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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: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @03:02AM (8 children)
In the meantime, what do we get? We get a global-scale distributed currency that isn't owned by anyone. It's an experiment unique in the world. Let's see how it plays out.
Second, we get a major consumer of high tech and a spur to various sorts of innovation in the field (such as improving the market for ASIC and FPGA devices). It also spurs an interest in mathematics and the use of computer technology to solve human problems.
Third, it creates change in our societies on a global scale. My view is that modest economic bubbles and crashes help make societies more flexible and less fragile as well as creating a group of people who can be more ambitious and dexterous concerning the future. Let the kids lose some fingers and toes. They'll learn from it.
Sure, it'll end in tears. Just don't let pension funds dump into it and we'll be fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:40AM
I hope it does not end in Government bailouts.
Lately, the Government seems to be the Jonny-On-The-Spot every time a one-percenter needs a bailout.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:42AM (1 child)
With a limited supply of coins and the requirement that a block value is values of transaction plus the miner's fee, I think you already feel how it will go.
What do you think it happens when close to the total number of BT has been generated?
What do you think happens when all the BT has been generated?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:16AM
Because we can never have more than one experiment ever? There's even multiple forks of Bitcoin itself.
Don't know.
Don't know.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:52AM (3 children)
A fine example of "efficient allocation of resources", right? Because tears are so precious a commodity.
Meanwhile, the fuck with the science and R&D, those are a penny-a-dozen, let them fuckers pay through their nose for quadruple GPU prices cause increased demand for cryptocoin mining. After all, those fuckers can contribute now with some tears.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:11AM (2 children)
Or the science and R&D projects can wait a couple of years for prices to go down.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:15PM (1 child)
Why only a couple of years? For instance, climate science can be shut down forever.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:40PM
Shut down by mildly more expensive computer components? I think you overestimate their chances!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:25PM
We looked at this story when it came out, but some don't think Bitcoin is not harmful to the environment [cbsnews.com]. "If you can pay for it then it's OK," doesn't necessarily make it ethically fine.
I'm not sure I buy into it or not - I've felt both ways about it (if it is measurable as a fraction of world energy output at all, it's something pretty huge.... But it's a tiiiiiny chunk of world energy output).
I'd imagine that there are likewise individuals who might think that there is harm to the economy or local community as well. Let one industry dominate your economy (of whatever scale) and then should that industry crashes your local community does as well. Any number of mining towns or crashed manufacturing zones can testify to that.
I'm not disagreeing as much as looking that there may be alternative viewpoints which may or may not be valid.
As for me.... my total holdings in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash come out to $4.43 right now. That's about a third of what I paid for them at almost the height of the boom (but I wasn't purchasing to invest - these are just leftovers from sending them as gifts to others in paper wallets). In fact the live value of them just went down a penny. If you're playing for fun I can't see the self-harm, any more than gambling would be.
This sig for rent.