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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the community-brownout dept.

Here's a month-old article from Politico Magazine about the big business of cloudscale blockchain minery in the better Washington:

Hands on the wheel, eyes squinting against the winter sun, Lauren Miehe eases his Land Rover down the main drag and tells me how he used to spot promising sites to build a bitcoin mine, back in 2013, when he was a freshly arrived techie from Seattle and had just discovered this sleepy rural community.

The attraction then, as now, was the Columbia River, which we can glimpse a few blocks to our left. Bitcoin mining—the complex process in which computers solve a complicated math puzzle to win a stack of virtual currency—uses an inordinate amount of electricity, and thanks to five hydroelectric dams that straddle this stretch of the river, about three hours east of Seattle, miners could buy that power more cheaply here than anywhere else in the nation. Long before locals had even heard the words "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain," Miehe and his peers realized that this semi-arid agricultural region known as the Mid-Columbia Basin was the best place to mine bitcoin in America—and maybe the world.

[...] As bitcoin's soaring price has drawn in thousands of new players worldwide, the strange math at the heart of this cryptocurrency has grown steadily more complicated. Generating a single bitcoin takes a lot more servers than it used to—and a lot more power. Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, "is nothing." The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale. Miehe knows of substantially larger mining projects in the basin backed by out-of-state investors from Wall Street, Europe and Asia whose prospecting strategy, as he puts it, amounts to "running around with a checkbook just trying to get in there and establish scale."

It's pretty long for an internet article but it's got pictures.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:47PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:47PM (#668237)

    Because it's not [wikipedia.org] possible [wikipedia.org] to do cryptocurrency differently [wikipedia.org]. No sir, Bitcoin is the one and only possible way to implement this idea, and since Bitcoin has obviously failed, there will never be a cryptocurrency.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:01PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:01PM (#668249)

    So explain to me, genius, how those overcome the same issues? Most of the problems with bitcoin are inherent to all those others. The main difference is that, with those other ones, it is still sort of early to jump in on the ponzi scheme. With bitcoin, it is time for the early ones to jump out of the ponzi.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:37PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:37PM (#668265)

      You should probably look up what a ponzi scheme is. Maybe try wikipedia?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:59PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @07:59PM (#668276)

        Ok, so you don't know then.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday April 17 2018, @08:10PM (2 children)

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 17 2018, @08:10PM (#668280) Journal

          I would point out that while the early adopters of ${insert-digital-currency-here} have a better chance of making money trading it, that does not make it a ponzi scheme.

          --
          People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Snow on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)

            by Snow (1601) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:30PM (#668331) Journal

            Apple, Tesla, Amazon... All ponzi schemes.

            • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:05AM

              by fustakrakich (6150) on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:05AM (#668388) Journal

              All the rest all simple shell games...

              --
              La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Snow on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:13PM (1 child)

      by Snow (1601) on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:13PM (#668326) Journal

      The 'issues' are less issues and more religious in nature.

      Bitcoin Core refused to scale onchain because they think that being able to run a bitcoin node on a shitty raspberry pi is a priority. Bitcoin Cash decided that they don't care about non-mining nodes that are run on raspberry pi. Tests have been successfully performed with up to 1GB blocks.

      I believe that the long term solution is sharded nodes running in data centers. They would be able to scale indefinitely.

      Bitcoin's scaling problems are NOT technical. They are political.

      • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday April 19 2018, @03:52AM

        by darkfeline (1030) on Thursday April 19 2018, @03:52AM (#668837) Homepage

        Political problems are a kind of technical problem. If your solution involves human nature or society changing to suit your needs, your solution does not work.

        --
        Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!