Bitcoin miners win legal battle to keep mum about energy use [US]
Bitcoin mines are energy-hungry data farms.
This is a loss for everyone. Fuck these clowns.
Trump judge.
Bitcoin is currently at $57,000 and it's up 144% in the last year. Haters gonna hate
Spoken like a true moron with zero insight.
Ransoms gotta get paid
Everyone is a bit shit here (including whoever came up with that title...). No one "won" anything here.
DoE wanted to use "emergency" measures to survey miner's energy use, which is likely outside of the scope of the original intent of such powers (which appears to be why the judge granted a temporary restraining order?).
The Bitcoin miner's claim the data release would cause "irreparable harm to their business..." If that's not an admission of guilt, then I don't know what is.
temporary restraining order?
It's just a type of pretrial injunction. You need to show that irreparable harm would come if the DOE did this. It's helpful to have the case look like you'd win. Since the judge already said that it looks like they'd win, he'd likely extend it all the way to the end of the trial.
Thanks! I wasn't clear on that detail!
Cryptobros and crypto miners are some of the most worthless people in the world. Just a waste of oxygen and resources.
keep mum about energy use
Whose mum?
There is a "Your mum" joke in there.
Your mum is so fat, that bitcoin miners litigated to keep abusing her power grid.
US headline
"keep mum"
There is one impostor among us
Probably ai generated
Mum as in quiet is uncommon but not unheard of in the us. Probably more common than mum for mother, anyway.
"Mum's the word"
Time to call an emergency meeting
This is dumb but only because we don't worry about energy use any other time. Tons of places in my city keep all their lights on 24/7 unnecessarily, we all are sitting on a "useless" social media, video games and movies and music are all energy uses. I don't want the government to start limiting energy use on things it deems unimportant. Who gets to decide what counts? Just implement a carbon tax and energy use will go down if people don't want to pay. We don't need to police everyone's usage, we just need the cost to actually reflect the externalities.
We could just solve the problem the capitalist way and just charge businesses extra for their power usage. That'll get them to care.
Currently at least in the US we charge them less. This is usually due to something called Economy of Scale. As well as the fact there is more competition for Business energy. As well as the fact they are usually locked into a contract for energy. 1
So true. These fu**ing schools keeping their lights on the whole night and vacations, with their old lamps, while people like me measure their lamps and turn everything off...
Also the amount of 4K or more useless data transfer, ads, unnecessary youtube videos where there could be only audio (if they made that free, you can use any FOSS client and do the same)
Even so, consumer electricity habits make up a fraction of the carbon emissions on Earth. People driving cars, people buying plastic bullshit, or factory farming creates more emissions singularly.
The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.
Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.
Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.
Somehow Ethereum 2 exists with Proof of Stake and everybody is still using Bitcoin. That tells me that nobody important (for this context) cares about wasted electricity.
It's more that noone cares about the actual use cases of crypto and are just using it as speculative gambling.
Bitcoin is the literal equivalent of a horse and carriage while cars exist. If any crypto survives it should be the proof of stake crypto not the badly designed bitcoin (noting of course, for its time it was amazingly innovative, just that it's no longer actually useful).
Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.
FYI there's no such thing as "Ethereum 2." It's just called "Ethereum."
And you're right, every time these mainstream articles mention the power consumption of crypto, they never mention ETH. Weird.
Because crypto is only used by people who want to get rich out of it.
There is no money to be found in Ethereum 2, at least not like with Bitcoin.
So if the userbase is full of selfish pricks, then they wouldn't care about energy use either.
Genuine question: If I use a cryptocurrency such as Monero for its privacy benefits (only for spending, not as an investment), am I indirectly making crypto mining more profitable and hurting the environment?
ps. I don't use any crypto yet.
Edit: actually I don't care that much about private money. What if I were to just use some crypto because it's convenient? Would that be bad?
There are so many things we interact with that hurt the environment that I wouldn’t take too much personal blame if I were you. The big time miners are the ones using the electricity, and they could use their profits to invest in renewable sources for their mining. They just don’t do it, much like how every other company in the world doesn’t take environmentalism seriously and just says “you first”.
The government needs to focus on making renewable energy investment a requirement for the biggest offenders. That is the only way we will force large scale change that actually matters.
Well, if you use credit cards that data gets tracked, stored, mined for years to come, not to mention the dozens of internet servers it took for you to buy that bread in the immediate. If you use cash, I'd assume some local authorities use extra AI to track your movements via cloud cameras (plus fiat isn't fungible since it has serial numbers)
It would be nice to hear the "pro-[insert your local fiat]" energy use when people argue environmentalism against cryptocurrencies
Good point, every form of money we can use has some inherent impact to the environment. Debit / Credit card infrastructure is consuming electricity 24/7/365 all over the world. Cash uses a variety of manufacturing systems that mostly run on electricity, and requires raw materials to be sourced and prepared for use as money.
[…] use roughly as much electricity as all of the nation’s home computers combined
Bitcoin mining also risks stressing out the power grid in Texas, a crypto hub in the US where the state’s grid operator has paid Riot more than $31 million in energy credits to curb its electricity use during heatwave-induced demand spikes. Bitcoin mining has also brought sputtering fossil fuel power plants back to life and raised electricity costs for some residents in New York.
It's clear why the survey is necessary.
Why did they make it an emergency survey in the first place? Is there no "normal" survey alternative?
With the continued adoption of electric cars and heat pumps, the energy grid needs to be expanded either way.
Does anyone know how much energy the banking system uses?
Edit: lol so much downvote for a reasonable question? Enjoy your inflation and your money being sent overseas by your masters squares
https://www.youtube.com/live/1jOUnFH-Ins?si=DNiscpajsDoUmbvd
A fraction of what it takes for thousands of machines to perform rework of the same problem.
Bitcoin miners aren’t doing re work, they mine the next block of thousands of transactions.
There’s also the other side of the conversation that over 51% of the network uses green energy.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This isn't the good argument you think it is.
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Dude it wasn't from a reasonable place if you immediately swing to screaming about masters like a delicate snowflake because people don't like your MLM.
The conversation is about bonfire of resources this speculative "free" asset uses and you weren't asking in earnest you just wanted a win that your blaze wasn't the the only one.
I never liked this kind of argument, because if bitcoin ever becomes truly mainstream, the similar ecosystem will grow around it in addition to the mining itself.
We really should focus on the renewable energy sources rather than argue who burns how much and for what reason. There's a price mechanism (albeit flawed) for that.
I totally understand, I’m tired of having the conversation as well. In the video I posted earlier it sheds light on how renewable energy companies can be incentivised to add mining bitcoin to their process. Has a lot to do with modern tech and how energy is used/distributed.
Example of a mining company working with the Navajo nation in the US adding solar panels.
The amount of energy the banking system uses is linear.
The amount of energy crypto uses is exponential.
It really isn't the argument you think it is.
Yes. Legacy banking systems use way more than at least Bitcoin.
"Bitcoin's emission intensity, a measure of emissions per unit of power, is now its lowest ever, dropping 18x faster than the banking sector over 4 years."
https://www.batcoinz.com/p/issue-001-the-narrative-is-shifting
yaaay.
Good for them. Fuck governmyth overreach