Topic: [Q/A] Can Bitcoin And Eco-friendliness Go Together? (Read 429 times)

Here are some large renewable bitcoin mining operations:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-16/solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-hub-in-whyalla-south-australia/101448784
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/23/new-solar-powered-bitcoin-miner-launches-operations-despite-difficult-market/
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/08/tesla-block-blockstream-to-mine-bitcoin-off-solar-power-in-texas.html

And here are some reports for bitcoin mining being used in demand response as I discussed above:
https://www.smart-energy.com/industry-sectors/energy-grid-management/demand-response-proves-more-profitable-than-bitcoin-mining-in-texas/
https://www.barrons.com/articles/crypto-miners-electricity-grid-51647296483

So what I'm discussing is already happening. It's now just a case of scaling it up and making it more widespread.

I think this is only true because the entire electricity consumption of the world is skewed towards fossil fuels. As the push for greener energy continues, bitcoin is well placed to be at the forefront of this (as it already is, given that we know it uses a higher percentage of green energy than almost any other industry on the planet).

It's a logical extension to o_e_l_e_o's reasoning since any appliance or group of them, big or small, can take part of this energy-sharing scheme. The scientific principals for this process are already well-known. Now our job is to get the special action groups to listen to us.

I will probably end up writing a follow-up blog post as I'm thrilled with all the ideas being churned up on this thread.

Another consideration regarding this point:

If you want to power something (home, business, etc.) 100% from solar, you need to hugely oversize the installation to harvest enough energy on overcast winter days.
However, this means in summer you are going to have tons of excess energy, making it financially infeasible.

There are already services that buy your excess energy (even though usually way underpriced), but in a future where most people have solar, there will probably be so much excess energy at summer noon that there will be no buyer.
Either mining yourself with that energy that nobody wants, or selling it to other people who are mining, is a great idea.

This is an often brought up argument, but one counter-argument that I can think of is that when done at 'small scale' you will run into the issue of how to power the ASICs when you don't have this excess power. Turning them off is technologically challenging (faster hardware degradation) and insanely elongates ROI, so it's not really an option either with current-gen machines.
I guess that in those times where you don't have excess energy (mostly in winter) you can actually use the heat. Maybe, there will be ASICs tailored to being frequently turned on and off.

Yes, I saw your post, but you didn't provide any real world examples of such effect. But there examples of mining creating large demand for fossil fuels power. Both cases can be true at the same time, but practice seems to be more skewed towards the fossil fuels. It could be that the effect that you described is not that important in the grand scheme of things for renewable energy, and other factors that play role in its adoption play far bigger role.

While Bitcoin consumes a decent amount of energy (less than 1% of total energy consumption). While this number may sound insignificant, Bitcoin is claimed to consume as much electricity as the whole country of Brazil (the source of this claim hasn't been confirmed). Certainly, there are numerous other activities that consume much more energy and are more harmful to the environment, but that doesn't change Bitcoin's impact.

However, the world is slowly shifting to renewable green energy, and Bitcoin will eventually switch too. Not only will the environment benefit, but also the miners themselves, who'll be able to enjoy the benefits of lower electricity costs.

Scandinavian countries are great examples of countries depending on green energy. Perhaps it would be ideal if mining operations occurred in such countries in order to reduce Bitcoin's carbon footprint.

At last someone talking about bitcoin and it’s CO2 emission problems in best sensible way. I always shouted this over the forum that there are more petrol and Disele engines, more refrigerators, more cold storage for perishables items in the world than the mining equipment’s which is being pain for government or environmental activists! No bitcoin will never contribute to pollution to that much level as what industries and data centers contribute and contributing since hundreds years now. They literally want it to be banned for the reasons of its pseudo anonymous nature and nothing else. They want bunch of reasons thrown away in the assembly so that they can say no to bitcoin and run their own bank in the traditional ways as they did always. That’s the summary of it. All the Eco friendly talks, CO2 emission and what not is just layer to hide stuff.

Sure, but I was talking about the scenario where the energy supplier is buying back excess green energy being produced by individuals. In this scenario, the supplier would be able to broadcast to the meter of opted in customers within the necessary geographic area that they would be paid at premium rates for any electricity they sell back, allowing each individual's system to work out whether it was more profitable to keep mining bitcoin or to shut down their miner(s) and sell the electricity back instead, and then vice versa when the rates drop again. Could all be set up to happen automatically, providing a great reserve of green electricity the grid can draw on during periods of peak demand.

It can obviously use all energy, and it will pay for whatever energy happens to be the cheapest. But as I outlined above, it can incentivize green energy in a way that few other industries can, by virtue of bitcoin mining requiring very little additional infrastructure, being entirely mobile, and being able to ramp up and down instantly without any long term negative effects (you can't just power down a whole factory, for example, without incurring significant costs in starting it all back up again in the future).

