Crypto is so inherently wasteful it's completely unethical. At least they're trying to use hydro here but by and large, this is an unreasonable resource grab.
To add to this, the article states it's the equivalent of 570,000 apartments worth of energy.
To what end? There is still no real use case for bitcoin, it can't compete with any modern financial transaction system in performance, it's difficult to secure, it's just a bad deal and I can't understand how we've allowed it to grow as much as it has.
I am not in favor of crypto. I don't think it is a better alternative than our "centralized" economy. I don't own any crypto, I don't encourage it to flourish, I don't encourage people to buy it.
>Crypto is so inherently wasteful it's completely unethical.
skateboarding is inherently wasteful, should we ban that too?
if people choose to do something voluntarily, and devote resources to it, I don't see a basis for you declaring it unethical. If climate change is your fear and we all decide to save ourselves by living in caves, some cavemen might still choose to engage in the cave-crypto-currency equivalent (carving big giant rolling stone coins?): it's not unethical, it's just not what you would choose.
Without delving too much into the utility of the practice, skateboarding as a past time is a rather commonly banned activity in common spaces.
The issue here is not that someone is doing something voluntarily and devoting resources to it, but rather that someone is taking an action that involves the consumption of a rivalrous good. The court's ruling notes this explicitly (from the article) "the very real prospect that devoting such a large proportion of the available electrical power supply to one industry would leave less energy for other uses which might result in increased costs to all other residential and industry customers in B.C.”
Not just energy, crypto is also using far more rare earth minerals and metals in their excessive utilization of CPUs and GPUs. Batteries to keep things running when power goes out. It's wasting so very many of our resources. There is no defense.
skateboarding doesn't scale to take up all available resources. I could be 10x the skater as Tony Hawk and I'd still only use one skateboard at a time. Doesn't matter if it's a $1,000,000 skateboard, I'm still only using one at a time. Meanwhile, $1,000,000 of cryptomining by one person is going to use so many more joules, and for what?
Is the commercial exploitation of several finite resources —skyrocketing their market prices— to generate nothing of actual value really just like skateboarding?
That's a bad analogy. The wastefulness of crypto affects us all.
Please sir here's millions of dollars so you won't tank our grid. These things should require co-gen facilities instead of my power bill suffering so they can print money.
Step 1: Calculate the effect on local utility rates.
Step 2: Create a new tax which brings in 150% revenue of the calculated effect which applies progressively on power users one standard deviation above the mean
Step 3: Apply a negative tax on everyone using less > 1 standard deviation above the mean. Either preserve the excess revenue, or put it into infrastructure.
Step 4: recalculate every year and adjust rates accordingly.
Yes. Even in Canada they already have something similar with their carbon taxes. IIRC, tax is collected all year and returned at the end based on income rather than consumption.
Not sure if it would technically be considered a negative tax, but the effect is similar.
I was thinking more along the lines of my purchase price is x + y tax + -z tax. A return eventually isn't quite the same, but maybe it's effectively the same.
In Pakistan, electricity rates are slabbed. 0-100 units are charged very little - often below cost of providing the electricity. 100-200 units more, etc. So ultimately, high consumption users subsidize low consumption users. It makes sense because low consumption users are 'using' cheap electricity from hydropower/gas, but high consumption users are forcing the state to turn on expensive oil based power plants.
Well I was thinking more along the lines of the price of a good is x, plus y taxes, reduced by -z tax. Subsidys might effectively be similar, but it won't be calculated the way "positive" taxes are.
> would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity each year.
Just to give some level of scale to this request, this is half the annual generation of the new $16 billion Site C dam. They are demanding the use of $8 billion in public infrastructure.
We need to start heavily regulating unchecked industrial resource usage of public utilities like power and water. There needs to be a penalty/incentive for conservation.
It's not easy. Obviously, different industries have differing abilities in how much they can conserve. So, naturally your penalty/incentive structure has to be customized per industry to make it effective. But that immediately leads to rich industrialists to start lobbying (read bribing) politicians to help their industry more than other industries. It's not clear if the country becomes richer by giving the government this type of regulatory power.
