, not to mention Mr. Pickens himself.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:02AM (4 children)
There's a lot of businesses (mines, stores, etc) in the US West that are way smaller than T. Boone Pickens and they have it figured out too.
What is the point of your posts anyway? Sure, there's no place in the world that is perfect. But there are plenty of dirt cheap places for generating power for cryptocurrency mining that won't give you a lot of grief (because they don't give any of their other businesses that grief either).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 08 2018, @12:32PM (3 children)
Straight up sour grapes: the benefits (minus the drawbacks) of electrical generation via wind turbine are completely swamped by external factors involving politics, payoffs and untenable competition with out-sized players in the market. Our economic incentive systems care not for the health of future generations, only for the lining of pockets in the short term.
I've got a particularly sore spot over wind power in the midwest, having looked into starting a wind farm in western Nebraska the ~2005 time frame, found the spinning fees, insurance and other factors distasteful, and to top it off, the primary land ownership costs (while nearly trivial in the greater scheme) turned into a 1000x better investment when ethanol was mandated as a component of domestic gasoline: land that was trading for $500 per acre before that shot up to $2500-3000 per acre within less than a year. So: yet again, smart money isn't working out business deals to deliver things people need in an efficient or environmentally sensitive manner, smart money has an ear to the ground in D.C. and front-runs the legislation to get 600% ROI in 6 months or less.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:07AM (2 children)
Ah, so not much of a reason then.
Doesn't sound like it from the story you wrote.
In other words, wind power was a terrible investment in the 2005 timeframe and you were right to stay away. I can't help but notice a complete absence of the concerns you've expressed so far in this thread. The interesting thing here is that we're moving into a situation where the absolutely cheapest power in the absolutely cheapest areas of the world, no matter how isolated can be profitable and readily converted into goods traded globally (assuming some sort of market for this sort of low communication bandwidth, coarse parallelism computation sticks around).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:10AM (1 child)
Yes, from a purely monetary gain perspective. The efficiency of the turbines, reduction in greenhouse gases and various pollutions emitted by coal and oil production were there in 2005, but the economics wasn't.
What is stranger still, is if I had simply leaped instead of looking and bought 250 acres for $125,000 thinking I might be starting a wind farm, less than a year later I could have sold those 250 acres for $750,000 outright, or leased them to farmers for an even bigger ROI than that by now. And the net benefits of growing millions of tons of extra corn so we can water down gasoline with some ethanol? Pretty pale in comparison to reducing coal mining, IMO.
Even more ironic, if the timing were slightly different, say purchasing the land in 2003 and actually starting the wind farm with a marginal ROI, the big "windfall" from ethanol legislation would still have come, because corn farming is 100% compatible dual-use with wind farming on the same land.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:25AM
Wouldn't be an investment otherwise.
This sort of speculation is pointless unless you have a time machine.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:50AM (13 children)
I can't get over the fact that we are so accustomed to fiat currency, that now people are crazy-mad to generate their own fiat currency which resides no place except on some computers.
Trading in gold, or silver, or even copper leaves the recipient with something of value. A bit coin? I can't even throw a coin at an armed robber. It's all pretend.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:24AM
and then chuck it at him.
Your mind is small; you don't know what you're talking about.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @03:42AM (11 children)
In times of economic turmoil bad enough that money is broken I really question what value gold and silver will have. Gold doesn't really oxidize so it's got utility in plating surfaces that need to last a long time. Other than that use case and the use cases associated with it being a pretty material that humans are attracted to what else does it do? And in terms of economic stress how critical are either of those going to be?
Silver I think has more utility as it could be used for joining some materials. Silver plated parts are easier to solder as well and that is damn handy but sort of a luxury. What else does silver do besides that and be shiny and sought after by humans?
Copper seems to have the most utility as it could be used to make wire. Actually I suppose silver can do that too but not gold.
They are all heavy and malleable so they should be able to make good paperweights and I would guess stuff like cooking and eating equipment and that's pretty valuable. They seem like they would be a lot easier for newbies to make a half crappy but serviceable bowl or fork with hand tools than to try something like steel. I don't think gold and silver are toxic but isn't copper?
So I'm curious what is gold, silver and copper expected to do when the shit hits the fan? If it is for barter it seems like there needs to be enough economy to support artificial stored wealth and there is a lot of opportunity for ripping people off through doctored up money.
Can you share your thoughts?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:17AM (2 children)
The Manhattan Project borrowed the United States Mint's entire supply of silver so they could draw it into magnet wire for use in Calutrons. A Calutron is a huge and _quite_ inefficient mass spectrometer.
That Oak Ridge National Laboratory is in Tennessee is because it's close to the Tennessee Valley Authority: Those Calutrons consumed one-tenth of THE ENTIRE NATION'S GENERATING CAPACITY.
Los Alamos knew early on that Uranium Hexafluoride gas turbines would work far better but they didn't get them to work well enough until after the war.
Get this:
The man from Los Alamos asked the director of the Mint "How many tons of silver do you have?"
"We don't use tons. We weigh silver in OUNCES!"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:30AM (1 child)
or at least I had read a story that the first time they turned the callutrons on they ripped all the nails out of the framing because the magnetic field was so strong.
That's good stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:06PM
https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/rockwell-calutrons [atomicheritage.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 04 2018, @01:44PM (5 children)
The only "use" in such a situation, is as currency.
It has value because the guy down the street would like to have some of it, if for no other reason, than to impress the women in his life. That is the only value required of the "precious" metals, gems, or even cheap costume jewelry.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:05PM (4 children)
Is that going to be important enough in the time period and economic turmoil as being discussed though? Is gold going to hold value because it is shiny and pretty when there isn't enough available money to facilitate financial transactions at all?
