Bitcoin Hashrate Drops Nearly 40% as Deadly US Storm Unplugs Miners (yahoo.com) 140
The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced to switch down their facilities due to deadly blizzards. From a report: Bitcoin hashrate, the level of computing power used for mining and processing transactions, came in at 155.28 exahashes per second on Saturday, down from 253.88 exahashes on Wednesday, according to data from IntoTheBlock. A winter storm has claimed at least 32 lives across the U.S., as of Monday morning in Hong Kong, according to media reports.
Smokin' hash (Score:5, Funny)
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it came back within one hour....
snow cup half full (Score:3, Insightful)
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If not for the power cuts, this could be considered an innovative thermal solution for all those overclocked miners.
I saw an advertisement video on TicTok this week for a mining rig that was being positioned as a combined heater and a bitcoin miner. I think the ad suggested 1300W of heating power. It was an interesting pitch, but not something I'd ever consider doing, and that's not even considering how the bitcoin price has been dropping in recent times.
Re:snow cup half full (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:snow cup half full (Score:4)
Bitcoin is about a degenerate a use case as one can devise; but it is the case that (minus certain power factor related quirks that can become an issue in larger applications) using a computer to generate heat is pretty much the same as using a resistive heater to generate heat; except you get some computation out of it.
I never said it was a good idea .. lol
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Bitcoin is about a degenerate a use case as one can devise; but it is the case that (minus certain power factor related quirks that can become an issue in larger applications) using a computer to generate heat is pretty much the same as using a resistive heater to generate heat; except you get some computation out of it.
What bitcoin hashing rate would be required for bitcoin to be able to cope with the volume of transfers that credit cards handle?
My guess is it'd melt the planet.
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
The hashrate and the number of transactions are completely disconnected.
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Hellloooooooo!
Universe.
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It would be the same as a resistance heater, with half the efficiency of a gas furnace or a heat pump.
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It would be the same as a resistance heater, with half the efficiency of a gas furnace or a heat pump.
I never said it was a good idea .. lol
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with half the efficiency of a gas furnace or a heat pump.
But near 100% efficiency in regards to the conversion of electricity to heat. You just need a renewable source of electricity (such as Solar) that doesn't come from burning fossils in an inefficient manner to generate.
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Solar isn't a good option in this case, it tends to be warm when the sun is shining and cold when it's not. Guess when you need heating?
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Wind, Hydroelectric, etc... he just said a renewable source of electricity. Solar was just an example.
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Solar isn't a good option in this case, it tends to be warm when the sun is shining and cold when it's not.
Not when there's a massive winter surge coming through.. it tends to become stormy only at the point where cold air mass and a warm air mass first collide. The past few days here have been a perfect example; the sky was completely clear, bright, and sunny, but the temperature stayed well below freezing. Solar would have been fine, but solar power generation is still possible even when the sk
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Storms tend to bring a lot of wind.
But there still are times and places where wind and/or solar aren't present, or aren't sufficient to meet current demand, and for that reason, there needs to be sufficient base load capacity. That could be solar or wind IF we had efficient ways of storing that power when they are present, but, since we currently don't, and since it's agreed by nearly everyone that coal should not be used unless absolutely necessary, nuclear fission seems like the best of several imperfect
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That could be solar or wind IF we had efficient ways of storing that power when they are present
That absolutely can be Solar or Wind; and Good enough ways of storing do exist. For example: Pumped hydro. Saltwater lakes already exist.... You just need to dig a pit at a high elevation to create a brand new lake. Same as methods used to create the massive reservoirs used for drinking water, except it doesn't need to be drinkable.
Build some long aqueducts and use Solar power to pump seawater up into
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So, use renewable energy resources to further heat the planet.
Music to the ears of Buffolonians.
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You just need a renewable source of electricity
No, you need a cheap source of electricity. Whether something is renewable or not doesn't come into the equation on the cost of mining.
And in any case the renewable angle is stupid. The US grid is interconnected, that means that anyone mining from green energy is keeping a non green power plant somewhere else on, powering a house. This is a zero sum game. The only way that bitcoin mining can be considered green is if it off the grid or connected to an area where transmission capacity prevents that energy be
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
Re: Don't be a Luckyo (Score:2)
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Electric baseboard heating: from 25 to 100 dollars per unit, easily installed in each room and only requires electric wires that are supposed to be there depending on building codes.
Heat pump: thousands of dollars for the main unit and requires ducting to each and every room, which means an expensive house-wide upgrade. Older houses are even costlier if not near impossible to upgrade.
