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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:20PM (3 children)
The dream died because it was a stupid idea all along.
Currency is by its very nature a social construction. It's something that has value primarily because everybody says it can be exchanged for other things. If you take out any kind of central authority, then fraud and abuse happen almost immediately.
On top of that, since most businesses do not accept cryptocurrencies in exchange for actual goods and services, it's not really a currency. Why, then, has the price skyrocketed? Because it's a classic economic bubble, and most of the people buying in isn't planning on using it, they're planning on selling it off for more standard currency (dollars, yen, euros, pounds, etc) than they paid for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Snow on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:25PM
Bitcoin has no fraud. All bitcoin transactions are valid and authentic. Every bitcoin input can be traced all the way back to the block that the coins were generated in.
Bitcoin is a bubble though. Bitcoin Core has crippled the coin. Bitcoin Cash carries the original vision of being a currency for the world.
Crypto is going to be a gamechanger. Provably transferring value anywhere in the world, to anyone, instantly, for under a cent. Transfers of this type is only the first use case. Eventually stocks, bonds & property will all be traded on a public blockchain.
(Score: 2) by patrick on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:24AM (1 child)
Again?!? Bitcoin has died 278 times since 2010... [99bitcoins.com]
(Score: 2) by Lester on Wednesday April 18 2018, @09:27PM
It has never been a currency. What has died is the dream, the fantasy. It hasn't been wrongly supposed dead 278 times. They have said it is not a currency 278 times.
Have you ever bought anything using bitcoins?