I would think something like laundry detergent is much more likely to be used as a currency. Depending on how much starving is going on of course.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:43PM (3 children)
You could look at catastrophes past.
Now, we need to understand that the fool who allows it to be known that he has tons of precious metals will soon be dead, and that the populace will divvy up the spoils. Judiciously guarded precious metals, secretly hoarded, and brought out in small amounts at opportune times is always respected. The fall of the Ottoman, the fall of the Iranian democracy, the French Revolution - pick any catastrophic event in human history. People who have access to precious metals before and during the catastrophe generally find the means to survive the event.
The legal currency may become worthless, but people who refuse that currency will often accept a few bits of silver, because it can be traded again in the future.
Expendable and consumable items, such as your laundry soap, can't be counted on, because it decays relatively rapidly. Not to mention, you might use some of it up yourself, and thus be unable to trade it again.
Human nature isn't going to change drastically in the future. If you can survive a catastrophe with some gold in hand, you are well set going forward.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:12PM (2 children)
I feel exactly the same way about my generator every time I break it out and run my house off it for a day to validate my emergency operating procedures and capabilities. I'm not going around saying "hey I got a generator right here come steal it!!!" but the g'damn generator is because it's loud and at night I'm the only one with lights on in the city if no one else has power. I'm not really sure what to do about that except keeping an armed sentry on it but then I can't do anything else if I have to be a sentry. That is going to be a serious challenge in a real nasty situation.
I was pondering this in my head and my conclusion was that it seems to be best at leaving someone in a strong position at the end of the mess - that does itself have a lot of value since being on top during recovery can be extremely lucrative and can start entire empires at the scale of nations or persons.
Being in a strong position at the end of the mess might itself be the saving grace - it is what allows a relatively valueless material to maintain value and continue to be currency.
Seems like that is still quite precarious though but it is hard to argue with history. I guess this kind of problem really depends on how long is it going to be bad. I'm not really well versed enough with economic collapses to know how that all plays out.
I do agree humans don't change very much if at all.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:24PM (1 child)
Noisy generator - I guess you don't have a basement? Basements are ideal. Park that noisy bad boy out of the way, remove the muffler, and buy enough pipe to run the exhaust up to the roof. At that end of the pipe, put a nice Harley-Davidson muffler. All the mechanical sounds of the generator are absorbed by the basement walls and the earth, while the muffler deadens that exhaust.
Or, you can dig a nice tornado shelter, and do the same thing.
A shed will help, but it won't be surrounded by nice sound deadening earth.
I can't help with being the only lighted house in the neighborhood, unless you want to invest in some stylish shutters. https://securitydirectuk.com/roller-shutters/commercial/solid-commercial [securitydirectuk.com] You'll be ready for the zombie apocalypse with those.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:38PM
Actually I just got a new Honda inverter generator with a dynamic RPM and it can be pretty quiet depending on load. When I had the generator powering only my ham radio room with a load of a few hundred watts I was able to talk to people with a radio while standing right next to it and they couldn't even hear it run over the microphone. If I put a 1.5kw oil heater on it and throw the switch it gets to be about as loud as my previous non-inverter static RPM unit.
I had considered doing an install in the basement but opted not to run an ICE indoors after I looked up what it takes when that is done industrially or commercially. I don't have anywhere near the venting in the basement that a professional install does and that seems like bare minimum due diligence. The idea of a leaking or broken exhaust system really concerns me especially for the specific use case of emergency operation.
That is specifically because there will wind up being a significant difference in operation during testing and during actual usage: runtime. While something like piping the exhaust out might work ok during testing when game time comes around and many times more hours are put on the system that won't actually have been tested. If there is a partial poisoning event during the emergency that will only make things much worse to deal with. I also looked and there is no commercial solution for home installs in a basement I could find. Seems pretty risky.
I did consider putting the generator in a dog house with something like pink wall insulation lining the inside - that lets it be outdoors, deaden some or all of the sound, and protect it from the environment such as rain. I had rejected it as not offering much increased security over chaining it to my hand rail outside but stealth does have benefit now doesn't it.
I think I'll re-evaluate the doghouse idea. Thanks!
Those shutters are awesome. I have blackout curtains but it is still pretty easy for little cracks of light to make it out and they stick out like a sore thumb at night.
Kind of reminds me of watching M*A*S*H when they need to go blackout.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:05PM (1 child)
Gold is one of the best electrical conductors around, probably the best without access to modern technology. You can make gold wire too, it's just not economical.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:13PM
I think we are actually both wrongish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @04:40AM (1 child)
We've had issues with people putting a miner in a hidden area, then pulling power from the lighting circuits to the machine.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:27AM
It would not be hard at all for me to get away with putting some rigs under my desk at the co-working space where I now operate my consultancy.
The co-working space leases an entire floor of an office tower. I expect their lease includes the electricity.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:02AM
It's vitally important to recycle aluminum cans even if they don't have the bottle bill deposit, because prodigious quantities of electricity are required to refine aluminum ore.
It is so very difficult to refine aluminum that at one time aluminum was more valuable than gold. The top of the Washington Monument is fitted with several aluminum spikes to serve as lightning rod. Aluminum because it was such an incredibly precious metal when they built it.
My father, a power EE, told me that Reynolds Aluminum paid for part of the construction of some pacific northwest dams so one of each dam's generators could be directly connected to one of Reynold's aluminum refineries.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]