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Comment on US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining

NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Crypto miners aren’t generally turning themselves off to just get the off peak rates. The hardware is expensive and only has a short lifespan before the next hardware that’s 5x better comes out rendering theirs obsolete as the hash rate spikes and they can’t make ends meet anymore.

Generally speaking, it does drive them towards cheaper electricity, which is often renewable or finding places that have excess and getting good rates on it.

Sometimes, that turns out to be dirty electricity like coal, and in some places its kept some coal plants alive and stopped others from being shut down.

But it doesn’t matter if they are 100% renewable because the people that hate crypto, don’t understand it at all, think it’s a scam with absolutely 0 use cases. So all those solar panels or windmills that they buy are resources being taken from other people and slowing down the adoption of renewables, because crypto is a waste.

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sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Right, but they’re not going to build out in a high electricity cost area, they’ll build where energy is cheap, which is often where renewables are abundant.

But like you pointed out, the real issue isn’t energy use, but perception of value. Any amount of energy used to do something with no value is wasted.

I see value in specific cryptocurrencies (esp. Monero XMR), but I don’t know how to effectively communicate that.

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- NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  esp. Monero XMR
  
  Its hard enough to sell people on using VPNs to protect their internet privacy, trying to convince them to use this fancy thing ‘only criminals’ use to have financial privacy is definitely going to be harder.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yup, but the most effective way to explain it is that it’s just like cash. Criminals use cash, and criminals use Monero, and largely for the same reasons. For non-criminals like myself, the benefits are:
    
    low transaction fees
    
    fast transactions
    
    pretty stable values
    
    Or in other words, it works like cash, just digital. Like cash:
    
    businesses can’t track me
    
    governments can’t track me
    
    there are no foreign transaction fees
    
    Monero is our best option for a digital, non-government issued currency. It’s as close as we’ll get to digital cash.
    
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