You can regulate it pretty easily with appropriate pricing.
The problem is that plenty of jurisdictions are willing to price industrial rates quite low for the sake of jobs and jurisdictions are in competition for those. So "wasteful" is largely determined, as far as the government is concerned, by whether a lot of jobs are produced.
> 1. So it's not so much "not providing power" for some political or philosophical reason but "not providing all the power they want."
this is a pretty incoherent sentence. Not providing all the power they wish to purchase is, as per their argument, "not providing power", and the reasons given, "(a) they plan to use power and (b) not create jobs" are political and philosophical reasons.
The economic argument is "making money creates jobs when you spend the money, or invest it which in turn causes it to be spent".
The "global warming is a negative externality" argument wasn't made, if it were made would need inspection. Is there a current surplus of (hydro, net) power in Canada, perhaps not sustainable into the future but for the lifetime of the mining rigs contemplated?
>2. The miner wants the equivalent of ~500,000 apartments worth of power...which is substantial.
if it's currently in surplus, it's surplus, i.e. there aren't a half million apartments whose lights would go out
>3. The reason the miner wants this particular power from this particular provider is that it's cheap.
it's cheap indicates it's surplus
>4. If the miner got all the power they wanted it would be enough to drive up local utility rates.
price changes are how all economies allocate resources. consumption driving prices higher indicates more economic activity; it's a good thing. Wanting to stop other people from doing things is authoritarian and negative.
>5. The local utility + government aren't keen on this as it's a pretty blatent resource extraction with no local jobs being created.
We can look at the environmental impact of hydro power, and regulate it out of existence if we want, but given that there are existing dams with surplus power, I don't see an argument being made that this "extraction" has any negative impact. "Extraction" is what every human being has lived on since the stone age.
Not necessarily. Water is cheap in California's dry agricultural valleys. It is still not abundant.
The utility asserts - and the court appears to agree - that this project would turn a surplus into a not-surplus.
> price changes are how all economies allocate resources
Not all resources, no. Canada doesn't allocate healthcare this way, for example. There's a significant societal benefit to having power be affordable by individual households; letting someone turn an abundant resource into a scarce one for personal profit isn't something Canada has to permit.
Ah, smells like a corporate shyster bought in. Much like this company, where a shyster from my country bought into it, (he had to move into overseas markets after the crap he pulled here)
> Long Blockchain Corp. (formerly Long Island Iced Tea Corp.) is an American corporation based in Farmingdale, Long Island, New York. Its wholly owned subsidiary Long Island Brand Beverages, LLC produces ready-to-drink iced tea and lemonade under the "Long Island" brand. The company's first product was made available in 2011.
> In 2017 the corporation rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp. as part of a corporate shift towards "exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology" and reported they were exploring blockchain-related acquisitions.
> In July 2021 SEC announced charges of insider trading against three major Long Blockchain investors who allegedly bought substantial numbers of shares which they sold after the stock gained as much as 380%. They allegedly had advance notice of the name change which preceded and caused the stock rise.
They didn't even have to sell shovels for the crypto gold-rush, just had to look like they might do to bump the share price enough.
This outcome is unsurprising given the industry climate. BC gets the vast majority of its power from hydroelectric dams and power is historically very cheap here. But last year's drought forced BC to import record amounts of electricity from surrounding provinces and states to cover the gaps between supply and demand.
Meanwhile the province right beside us, Alberta, was issuing emergency alerts to the population last month asking the public to reduce power consumption in order to avoid rolling blackouts.
It's not the ideal time to be trying to force the gov to give you electricity to use on hashing.
> Meanwhile the province right beside us, Alberta, was issuing emergency alerts to the population last month asking the public to reduce power consumption in order to avoid rolling blackouts.
This is why having constant prices for power is dumb.
3x, and only when it's just mildly cold instead of actually cold. When it gets actually cold heat pumps stop working, or work at massively reduced efficiency.
