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A comment on Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day (2014). Parent comment

Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by ajmurmann on Monday February 15, 2021 @04:20PM (#26147578)
The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.
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Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by vinger on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:35PM (#26148476)
The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some interesting side effects.
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Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by exyi on Monday February 15, 2021 @06:03PM (#26148793)
China is relying heavily on coal power (AFAIK, can't find reliable source quickly). Iceland has clean energy, but in contrary to the popular wisdom "only" ~30% is geothermal, most is hydro. See https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/IS for more detail.
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Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by hulahoof on Monday February 15, 2021 @07:15PM (#26149479)
They are taking about the miners, not the grid as a whole. There are some massive operation utilising hydro setups in the middle of nowhere that were otherwise unused
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Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by kevingadd on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:01PM (#26148075)
In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding error... At the point where miners are willing to do things like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV. If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

[1] https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/russian...

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Re:Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day... by wmf on Monday February 15, 2021 @05:55PM (#26148713)
what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

International sanctions. Civilize or die.

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