So yes, if you're building a new house, don't be stupid and get a heat pump system. Otherwise, I'll take electric baseboards
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All electric resistance heaters are 100% efficient at turning the electricity consumed into heat.
By that measure, heat pumps are 200% efficient, so resistance heating is still half.
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Heat pumps are only really effective in a narrow range of temperatures though with a sweet spot around 50-60F. They don't do anyone much good at temps below freezing.
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>They don't do anyone much good at temps below freezing.
They do fine. Where do you get this nonsense from?
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https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heat+pumps+effective+operating+temperatures
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That just gives a lot of results with false facts. That's like saying the Earth is flat because if you search "flat Earth" you get thousands of results.
If that were the case, nobody in Canada would own heat pumps. And the operating range on the newer units has gotten even better, so also be careful about the age of the data you find.
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
Heat pumps are only really effective in a narrow range of temperatures though with a sweet spot around 50-60F. They don't do anyone much good at temps below freezing.
No, sorry, that's wrong. You seem to be getting all this from a narrow interpretation of the first blog post that comes up in search results. Come on man, do better than a chat bot.
I saw your other reply with the duck duck go query. Go to the second or third result that explains coefficient of performance, and skip the random HVAC installer's half-hearted SEO blog spam.
The sweet spot thing and the stops working below freezing thing are bullshit. I'm going to use the same dumbed down measure others are u
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
WTF is waste fuel drained from jets?
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It's either unspent fuel that somehow can't be used again with fresh fuel for some unknown reason, or something sexual related to the miles high club.
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Been a critic of that entire notion as well for a long time and even some morons here on Slashdot arguing that the 100% is "technically correct". Maybe now that crypto bros are using the same rhetoric more people will realize how fucking stupid raising that point actually is, desp
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
Let's be honest, "100% efficient" heating is not really a selling point for Bitcoin miners. You could tell them a heat pump might be 300% efficient by that measure, but it doesn't do any math, and they're not really buying an electric heat source.
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I briefly tried to mine Bitcoin in like 2010. On some motherboard I got at Fry's, with a honking PC Power & Cooling power supply. (San Diego native company, went there to get the PS.) I got my 5 free Bitcoin (Which old hard drive is the wallet on, I wonder, I wonder... which password-safe software did I stuff the private key in, and what's the password to the password-safe?)
I thought I was going to add some coin to the free coins I had in the wallet.
Well, it was summer, and San Diego, and though we hav
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If you mean you mined 5 blocks back in 2010, that would be 250 free bitcoin, which has a market price of over $4,000,000 today.
I suggest you spend some serious effort trying to find your bitcoin wallet.
Think of it as punishing the people who are stupid enough believe in bitcoin by taking their money.
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It's not that great, considering tumbling price of bitcoin and the fact that a typical geothermal heat pump will be around 500% efficient for heating even in very cold climates.
For warmer ones, you don't even need geothermal. You can just do ambient air.
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Are you ok?
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
Demonstrated ability to learn when presented with new information puts you in at least the 90% percentile on the Internet forum intelligence measure. Impressive actually.
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Resistive heating has 100% efficiency. In comparison, the typical heat pump yields ~300% peak efficiency (3x heat/cold output per input unit of energy) and the maximum theoretical peak efficiency is ~450%. There are ground-loop heat pumps which yield near ~400% efficiency and these are likely to be the ideal air conditioning solution for humanity in the future.
An ordinary heat pump uses normal air surrounding its coil external to transfer heat from the source to destination. Air is a good insulator, so this
Re: snow cup half full (Score:2)
In addition, seasonal variations in air temperature below the freezing point of water and above human body temperature make the atmosphere a poor heat source/sink for air conditioning.
This makes NO sense at all, a heat pump isn't just a pipe that loops through a wall to the outdoors. There is a compressor.
For heating, the ambient temperate has to be warmer than the temperatures the coils get to, and I don't know if you've every operated a refrigerator before, but compressors can chill something far below freezing.
For cooling, the air temp has to be lower than how hot the compressor can make the coils. Again, I don't know if you've ever touched a refrigerator before in your life, but co
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Ground-loops solve this problem because the ground at a sufficient depth (over 5 meters) maintains a year-round constant temperature. The range of variation in temperature of the soil decreases exponentially with depth to near that point, dependent upon the soil's thermal diffusivity [wikipedia.org].
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But then you either need a lot of land... land which you can't otherwise dig in or tens of thousands spent drilling.
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I'm not really sure what the article was for; I'm already familiar with geothermal installations.
The fact is that hundreds of millions of people live in and use single dwellings and small buildings. So you can't just pretend they don't exist. For a small subset of them, geothermal coupled to a heat pump can provide a good answer. For most a heat pump provides a solution that is highly efficient on paper but which becomes drastically less efficient as it becomes more needed.