Depends how cold. You can get models that work down to -15/-20F.
> High-HSPF heat pumps can handle cold weather. At temperatures below -20°F, cold climate heat pumps still provide dependable heat, and many models are 100% efficient at sub-freezing temperatures. Since they consume less electricity in moderate weather, heat pumps cost much less to operate than legacy systems like combustion furnaces and boilers. For building owners, that means enormous savings over time.
So unless you're planning to run them exclusively in the polar tundra, probably still better off with a heat pump.
This is Canada - it gets colder than -20F most winters. Sure you should have a heat pump if you live there, but there will be days when you cannot use them.
If you live right on the ocean shore you might get a mild enough climate to not need backup, but most of Canada is not that. (though the population may tend that way)
> If you live right on the ocean shore you might get a mild enough climate to not need backup, but most of Canada is not that. (though the population may tend that way)
There are high-efficiency heat pumps that you can use most of the time, and to my knowledge at least in Ontario, most of the heat pump setups I've seen use a heat pump with a back-up heater for days it gets too cold. And that's fine, it saves a ton of money over the course of the year vs. running resistive. 90% of people in Canada live within 100 miles (160km) of the US border and most people live in pretty moderate climates.
The low-temperature heat pumps I've seen work down to -20F (-30C). It's not -30C anywhere in Canada people live for much of the year. Even Winnipeg you'll only get into the danger zone a few weeks of the year.
If you live in Alert, feel free to stick to resistive.
Those really cold days matter though. You cannot say a HVAC system is good enough if it doesn't work on the coldest day while the system is installed. Even if it is only for 1 night every 15 years that you get down to -30C - that is not acceptable. Which is why you need some backup system. Even down in Iowa (quite a bit south of Winnipeg) I've seen -30C in the last 10 years.
In case I wasn't clear (and on re-reading, I may not have been) I mean it shouldn't be advocated for as a means of primary heating. Of course if you need it as a back-up then get it. However, using it once in a while materially changes the economics involved in both mining (negatively) and heating/cooling (positively).
The Nordics which have climate similar to Canada have the highest usage of heat pumps per capita in Europe (and naturally the world) [1]. People also report that they work in Calgary [2], for example.
most people in the nordicts live in a mild climate. The Mississippi crosses the ocean and brings warm water to them so if you are not inland you don't see very much cold despite the northern location.
Their heat pumps incorporate back-up heaters. Into a single unit, that's rarely if ever used. It's sometimes called an auxiliary heater. In most climates backups are not required.
> The good news is that, in most climates, modern cold weather heat pumps no longer need this type of backup heat source to supplement the heat being produced by the heat pump itself. If the power remains on, the better types of heat pumps can operate succesfully at temperatures as low as -15°F (or -25°C)...
> Many modern high efficiency heat pump systems come with an integrated electric resistance heating system that functions as a back-up system at low temperatures.
You do see them in the cold because they work fine.
60% of Norwegian homes have heat pumps. Sweden and Finland are around 40%. I believe that's the highest rate in all of Europe. [3]
If you need the waste heat then there is no downside to mining bitcoin to get it. Over a few years you will pay off the computer.
However even in Canada most of the time you are better off with a heat pump to create heat. On the really cold days heat pumps don't work (unless you have a ground source which is expensive to install) and there are not enough of those days that you can pay off the bitcoin machine. If you have the option on those really cold days you save money by burning natural gas (at least now) in a modern furnance. I'm not sure what the energy mix is in Canada, but at least some people there create less environmental impact by burning natural gas.
The computations done in bitcoin aren't just to waste energy, they are meant to prove you have the ability to waste energy.
That means you need a problem where: there are infinite instances, the hardness of an individual instance can be dynamically tuned, there is no central authority needed to give out problem instances, there are no shortcuts or ways to collude to make solving a specific instance easier.
Nobody has come up with a useful problem that meets this criteria. It seems hard to imagine anyone will.
