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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @06:54PM (#668244)

    Bitcoin promised a world with a decentralize currency, where people could sell and buy using it. No dependency on credit cards o banks. No control from governments.

    Bitcoin is not a currency, nobody buys or sells in bitcoins. It is just a volatile commodity or a cyurrency for criminals (ramsonware, drugs dealers...)

    I'll bet you don't even understand how nonsensical it is to criticize a currency for being used by criminals but support features like decentralization and lack of government control. You go work on developing that magic medium of exchange that isn't controlled by government but can't be used in ways the government disapproves of. Let me know how it goes.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:53PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:53PM (#668332) Journal

    You go work on developing that magic medium of exchange that isn't controlled by government but can't be used in ways the government disapproves of.

    Freedom to do something is freedom to do something you don't like.