Back to basics (Score:5, Funny)
Only the best, handcrafted bitcoin [imgur.com] will do in these trying times.
Re: Back to basics (Score:2)
How will society function?? (Score:2)
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A lower hashrate doesn't mean fewer bitcoins. Well, it does in the short run, but in the long run, the system adapts to the number of miners.
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A lower hashrate doesn't mean fewer bitcoins. Well, it does in the short run, but in the long run, the system adapts to the number of miners.
Actually, the network adapts the difficulty in real time. What does potentially change is mining profitability, since there's less people competing for the same pie, your slice gets bigger. Coinwarz.com tracks this sort of stuff [coinwarz.com], and it looks like the economics side has already reached equilibrium. As usual, it's not really profitable to mine BTC unless you've stolen the mining equipment and have access to really cheap electricity.
I Would Have Expected It To Go Up (Score:2)
All this cold weather would make the cooling costs less. I guess power outages have taken their toll.
Good (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Good (Score:2)
Re: Good (Score:2)
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You could probably just burn all the money we've been sending to Ukraine to heat the entire nation through the winter if it weren't all funnelling back to the corrupt interests pushing us to send it there.
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Climate change denier? Your opinion doesn't matter.
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In my wallet, where I have to spend more for power these useless spongers waste.
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It doesn't really work that way. Miners increase the base load and pay for that increase which results in increased capacity being added to the grid.
This increases the available power during peaks or emergencies like this when they'll shut down (reducing the strain on your wallet) but also since power production is more efficient at larger scale it decreases your costs pretty much all the time.
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Unless deciding to burn cash magically spawned a bundle of cash you wouldn't otherwise have had on a consistent and regular basis and keeps spawning during the hard times it isn't the same logic at all.
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"You may think they're wasteful, But they are helping to provide a financial incentive to create the additional capacity which is now being used to the emergency - If Bitcoin didn't exist, then the extra generation capacity built for it would not exist, And would not be available to be allocated in the emergency, And more people may die than did because of the fact that the Bitcoin mining operations existed."
This isn't a troll. It is just an unpopular truth. This story could have been accurately rewritten a
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Exactly... People can sit on Slashdot all day saying they consider Bitcoin a waste of power consumption, but i'd wager not a one of them would offer to have enough extra added to their power bill every month per kWh of electricity they consume for the purpose of funding the extra network capacity that the Bitcoin mining operations effectively paid for without cost to the home users and regular businesses. Since raising the bill is politically unsavory; what happens is infrastructure gets underbuilt.
Havi
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"Since raising the bill is politically unsavory; what happens is infrastructure gets underbuilt."
Around here they'll blame that on capitalism and the free market. But that infrastructure costs resources and those resources are finite. The reason you need to have a cost and recoup a cost from somewhere else is because the dollars represent actual limited pools of resources and labor.
There are only so many engineers, laborers and physical goods and if they are building power plants they aren't doing something
Re: Good (Score:2)
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This happens over and over again. They've drank their kool-aid and all they are going to do is abuse their mod points to punish you for subjecting them to cognitive dissonance.
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BitCoin Blows (Score:2)
Imagine the global economy crashing because of a couple day weather event in a local area of a single country. Yeah, solid currency.
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Despite the brief hashrate reduction, the network still mined blocks with a marginal slowdown.
You should not let your imagination get the best of you.
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Imagine if that happened with real currency that people actually depend on. Holiday season, when demand is the highest. Crypto would bring everything to a halt.
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The bitcoin economy didn't crash. The mining hashrate crashed.
Other than storm, this is good (Score:2)
Die bitcoin (Score:2)
Die.
Permanent solution (Score:2)
Re: Permanent solution (Score:2)
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Solution for what? If you unplug them then the 40% of US bitcoin energy consumption they made available when they shut down goes away with them. These miners are what pay for that additional capacity on the grid.
What's the effect on the world (a.k.a. "so what")? (Score:2)
Only 60% to go (Score:2)
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Right, everyone should embrace the proof-of-stake ponzi schemes you early adopted instead ;)
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I didn't say 'invested' I said adopted. There is a difference between using crypto and investing in it. Investment is for gamblers whereas Bitcoin is a tool. Do you know which disorganized individual who didn't track expenses but sold net loss custom crafts won't have insult added to injury by tacking in the backdoor from the IRS this year? Those who took payment in Bitcoin.