If you want crypto enviro friendly, proof of stake (like eth) seems like a much more viable path forward. Even better would be to stop using fake money altogether.
If you prefer, you can read that sentence as stop using cryptocurrency based money and use USD, gold, or whatever instead.
Or if you really want electric money, use Chaum style digicash instead. It long predates bitcoin, but basically has all the benefits except technically having a central authority except you dont even have to trust the central authority.
In some sense, the introductions of scientific papers are supposed to be / are the original 'verification blockchain' albeit one done with human minds and messy research projects.
This isn't a little rubber-stamp issue. The issue at hand would require adding 2.5TWh/y of capacity. And, you're right, there are countries where you could totally grease the palms of some politicians and get a new coal plant built. I'm glad that Canada isn't so corrupt.
Anglo societies absolutely have a problem with committee veto. I get that you're proud that there is low corruption, but that doesn't mean other problems don't exist.
> Anglo societies absolutely have a problem with committee veto.
They have bigger problem that is opposite. Lobbing. Like when proposal for golf resort in natural protected area was vetoed by committee in Aberdeenshire. But then after lobbing, decision was reversed by local government. Argued that it would create 6000 jobs. Result? There are no 6000 jobs and protected are is lost.
Funny how crypto folk constantly talk about libertarian ideals, except when other people exercise their right not to do business with planet destroying scam artists.
> but I worry about what happens when a useful industry becomes politically unpopular.
In a society driven by supply and demand capitalism, I can't fathom this scenario. Even popular stuff we currently prohibit, drugs, prostitution, gambling have thrived.
My own personal feeling that Proof of Work has a dangerous set of incentives which can lead to electricity waste on a global scale we've never seen before. We don't want to get sucked into this set of incentives, and hopefully our decision to ultimately remove the miner will set some sort of precedent for other apps as well.
Ultimately, even though we technically could have remedied the situation and continued on benefiting from the pretty large income such a miner generates, we took the above as a sign that we should get out of the "mining business" before we get sucked into the Proof of Work morass of incentives.
The only place I might be OK with it is in really cold places for actually heating a room.
A heat pump would likely not work for a sauna due to the temps required, do you know of a single instance of this being done successfully?
I don't think it was a gimmick anyways - they were doing this for a long time non-publicly before it came out and when it did a lot of people said they no longer wanted to be customers.
I don't know if there's currently a solution for spas that incorporates a heat pump - Purdue has a paper on it [1] - my point was more that incorporating a false economic signal allows maintaining the status quo instead of leading to improvement in efficiency. [1]
> I don't think it was a gimmick anyways - they were doing this for a long time non-publicly before it came out and when it did a lot of people said they no longer wanted to be customers.
If you were to design an optimal system it just wouldn't have the crypto boxes in the first place. You're starting from a solution and working your way back to a problem. That's a great way to land on a poor solution to the problem as it unnecessarily constraints your search space and installs false constraints. Crypto is not by any means unique in this regard but boy does it happen often.
"Assuming I spent $20,000 on a box that converts all electricity fed into it directly into heat, and once in a while, in the process of guessing random numbers, facilitates some very questionable transactions and poops out a magic bean I can sell (only 3% of the time once in its useful life), how can I use it to heat a sauna?" -- is a pretty strange place to start an exploration on the best way to heat saunas. Yes if you start there, a heat exchanger or a heat pump is not a bad idea. But why on earth are we starting there, lol, and you really sure there isn't a better way?
If a resistive heater on one side were useful that’s just how it would be done, with or without the false economic incentive.
Seems reasonable. You don't have to produce hydro power at maximum capacity. Mostly you do not even want to as you only get so much water. In certain situations there might be potential for excess, but those are only periodic. So limiting production makes lot of sense. Specially if use case is crypto...
I think it was the noise mainly. The lack of licensing was the angle to shut’em down, but even if they had a license, I’m sure the complaints would have persisted.
Would like to know if the noise was primarily from the generators or from the miners.
