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Access to cheap electricity can make or break a cryptocurrency mining operation, and firms angling to strike it rich in an industry where delays can and will cost digital money will do just about anything to get it, as soon as they can.
The latest move in the quest for bargain-basement kilowatt hours, as quickly as possible: building out local power grids with bespoke electrical substations.
Canadian company DMG Blockchain is building what it hopes will be a fully-functioning substation near the Southern British Columbia town of Castlegar, which is electrified by hydro power. When I spoke to Steven Eliscu, who leads corporate development for DMG, over the phone, he told me that building the substation costs millions of dollars and required the company to build its own access road to haul equipment to the site. The goal: to plug it into the local grid and have it power DMG's expanded mining operations by September.
"At the end of August we'll go through a commissioning process where the utility will test everything as a completed substation and make sure that the town doesn't blow up when we flip the switch," Eliscu told me over the phone.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Friday August 03 2018, @11:20PM (7 children)
They are building a substation. I thought if a factory comes to town, the factory is responsible for constructing their own substation. Lots of caveats apply, but if we are treating miners as industrial sites this sounds quite normal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 04 2018, @12:11AM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:07AM (3 children)
-sumption.
There's not a whole lot you can do about BitCoin itself other than to not use it.
Some cryptos use proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work to reward miners. Under PoS you are rewarded based on how many coins you already possess, but there's a rotation so once you've been rewarded you are ineligible until the rotation comes back around to you. There's more to it - I don't fully understand PoS.
Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, is developing a Proof-of-Storage based cryptocurrency. To mine Cohen's coin requires lots of disk space, but storage is absurdly cheap these days. Given that Cohen is well-known as well-funded I expect his P-o-Storage coin to succeed, so I plan to mine it myself.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @05:04PM (2 children)
I liked how IOTA works. They have something called the tangle and you verify other transactions in order to get your transactions verified. So the more transactions you need verified the more transactions you must verify for others. This makes good sense as you contribute back to the network based on how much you benefit from it.
One thing they need to work on that never gets addressed is the insane volatility. It's hard for me to put my car on craigslist for one crypto coin if the value of one coin could double or drop by 50 percent in one week.
Perhaps they can create a system that can somehow stabilize the value of crypto. I'm not sure how it would work but maybe it can somehow put a tax on crypto coins if the value falls too fast to reduce the number of coins in supply and issue free coins if the value rises too fast. The tax could go to like a centralized ledger account and the coins being issued could come from that account. They would have to figure out who to issue new coins to, perhaps individual accounts can request them from the ledger account and if the ledger account sees that prices are going up too fast it can randomly issue free coins to requesters. Those getting taxed should be those selling coins during times that the price is falling too fast so that they have disincentive to sell during those times.
If there is a system in place to increase the number of crypto coins in supply they should create one to also reduce the number of crypto coins in supply and a way to manage it so that they can stabilize its value.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)
What at first was known as Qualitative Investment went on to transmogriphy into Sub-Millisecond Precision High Speed Trading.
That'w why we really _did_ need to Occupy Wall Street.
That such algorithmic... uh... "investment" robs the to poor to give to the rich has often resulted in calls for a punitive, very short-term Capital Gains Tax but these proposals never found purchase in our Congress' soil.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @06:57PM
I think congress getting involved is a stupid idea. If I'm a good trader or investor and our stupid society won't otherwise give me a decent opportunity why not make some money trading? You have just as much opportunity as I do and today the retail investor has pretty much all the same tools from technical indicators to access to all the fundamentals of various companies. If I know how to use these tools to invest wisely why should the government get in my way and tell me no?
People complain that big corporations make all this money at the expense of their employees and customers. Some of that is true. Invest in these big corporations, become an owner, and use some of that money to fix some of our social problems. Invest in them and use your stake in these companies to make company votes that relate to how these companies operate. These same companies that no one likes are publicly traded. Participate in the process. If you're so smart invest wisely and become a successful investor.
You can do what I do. I use moving averages with standard deviations (bollinger bands) and regression analysis with standard deviations over relatively long term charts (ie: one day / one year charts but I also look at the shorter term charts as well). There is also moving averages with the average true range (Keltner channels - I don't really use these). Your trading software has all sorts of technical indicators that are useful. Most trading software comes with linear regression lines but with a little scripting or a little excel manipulating you can create more sophisticated curves with sample standard deviation bands such as polynomial or exponential curves and you can get higher R^2 values (but higher doesn't always mean better so you need to know what you are doing).
If you aren't a good trader/investor don't expect congress to fix that for you. It's your own fault. If you don't know what you are doing and want to complain about losing money to someone that does then don't invest/trade. You have no one to blame but yourself.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:56PM (1 child)
Citation needed.
I'm actually kinda curious about if it takes more energy to mine a bitcoin than it takes to mine a bitcoin worth of gold. Sources would be greatly appreciated.
(Also - I must admit I don't know if any currencies currently are tied to gold, but considering it has a long tradition of being the "oh, we _REALLY_ fucked up"-fallback I'm guessing it will keep rotating in now and then)
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday August 04 2018, @11:18PM
The cyber money is a very smart idea. But you can't decorate your apartment -- or your woman -- with it!!!