As for proof of stake, of course it is more energy efficient; it completely skips the fundamental algorithm that provides integrity to
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Re:Demand response allows for a resilient grid (Score:5, Informative)
Since it's not cost effective to distribute mining hardware when you can just shove it in datacenter-like facilities for ease of operation and access control there's no incentive to build out any distribution infrastructure except that between the base load plants and the datacenters; and since it's very cost sensitive and not not terribly concerned with uptime there's no reason to build peaking units to cater to it.
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When China banned mining and the miners moved to Texas, which happened after the notorious cold-weather failure of the Texas grid, the electricity providers catered their power contracts to miners with demand response features. In extremely hot weather, miners shut down to accommodate air conditioning. In extremely cold weather (which is typically supplied by electricity in Texas), miners shut down to accommodate electric heat (heat pump or resistive). Either way, since miners are not critical infrastructur
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Your scenario is built on a centralized and censorable trust relationship. If you've learned anything over the last few years, it should be that trusting centralized entities with your assets is a fool's errand.
Bitcoin is not crypto or defi. Scammers are good at separating fools and their money, and it doesn't require crypt to do it. SBF and others like Bernie Madoff will go to jail, independent of the medium of exchange.
Keep bitcoin in a private wallet with control of your keys, like cash in a safe. The
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"Simple question, have you ever lost money with your cc or financial institution?"
Yes. There is a constant depressive pressure from inflation, fees and a whole slew of processes and policies all designed to whittle away my funds in the banking system. Ever get charged an extra month when you cancel a subscription charge? Had transactions re-ordered from greatest to least to maximize overdraft fees?Ever stuck with someone charging a recurring charge who won't stop and the bank makes it follow when you change
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"If you overdraw your account that again is on the customer and is entirely within your control."
No, it isn't entirely in your control. If you've never overdrafted it is because you are financially well off enough to have a buffer in your account. The bank does not provide a true real time balance. The bank will not offer the option of declining overdraft transactions. The bank reorders charges from greatest to least and will inject their fees at the top, selectively, when it will generate more fees.
So lets
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"What my brokerage has done flawlessly is trade literally thousands of times without ever messing up my trades and managed to keep all that money safe."
The last thing your brokerage does is keep your money safe. They operate a rigged system with a large set of industry standard rules designed to siphon money from you on each and every trade and to make profiting more difficult on each trade.
But this is a strawman. He indicated government mismanagement not brokerage mismanagement.
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"I'm sorry if you had bad experiences with financial institutions, but how do you think the people who had crypto in blockfi, voyager, terra luna, celsius, bgl, ... feel? Had being the operative word."
I don't see much difference. Financial institutions and those scams are all pretty much the same.
"As I said before, the losses (and gains) have been the result of my gambling in the markets."
In the sense that you played, yes. But the trading fees they charged, the slippage they profited from, the settlement te
Re:Demand response allows for a resilient grid (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound like a mutually beneficial relationship, but that's a complete and total lie. By creating demand, they're driving prices higher. If you pay for electricity in Texas, you should be pissed that you're paying more for electricity just so some crypto scammer can run their wasteful mining operation.
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"By creating demand, they're driving prices higher."
Sorry but this isn't accurate. They are enabling increased supply which results in prices which are either the same or lower due to scale in normal times and much lower when they suddenly drop their demand by 40% during an energy shortage crisis like this one.
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Me: Basic supply and demand.
You: I believe in magic.
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No.
Me: I believe in supply and demand.
You: I hate bitcoin.
What you are calling 'magic' IS supply and demand. Mining increases the base load, constant demand, additional supply is added so they can meet that demand and make money doing so rather than look bad due to brownouts. Except in California, they love brownouts.
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The incentive to develop infrastructure that works 365 days a year should be that people need heat, not that scammers have to scam.
But hey, what are a couple hundred dead Texans? The Invisible Hand of the Free Market demands an occasional sacrifice.
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Actually Texas did just fine in all of this. We have our own grid and it held up.
"The incentive to develop infrastructure that works 365 days a year should be that people need heat"
People don't need the heat 365 days a year or even most years.
"The Invisible Hand of the Free Market demands an occasional sacrifice."
The free market and capitalism in general is nothing more than a decentralized system of resource allocation. Ideas like those you imply work on the premise that resources are plentiful and it is t
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Assuming they themselves have more hashing power than the rest of the world. Sure.
The 51% is a design characteristic and it is de facto self-eliminating, a feature that has been tested before.
ASICs are difficult and expensive to produce and ASICS offered a multiple order of magnitude increase in hashrate. Not only that but subsequent generations of ASICS had order of magnitude increases over the previous generation of ASICs. In these cases single parties who had produced the ASICs and taken many thousands o