Pretty easy to cheer when it's crypto. But if we are onto the slippery slope of canceling utility customers who don't use their power judiciously, let's go ahead and cut off a few more customers while we are at it:
1) Anybody using resistive heating instead of heat pumps.
2) Anybody that uses a non-induction electric stove.
3) Anybody heating an outdoor pool or hot tub.
4) Anybody still using an incandescent bulb.
5) Anybody who leaves the lights on after they leave the room.
6) Anybody who use their TV to watch a reality show.
Actually come to think of it, residential consumption in its entirety is a total joke when examined from an efficiency standpoint. Really, if you play this nonsense to the endgame, it's best for utility companies to cut their losses and simply end residential service altogether.
Vastly different scenario. My AI being super power efficient doesn't harm yours; there's a shared incentive to make it as cheap and low-power usage as possible. We're not scrabbling to take a share of a limited pie as we would over a block reward.
Proof-of-work cryptocurrency power usage/efficiency is a zero-sum game in a way AI is not.
There's no evidence that AI is getting more power efficient or that it will in the future. It's still new tech that we haven't tested to the limit.
Current indications lend to AI going more cloud/enterprise (centralized) than local (decentralized) where it will continue to increase energy demands to data centers that were already power hungry before AI.
The Bitcoin miners and AI compute scenarios are more alike than you think.
> There's no evidence that AI is getting more power efficient or that it will in the future.
Model optimization is absolutely a thing; faster models are desireable, and GPUs are in short supply.
And, again, my model getting optimized doesn't hurt you. If I make a faster or more efficient Bitcoin miner, that directly reduces your profits, because all miners are competing for a fixed pile of rewards.
Just because AI-specific GPUs are in short supply today doesn't make your argument stronger.
You are complicating the comparison with the incentives for Bitcoin mining. It is irrelevant to the fact that it is today consuming more power than ever due to the increase in demand of the commodity.
In the same comparison, the same increase in demand is what's going to 3x today's energy use for AI and probably even surpass Bitcoin's in the future.
In Bitcoin, the computation being challenging is key to the product.
In AI, it's an inconvenience to be optimized away if at all possible. If someone figures out how to make AI models run on an iPhone with zero battery use, everyone goes "yay!", not "oh no our entire financial system collapsed".
AI and Bitcoin may both use a lot of power, but there's a vast difference in whether they want to. (There's also a difference in how useful they are, but that's a separate argument.)
> If someone figures out how to make AI models run on an iPhone with zero battery use, everyone goes "yay!"
This is what I call wishful thinking.
I never said Bitcoin and AI have similar energy use patterns which is the argument you are keen to make. My original argument was that AI usage is going to be worse than Bitcoin in the long run. With some AI farms using ~3000W per server, it's a no-brainer where this is all headed. Add in the fact that AI has so far proven to be more popular at launch than Bitcoin.
Just because you can optimize models doesn't mean that people won't want or need bigger better models to train/use.
Nasty. Electrical power is definitely a basic utility and refusing to provide service should at the least be heavily investigated by the governing regulatory body of the region.
It doesn't matter what one's opinion of the use is. This could very easily spiral out into a larger societal problem.
Wanting 2.5 million megawatt hours per year (an average of almost 300 megawatts) goes a bit beyond providing a basic utility. Doing that while not impacting other customers would almost certainly require big infrastructure investments. The fact that crypto mining is a useless dead-weight loss compared to supplying power to homes and productive businesses just makes the decision all that easier.
Sounds like they're preventing a larger societal problem.
> It said the pause ordered by the government was in response to "the very real prospect that devoting such a large proportion of the available electrical power supply to one industry would leave less energy for other uses which might result in increased costs to all other residential and industry customers in B.C."
What happened to scaling the offer based on (future) demand? That is what a government who wants growth should focus on... instead of telling their citizens which use cases are acceptable or not.
See in Texas how the Bitcoin mining industry negotiated agreements for curtailing and greatly help scaling the grid better... this seems like a way more efficient approach to these offer/demand and scaling issues than "we can't let you buy our product because other people want to buy it".
