FWIW there's a lot of half baked arguments going around the space, so a few comments for anyone genuinely interested in evaluating facts:
- The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible.
Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-balancing the network without permission. This is not possible with proof of stake.
- We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power)
- A lot of Power projects get scraped due to inconsistencies in demand. Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
> It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible.
Which is why Bitcoin mining is only feasible in the areas that have the lowest electricity rate?
> We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power)
How much of those inefficiencies are caused by Bitcoin? My understanding is that a substantial fraction of that inefficiency is things like "there's power loss in running power from a power plant 100s of miles away" or "converting from AC to DC power induces power loss." In other words, Bitcoin isn't converting electrical waste into useful work, it's just creating more electrical waste on top of the power it directly uses.
> A lot of Power projects get scraped due to inconsistencies in demand. Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
Are you aware that the electrical grid already manages demand in large part by telling the smelters to stop smelting for a few hours? There's no need to invent new demand to manage existing demand.
> Which is why Bitcoin mining is only feasible in the areas that have the lowest electricity rate?
Nope, not where Electricity is cheapest, but where it's opportunity cost is lowest. In developed nations with a stable currency this might be high, in others that don't have the privilege of printing the world's reserve to bail out bad decisions, different story. And that's what the market is reflecting.
>My understanding is that a substantial fraction of that inefficiency is things like "there's power loss in running power from a power plant 100s of miles away" or "converting from AC to DC power induces power loss
Precisely, most Bitcoin mines are remotely located right next to the power plants, partially for this reason.
> There's no need to invent new demand to manage existing demand.
The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more.
> Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
Could be, but are the price signals really in place to make this out work in practice in many places? How many electric utilities have so far succeeded in charging people more at all during peak demand times? (maybe other than electric customers they've identified as industrial)
Edit: To be clear, I agree that there is such a thing as surplus power generation and usefully smoothing out demand, I just don't agree that we're in a scenario where cryptocurrency mining is predominantly used or predominantly incentivized to be used that way.
> The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more.
This is true and is a function of context and locale. That's the point. Opportunity cost.
How low does the energy price have to be that someone could currently expect to profitably mine Bitcoin on commodity hardware? (I read "without permission" that one cannot expect to have specialized hardware available as import of mining rigs could be regulated).
It's a question of opportunity cost of electricity, not absolute numbers:
- You live in a place where the "cost" of mining = Electricity + Amortized cost of mining rig.
- Someone else lives in a place where "cost" of mining = (Electricity + Amortized Blackmarket Rig Cost) - (5% Inflation per month - 30% reduction in remittance fee -etc..)
The solution for the excess supply issue is energy storage, not mining bitcoin. I've worked in clean energy for years, and no energy expert is advocating digital currency mining + increased energy production as a method for meeting demand peaks.
- While storage is part of the infrastructure, it not the solution -> Not feasible for a large set of energy sources and often falls to the same pitfalls of bringing new power online (remoteness, capacity, etc..).
- Actually Bitcoin mining is being adopted by renewable providers as very good solution to offset intermittence and wasted excess.
- Further something like Natural gas flaring is something that cannot be stored but can largely routed through mining setups. Which is being adopted at scale.
Articles like this while well meaning and coming from a good place are extremely naive and myopic.
Do a bit of research in terms of the costs in lives and “, yes c02, of the current status quo and petro dollar complex.
Do some research on how many human productive hours where lost in debasement and irresponsible monetary policy (fun fact the GFC cost around 70,000$ per American)
I can go on forever and should you be interested id be more than happy to point you in the direction of sound research that has been done on this topic rather than this click bait
- There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion
- To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
and most poignant of all :
- Your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is.
I remember the exact moment of my life when I read "Self reliance for the first time, I'll never forget that moment.
fluentd is great.
You can setup forwarding nodes, that relay logs to one or mutiple masters that then persists into whatever layer(s) you want.
Tolerance and failover baked in.