In recent times my attention has also been drawn to hydropower dams as a source of green energy because unlike solar and wind energies they can operate for 24 hours without any form of restrictions. There are some groups and individuals advocating for the conversion of some nonpowered to hydropower so that Bitcoin miners could have enough access to power. In the case of the United States out of 90,000 dams, only about 2,200 generate hydroelectric power.

Most of these hydropower dams are old and producing below capacity, hence Bitcoin miners can take advantage of these opportunities and finance some of the projects of transformation and rehabilitating some of these dams to produce the needed electric supply. The project might be expensive now, but the cost of electricity might be cheap in the future.

This is not an argument. No one is saying otherwise, that bitcoin mining is not emitting carbon.


Bitcoin only contribute little and not an argument. More miners are turning towards the use of clean energy is what this thread is all about.

If it should be an argument, it should be that the world should go against the use of fossil fuels for energy production. Clean energy has be used to mine bitcoin profitably. The ones that releases carbon are also used for household, offices, mining of mineral resources and other industrial activities, but most pressure on bitcoin miners.

What I just hate about this world is that most people do not know the actual truth, but following what others are saying.

People say that Bitcoin mining incentivizes green energy, but isn't it incentivizing all energy? Miners are looking for the cheapest electricity possible, if in some location it is generated by fossil fuels, it's not their problem. There were reports that in some places mining resulted in re-opening of a previously closed coal power plant.

I personally don't feel the need to argue that Bitcoin is not contributing to global warming or pollution. Bitcoin is not perfect, nothing is, it's just one of its downsides. It's not big enough to cause any significant problems for the world.

many countries already have rated electric. no need to have smart meters that talk to energy suppliers every minute..
EG household bills. first 1kwh used per day at Xrate, 2-4kwh at Y rate
and power companies just send them a bill at the end of the month
via a monthly reading

as for hashes and mining.. many smart homes already have WIFI lighting. heck i can change my lighting from blue, white red by using a tablet. yep small devices including a light bulb have wifi and can accept commands and do functions.
a light bulb socket can accept electric. and in the bulb can be basically a USB miner dongle size device using part of the electric from the socket, whilst also lighting the room and send the hashes through wifi..
the technology already exists, it just needs to be put together.

lightbulb mining is easy. so 'heater' mining is easier

Should be easy enough to do. With digital meters which send readings directly to the energy company, then the energy company could equally send updates on the price they will pay for electricity back to the meter. A small additional bit of programming to pull the current bitcoin hashrate and current bitcoin price from internet, and it is easy to work out the profitability of mining versus selling. And the user can of course set the limits they like, as some may wish to continue mining for the long term gains even if selling would be more profitable in the short term.

That would require a bit of back end programming that on the fly would be figuring the price of BTC vs hasrate vs power used and so on.
There is also the potential for alternative use of miners. I have a few old ones that have been under-clocked and more or less are space heaters.

philipma1957 started a thread about what he did a few years ago: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/what-to-do-with-all-the-old-s-9s-5160194

More things like that.

I dislike liquid cooling for a bunch of reasons, but on a semi-industrial scale it might not be the worst, generate hot water for some functions in buildings where regular heating might not be the best way to do things.

-Dave

I remember writing a topic concerning bitcoin miners and the new introduced data center from eco to leverage on when i saw the updates online some few months with the topic Bitcoin Miners Can Leverage on ECOS Data Center but what gives more concern in this is that are they truly giving out the best and expected change to lit up the challenges in mining industry? take a look at this:


Yes this is true about the entire scenario, but in addition to that, could an average miner be able to afford the cost for their services after careful considerations? Also, i believe it would have been more appreciated if ECOS centered on green energy to be more environmental friendly.


And to me, i believe that miners are not going to enjoy anything free than having more hectic cost on the overhead cost of mining after receiving their reward just on the utility of the ECOS facilities, the above statement only work in favour of ECOS and not the miners, news can be misleading it not carefully studied.

Now there's a neat idea. Most states (and probably most countries?) have a set up where if you are generating your own electricity at home, then any excess you produce and cannot use/store is sold back to the grid. Depending on your net metering tariff, you will probably be more profitable using that excess electricity to mine bitcoin than you will be by selling it back to the grid. And that can tie in brilliantly with the demand response system I outlined above. Sudden surge in demand for extra electricity? Then the grid operator can up the rates at which they will buy your electricity from you, making it more profitable for you to stop mining bitcoin and start selling your electricity to the grid.

