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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) 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.