Tons of connectors and best of all docker logs driver is built ships with docker so almost zero setup to get your container logs to fluentd.
Also works nicely with kubernetes too!
I haven't used it in maybe 3 years or so, so some of this could be misremembered a bit, but I didn't have a great experience with fluentd.
Trying to do much customization was kind of painful, the config file structure is kind of confusing and the docs were sparse and differ depending on the plugin you're using, and there's no validation of the config so if you have any of the arguments slightly wrong it'll fail silently.
The modularity of routing and filtering logs seems like it would be great, but it turns out not to be all that flexible, you really have to follow the framework's preconceived idea of how the processing pipeline should work. I forget the details but we were trying to do some processing on the logs, like ensuring they're valid json and adding a few fields to them based on other metadata source, and it would have required writing our own plugin. In other ways it felt too modular for its own good, like it's up to individual plugins to implement anything they need and the core doesn't seem to provide you with much. Even things like an error handling or retry framework are not built in, so if a plugin throws an unexpected exception it's not handled gracefully. One plugin we were using would just stop sending logs until we restarted the fluentd process if it ever got an http failure from being temporarily unable to connect to the api, because they hadn't built in their own retry/recovering mechanism. Granted this was for a pretty new logging SAAS service we were trying out, if you're sticking with the basics like files and syslog it's probably more robust, but at that point you also might not need the flexibility promised by a tool like fluentd.
Despite their advice not to write a lot of Ruby code, the fluentd plugins are Ruby code, so I ended up just writing one big custom plugin with all the rewrite/routing logic in it. It was very simple to do, and so much easier to read than the convoluted fluentd config files you end up with to do anything mildly complicated with filtering.
It depends when you crystalize the loss. If you need the cash and the market happens to be down this week, that's a problem. Don't forget this is replacing the savings and bonds that "dolts" use, this is supposed to be your short term easy to access money.
It is in Internet Dog (Cat) Years. Or, if each block is like a ring on a tree (per 10 min instead of 1 year), it's a little older than its inception date.
Considering the current political and economic climate :
1- Pay back as much debt as you can: Signs point to the 'cheap money' party ending relatively soon and debt will start becoming considerably more expensive to carry.
2- Bitcoin. Yes, I said it. My 2 cents: Forgetting the debate on the currency aspect and its usability as such . A politically neutral store of value has a use case and there is a tremendous need for it going forward in this world. Bitcoin checks all the marks needed and has been around for more than 10 years now proving its use case.
What you have to ask your self at this point is the following :
What happens if it all goes down the gutter? Well you loose 1k.
What happens if it actually works out? 10-100x? Who knows, but such asymmetric value propositions present themselfs once or twice in a lifetime.
Educate your self and take action with the intention of being able to justify it to your future self in 10 years. Ultimatey that is whom you will have to answer to :)
I don't have debts and the 4k worth of btc I had when its value reached its maximum are now worth less than 1k. BTC is too volatile and not something I would consider an investment.
>debt will start becoming considerably more expensive to carry
Only if it's not fixed interest. If you have low fixed interest debt, is there any reason not to keep it ?
If you manage to secure it for a sufficiently long term where you feel comfortable you can meet it's obligations before the terms expire, then go for it !
But you do realize that "cryptocurrency" might very well be THE everyday use product/experiment that successfully demonstrates and educates the average human on the social implications of 'Crypto'.
- The usage of electricity in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug. It's designed to use the most democratic and ubiquitous commodity avalible. Any nation/individual can evaluate their electrical opportunity cost and at any point make the decision to dedicate resources to towards re-balancing the network without permission. This is not possible with proof of stake.
- We produce about 160,000 TWh of power, ~50,000 TWh is wasted due to inefficiencies. Bitcoin using 120 TWh (0.25% of wasted power)
- A lot of Power projects get scraped due to inconsistencies in demand. Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.
- Bonus: SHA-256 did not get broken this week.