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On Wednesday, the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) ruled that municipal power companies could charge higher electricity rates to cryptocurrency miners who try to benefit from the state's abundance of cheap hydroelectric power.
Over the years, Bitcoin's soaring price has drawn entrepreneurs to mining. Bitcoin mining enterprises have become massive endeavors, consuming megawatts of power on some grids. To minimize the cost of that considerable power draw, mining companies have tried to site their operations in towns with cheap electricity, both in the US and around the world. In the US, regions with the cheapest energy tend to be small towns with hydroelectric power. (Politico recently wrote extensively about the Bitcoin mining boom in Washington state's mid-Columbia valley, a hotspot for cheap hydro.)
But mining booms in small US towns are not always met with approval. A group of 36 municipal power authorities in northern and western New York petitioned the PSC for permission to raise electricity rates for cryptocurrency miners because their excessive power use has been taxing very small local grids and causing rates to rise for other customers.
[...] Ultimately, the PSC decided that municipal power authorities will be allowed to increase rates for customers whose maximum demand exceeds 300kW or whose load density "exceeds 250kWh per square foot per year."
Singling out a power-hungry industry for rate increases isn't without precedent. In Boulder County, Colorado, for example, marijuana growers are charged an extra $0.0216 per kWh because they use so much power to run grow lights, ventilation systems, and air conditioners for their plants.
Source: Ars Technica
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 19 2018, @06:31AM (3 children)
Good.
That will ensure:
- on short term the grid is better balanced and a power-shortage won't cause such a big disruption as those 30 mins in South Korea.
- on medium term, perhaps we'll see some internet/power infrastructure being beefed up in more places than one
- on longer term, perhaps the crypto-currency miners will get to invest in their own energy production capacity. Who knows, maybe they'll even finance some fusion power or in low-power computation or quantum computing research?
So, I hope those municipalities start to charge more for power sooner rather than later.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 19 2018, @08:39AM (2 children)
We're also missing the benefits of those miners. Just because a utility don't want them mining at peak load, doesn't mean that the utility would similarly not want them mining late night. The whole thing would be eliminated without a fuss, if those miners were charged considerably more for mining at 5pm than at 2am.
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Monday March 19 2018, @09:46AM (1 child)
Which, of course, will require a distributed processing. Which, of course, will require acquiring the rights to use that space - after a while this will translate in paying some rent to the space owner. Supplementary, the premisses which host those node will need to be wired with optical fiber.
One on top of the other - infrastructure.
I think you are missing some of the crypto-mining specifics -If two miners work on the same workunit, the first to crunch through and convincingly broadcast about it to the distributed database gets the credit, the second gets zilch.
Now, put this together with the "fragmentation" of a miners rig into many "basements" and see what you get.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday March 19 2018, @02:40PM
Already mostly done. Probably would need to run some additional monitoring software for the additional infrastructure needed per installation and to make sure power consumption stays below a minimum amount per unit time.
No, it won't. The current work allotment methods are constant time [bitcointalk.org], no matter how much work is allotted. For example of the discussion from that link:
Moving on:
Mining pools don't work that way. And they wouldn't be coin mining in low cost regions of New York state, if electricity costs didn't matter to them.