Comment by monero-xmr
2 years ago
Crypto mining can scale up and down extremely easily. They are a good fit for hydro, wind, solar, and nuclear where not using the energy means it’s simply wasted (at least until serious grid scale battery exists).
If you want to judge payers of electricity you should also look at video games. It is pure entertainment with no societal value beyond that. If that doesn’t bother you, maybe don’t judge what people want to electricity for if they buy it on the open market.
> They are a good fit for hydro, wind, and solar, and nuclear where not using the energy means it’s simply wasted
This is a persistent myth in crypto circles, but it doesn’t match up with the financials of any company I’ve seen. Instead what happens is that once you’ve paid to build up mining capacity, particularly for mining rigs, any downtime is extremely costly.
Miners are always racing against the clock of increasing hashrate and the next halving.
What I mean is, if the price of electricity skyrockets temporarily, it’s very easy to stop mining. They are extraordinarily sensitive to prices given there is a direct relationship to electricity and mining pool payouts.
That’s true, but being a damper when prices skyrocket is different from being a damper on the predictable 24-hour output fluctuations of wind or solar.
The prohibitionist's entire premise boils down to a lack of understanding for markets and the subjective theory of value. Your comment illustrates this well.
Some will value entertainment more than others. Teetotalers don't value alcohol and would ban it by citing social ills. Negative externalities are a magic hand-wave here, "The climate apocalypse is neigh! You must taboo the things I say!"
I think people have underestimated the environmental impact of training AI models.
While one can argue things like GPT3/4 are useful, the question becomes how useful are they if they burn up gigawatthours to do it?
GPT3 alone took around 334MWh to train, and that's one model from one company, and that's just for training, not usage.
We should be focusing on making power cheaper and more accessible to everyone, not policing what people do with the power they have purchased.
This is why judging the usage of electricity is a fool’s errand. The market has a price, and if I want to use it to heat my pool and power my air conditioners that’s my choice. The government should not prevent me from heating if a coat is sufficient, nor cooling if being naked is sufficient, if I’m willing to pay. If that argument makes sense, then using it to play video games, train LLMs, or mine crypto is simply a choice the market makes.
There are externalities of power consumption for which regulation (in the case of a single monopoly power grid, as is the case here) makes sense.
Large scale usage affects grid stability at specific occasional times. If it were just individual homes doing small scale mining across the grid, it would be different, but one can make a good argument that large scale crypto miner operations should be prioritized for unilateral load shedding in times of grid instability.
The power grid as currently designed and deployed in Texas is a shared resource and needs to be centrally managed to avoid tragedy of the commons situations.
If crypto miners don't like the shared rules for the shared resources, there's nothing stopping them from deploying their own wind, solar, and optionally storage.
Being connected to the public grid comes with benefits, and those benefits come with conditions of use, ideally set by consensus of everyone who benefits from and funds the grid.
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> It is pure entertainment with no societal value beyond that.
I think entertaining society should be very high up on the list of societal values.
Crypto, on the other hand, I struggle to find any value worth the cost.
I can’t be entertained by crypto mining? One man’s entertainment is another man’s boredom. Maybe we ban professional sports as well?