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I need to get into the business of being paid to not mine crypto. Sounds lucrative, and I have the skillset already.
Catch-2022:
The government paid him well for every coin of crypto he did not mine. The more crypto he did not mine, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new GPUs to increase the amount of crypto he did not mine. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not mining crypto.
I would totally read that book.
Sounds like our Agriculture industry. The people that unironically cry socialism when kids get free school lunch and shit…
That’s actually the joke. The book Catch-22 has a story about Major Major ( rank, name) whose father scammed the government for corn subsidies by not farming.
Good book, I would recommend it!
That’s a sweet gig, if you can get it. I heard you have to now show you can grow but choose not to.
One of my absolute favorites. “Help the bombardier!”
Here I am, not mining crypto for free, like some sucker!
if you’re good at something, never do it for free
Shut down the big mines
Maybe if Texas shutdown those miners, their power grid wouldn’t be so strained all the time.
Maybe if they didn’t have a power grid that was cut off from the rest of the country that wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe their citizens wouldn’t freeze to death when there’s a little snow.
Those damn people, paying for electricity AND using it?!
Edit: Is this take so egregious its not worth even worth discussion? Just downvote and move along? The hive-mind opinions is one thing, but the lack of interest in actually engaging in discussion is really sad. But I guess it’d make sense for them to go hand in hand.
All you did was make a satirical comment.
That’s like saying it’s fine for the Kardashians to use as much water as a whole city during a drought, because they pay for it.
Eh, idk. Depends on the cost structure I guess. What if their (collective, with other similar users) excessive use is charged at a rate that makes it easier to fund the public infrastructure that benefits everyone?
At least in San Antonio, the utility charges a higher rate above a certain threshold.
Edit: also, people are calling for a ban of mining. It’s not as if they’re ALWAYS in a state of grid strain.
I don’t know about this specific case but it’s a common practice to have big consumers be on specific agreements with national grid so they can be shut off on demand to ensure the grid integrity. The companies are compensated for the inconvenience in exchange for their flexibility. Usually it’s with heavy industries like metal, paper and glass manufacturers.
Yep. Architected a bunch of software to measure baselines, prove or disprove responses to demands within requested periods etc.
You don’t want giant arc furnaces running full tilt in the midst of an energy crunch. It’s enough compensation to cover NOT producing anything that day which the ratepayers pay for but also benefit from.
Everything had to work sub-second round-trip, fun stuff, egomaniacal boss.
My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.
The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.
The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.
I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.
People are still mining bitcoin? Lmao
People will always be mining. The cheaper the value, the less miners meaning more coins to sell. It won’t ever fully die.
At first glance, this makes zero sense, but once you dig in and read the details, it makes even less sense
You know what they say, whenever the stars are over Texas…
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Makes sense to me, just sounds like the crypto company is holding the state’s power grid hostage
Who has the keys to free the hostage? ERCOT or the Crypto Mine?
Don’t blame the Crypto Mine for the decisions of the State or ERCOT.
TVA doesn’t give energy credits. They give you a thirty minute notice that your ¢/kwh is about to quadruple.
pro tip, be born with a parent who runs a large power grid who can buy your debts
I especially like the part where they say encouraging crypto mining will somehow create power grid innovations. What?
Trickle down grid, food, climate, whatever just fucking gimmie peasant. /s
Either you innovate or you pay that company $32M every summer forever
I’m pretty sure their goal is the latter based on the other part of the article which says they can act like padding.
That has the same energy as someone claiming they drive better tipsy than sober
Not in Texas, at least. Our government here is in the habit of actively making everything worse, not better.
It makes sense if it’s the renewable energy companies using cryptocurrency mining to keep solar and wind energy from going to waste. It makes zero fucking sense when natural gas is still a major part of your energy supply. https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix note the complete lack of a logical sorting on the page.
Even if all you have is wind and solar, you can still turn it into baseload power by pumping water up behind dams, storing it in battery grids, or turning it into green hydrogen via electrolysis. Hell, you could even use it to heat up salts until they turn into a molten salt, which can be used for about 12 hours, going off of solar towers with molten salt generators…
Good point, OP is right then, makes no fucking sense.
Even if that’s their strategy you’re not guaranteed a return when mining. If you or your cluster don’t mine the block all of that energy was absolutely wasted. If we didn’t have a shitty ass isolated grid we could just sell the energy to another part of the country.
