And once you've built it, you have to have the aluminum ore shipped to you, and get the processed aluminum shipped to the world market.

A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed

Plus the whole environmental nasty thing. I was born in a town which hosted an aluminium smelter, my parents moved from there when I was 10 months old on the advice of a doctor who was a friend of theirs and who had told them they should most probably seek a better place for me to grow up, environmentally-wise.

Shame about that other environmental nasty thing related to proof-of-work that renders the entire earth somewhere you'd prefer not to raise a kid.

CO2 doesn't directly poison people in the same way the industrial waste/emissions poison people. This fundamental fact is one of the major reasons it is difficult to coordinate CO2 emissions reductions -- the harm is global but diffuse.

I was just commenting on the aluminium smelter thing being very, very non-environmentally friendly at a local level.

Depends on what the miners are being powered with.

Geothermal energy has very few emissions.

If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.

I wonder if it's more complicated that that. Narrowly looking at the CO2 effects of shutting down AL smelters in Iceland, that will make the global supply for the metal lower, raising prices. Perhaps that would make it uneconomical for usage in vehicles, meaning that cars would again use heavy steel instead of aluminum. Perhaps that would cause the global car fleet to burn more fuel and net pollute more CO2.

> A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed

...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.

it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.

> ...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.

It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.

Is this censorship? https://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-excha...

Yes it is.

Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil".

Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality.

Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked.

But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it.

Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography).

Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.

So…how? What? Bitcoin is supposedly uncensorable - yet he was censored? Which one is it?

Only because governments don't give a flying fuck about it... Yet.

They'll catch up eventually. See how some politicians are already starting to call on mining bans.

They can easily fully ban it and enforce it. Let's say, put mining on the same level as growing weed or making heroin.

Your super first kind of decentralized money is now fucked.

Then all of mining would just move to places like Venezuela, where a lot of drug trade (per your example) already goes on, and they would get even more money for their extremist endeavours. Sad.

Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local. You don't have to worry nearly as much about local oligarchs or regulators getting uppity and trying to shut you down.

> Containers or a warehouse of miners also has far less effect on anything local.

uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.

prices rise until mine is moved to different place with cheap (for now) energy.

Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?

Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...

> Even if it's green, wouldn't it be better if that produced energy goes somewhere to replace non-green energy, rather than to calculate hashes that are mostly thrown away?

yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years.

“In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.”

https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...

Just FYI most of the energy in Iceland goes into smelting. It's not excess the capacity has been expanded and continues to be expanded to power smelting.

https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70

It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money.

https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...

What about storage of energy in batteries for resale to the grid? That’s very low (or negative) return by comparison? (Also probably not possible everywhere.)

Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”.

Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.

Where is the arbitrage? Mining crypto in Kazakhstan with subsidized energy can not do anything to reduce the MWh price in Germany. There is only up and up as energy is irrecoverably burned for crypto.

Even better, the price of crypto is so high that it can be profitably mined even in countries with very high consumer power prices. I want to see you travel to Kazakhstan and tell them that paying 35 cents per kWh now that all the production goes towards crypto has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies - namely the consumption of people living there. You might not make it back alive.

>Where is the arbitrage? Mining crypto in Kazakhstan with subsidized energy can not do anything to reduce the MWh price in Germany. There is only up and up as energy is irrecoverably burned for crypto.

I already said in the comment that it is "probably not possible everywhere". But to clarify that hypothetical, the arbitrage would be reselling the energy to whatever energy use-cases exist in Kazakhstan that aren't subsidized (which probably exist since it's unaffordable to subsidize energy everywhere in a country without bound).

Also, really? Is that your standard for the merit of an argument? Whether Kazakhstanis will kill you over it? I explained in detail how the efficiency manifests in another comment [1], and (also) already said it doesn't necessarily cancel the negative effects of crypto.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809318

Price doesn't matter, profit does. And mining difficulty automatically adjusts to price so that the profit (also from transaction fees) tends to zero (whether from the top or from the bottom). I've seen the average Opex estimated at 60%, but that was some years ago...

(Also, an expectation of prices being higher than they "should" would mean that one has to consider an incoming crash and the whole operation should probably start getting wound down, so as not to be left holding the bag with now (almost) worthless cryptocurrencies and mining rigs. In that sense, yeah, you're probably better off staying closer to home, which I'll assume to be one of those "high consumer power price" countries.)

There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.

To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like:

Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1].

But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy).

[1] hopefully with sustainable management

[2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.

Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this:

1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day

2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland).

3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.

Energy storage is not particularly cheap.

And not particularly efficient : if you cannot beat the highest market prices...

And comes with the risk of catastrophic release of that stored energy. Which means that the authorities will be much more interested in getting involved !

And the biggest issue is that if you try to become an energy seller, it becomes much harder to go under the radar as part of the black or grey market ?

Presumably generating blue hydrogen is an obvious way to export free power

The aluminium smelter also requires collocated skilled labor which is another factor.