> See in Texas how the Bitcoin mining industry negotiated agreements for curtailing and greatly help scaling the grid better...
They get paid not to use power to prevent the grid from collapsing. That's not what I want my tax dollars spent on, and such silliness is why I tend not to look at Texas for good governance.
They provide constant demand in low consumption periods which makes it possible to have a stronger grid when indeed there is a spike in demand due to external conditions like a heat or cold waves... something which will keep happening more and more (and more extremely) if you listen to climate scientists.
The keywords are scaling and stability, if you prefer to piss this money away on building plants that will work at 50% capacity for years you essentially pay for the rest of the capacity with no other utility, that's bad governance.
Indeed. Such a general response can literally be applied to every industry and so shows the judicial response in this case is working on feelings rather than facts.
I assume it would be applied to any other industry. If you started a steel plant without telling anyone and created a potential electricity shortage in the process, it would probably be shut down too.
Industry-scale resource usage requires planning and coordination.
> Such a general response can literally be applied to every industry
One difference from other industries:
> Energy Minister Josie Osborne said when the policy was introduced that cryptocurrency mining consumes ... adds “very few jobs” to the local economy.
So it's okay for the local electrical utility to not provide service if they feel you aren't contributing enough jobs to the local economy? That seem very absurd on the face of it. And easily slippery sloped to abuse and corruption.
I'm not commenting on whether it should be permitted or not.
However, they presumably pay tax on revenue and employ engineers, electricians etc. So I'm not sure of your latter 2 points are totally valid. I'd contend that they're fairly similar to a data center in that they have massive power draw, do not produce physical goods and employ few people compared to the space and resource usage. Obviously data centers are much more pragmatic and are much less contentious, though.
Regarding the labor force this was taken directly from the article and quoted by the energy minister. I imagine they have more insights than we do regarding the proposal.
I understand your comment, and I'm agreeing that it should be investigated but I disagree about it being "nasty".
B.C. is not incredibly populated and also they are appealing for cheap electricity.
Asking for the power they want is a substantial undertaking that would cause higher utility prices for everyone living there.
If the cause somehow out-weighed the potential of higher costs it would be fair, but it's not.
Allowing this without investigation and diligence would be "nasty"
> This could very easily spiral out into a larger societal problem.
The Slippery Slope is a common logical fallacy. There is no evidence of any spiraling happening.
> should at the least be heavily investigated by the governing regulatory body of the region.
This went fully through the legal system:
"Conifex Timber had gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to have the policy declared invalid. But Justice Michael Tammen ruled Friday that the government’s move in December 2022 to pause new connections for cryptocurrency mining for 18 months was 'reasonable' and not 'unduly discriminatory.'"
So the utility has a certain set of existing infrastructure capable of producing electricity at lets say 10c/kw. Accepting all the crypto miners might force them to introduce new capacity at 16c/kw or buy from another grid at a high rate during peak, raising prices for home consumers.
I think the situation here is something that's good for a specific user but bad for the wider community.
It seems like the perfect case for an authority to step in.
Think about what the rationale for having a common utility even is: a group pools its resources so everyone can have a better power system (more reliable, cheaper) than each could have running their own. Obviously, for that to work though, there has to be a way to prevent individuals from abusing the system.
I agree it shouldn't matter what anyone's opinion of the use is, but that doesn't appear to be what's happening here.
I think its entirely reasonable that large users of basic utilities be regulated. Part of being a basic utility is its supposed to be shared fairly. Large industrial usages require advanced planning.
1. So it's not so much "not providing power" for some political or philosophical reason but "not providing all the power they want."
2. The miner wants the equivalent of ~500,000 apartments worth of power...which is substantial.
3. The reason the miner wants this particular power from this particular provider is that it's cheap.
4. If the miner got all the power they wanted it would be enough to drive up local utility rates.
5. The local utility + government aren't keen on this as it's a pretty blatent resource extraction with no local jobs being created.