A network of homes all producing their own renewable energy and with a small bitcoin miner to act as a demand response back up. Amazing decentralization for bitcoin, optimal profits for the home owners flipping between mining bitcoin and selling their excess, and a robust 100% renewable electricity grid with a huge reserve capacity it can draw on when required. Win-win-win.

be careful
dont be too quick to stroke people to sleep that bitcoin is "too big to fail" that a switch over to PoS is impossible

knowing the 2 mandate tricks of Eth to switch to PoS
1. mandate that a deadline point be made where by difficulty wont follow the blocktime rules but instead just periodically increase and only increase until unmanageable to solve blocks via PoW mining.
2 mandate that on such date PoS validators take over the block confirm process.

now how to push it into happening in bitcoin.. well again look to history. 2 tactics
its not about needing users agreement of user node..s its about the economic nodes of exchanges and merchants to treat a forked coin as the master chain..
the NY agreement of many exchanges in 2017 done this by treating the UAHF mandated activation fork that created a split where there was a segwit flagging chain as the master chain to follow. where the other split became the offshoot altcoin

and ofcourse the code itself to enforce the mandate and the rejection of those not flagging for the mandate.. that was blockstream sponsored devs.

looking at the past both the NY agreement of economic nodes and the code to support the mandated upgrade were both sponsored by DCG.

now imagine if government regulators pushed that scheme to happen in 2017 whereby the mandated upgrade was not segwit but PoS
where by large businesses had to comply under law/regulation, rather than sponsorship/bribe/payment.

dont turn this into a debate about the 2017 events of taking sides.. think about this as protocol risk of events repeating by a malicious actor(regulators) pulling the mandate grenade

All it really requires is a bit more planning. There are a lot of locations with a SURPLUS of green energy. Rivers don't stop flowing when there is no need for more power.
Nuclear plants don't shut off at night when demand is down and so on. Geo-thermal and so on. Although most power grids are interconnected not all are and places do exist that can tun on green. Add in some of the new large battery storage options and it 100% can be done. It will cost more to start BUT, if everyone is operating under the same costs then it's still a level competition.

But, I also think it would help if miner manufacturers started producing smaller lower power miners that can be run on home solar and the like without rewiring your enter house.
Smaller, quieter, less power draw. Same efficiency more or less but not screaming fans making anything but the best wiring glow. My condo is 100% solar / green electric power. But I can't put a full power miner in here.


Sorry, iron fist has been canceled.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/iron-fist-canceled-2-seasons-at-netflix-1152134/

-Dave

Absolutely agree. Why aren't more politicians being told this?

Somebody needs to tell the Blockchain Association to make this their main talking point, and then have miners talk to utilities to actually make this happen.

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I accidentally deleted the above post, so there's probably a deleted post counter now; but I'm dead serious about the no trolling rule. I will rule this thread with an iron fist. 

Bitcoin mining is uniquely placed to facilitate and enhance the move towards 100% renewable energy.

With standard electricity production, such as via burning coal or natural gas, supply can be adjusted to meet demand. More demand on the network? Burn more stuff. Less demand on the network? Burn less stuff. Straightforward.

With renewable electricity production, this is not possible. How do you create more wind for turbines or decrease the amount of sunlight hitting your solar panels? You can't. So you need to do something known as demand response. Demand response means changing the amount of consumption, rather than the amount of production. So whenever the power companies have a low amount of production with a high amount of demand, they can pay customers to reduce their electricity consumption. Bitcoin miners are well placed in such a scenario to be able to immediately reduce their electricity consumption without any lasting effects on future operations, and so provide a good demand response buffer for the network. This is already happening in places like Texas.

And then look at the flip side as well. When demand is low, with traditional electricity production then the power company scales down their operations. Again, they can't do that with renewables. So instead they generate a bunch of electricity which goes to waste, they have to dump, and they don't get paid for. Instead, bitcoin mining comes along and can immediately ramp up its consumption to utilize this otherwise completely wasted energy. The miners are happy since they get cheap green energy, and the green energy company is happy since they make money on electricity which would otherwise be completely wasted and earn them not a single cent.

And so not only does bitcoin mining facilitate a robust renewable energy network, but it even incentivizes production of new renewable generation. I'm not going to build a big solar panel system if I know that the local grid will only utilize ~50% of the energy I produce and the other ~50% is going to be completely wasted and earn me nothing. It won't be profitable. But if I know that at times of low demand there are bitcoin miners who will scoop up every last kWh I produce and I'll get paid for 100% of the energy I produce, then that becomes a much more attractive investment. Bitcoin mining is fairly unique in that it can be located anywhere there is electricity being produced - right next to a solar farm in the middle of nowhere is just fine - whereas most other industries need a lot of surrounding infrastructure (transport, water, waste/sewage, etc).

I wrote a blog post that explains the problem with the practicality with Proof of Stake, why Bitcoin will never switch to PoS, and how Bitcoin miners can slow and even reverse climate change. Read it here: Bitcoin Being Energy Efficient? (no ads, they were not profitable so I got rid of them. I might just introduce a tip address instead.)