For the First Time, a US City Has Banned Cryptocurrency Mining (businessinsider.com)

CaptainDork writes: The city of Plattsburgh, New York is imposing an 18-month moratorium on commercial cryptocurrency mining. The official reasoning for the moratorium is to "protect and enhance the City's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources." Plattsburgh residents have seen skyrocketing electrical bills -- as much as $100 to $200 increases -- as a result of commercial cryptomining operations that mine for cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, according to Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Read, who spoke with Motherboard. The city is taking action to protect its citizens from those rising electrical bills that the city of Plattsburgh says is caused by cryptomining operations.

It turns out that commercial cryptocurrency mining operations used up so much electricity that the city of Plattsburgh exceeded its allotted monthly budget of electricity. One single cryptocurrency mining operation called Coinmint used up around 10% of the city's allotted power supply alone in January and February, according to Motherboard. When its electrical budget was exceeded in January, the city had to buy electricity from the open market at a higher cost, which was distributed among its residents.

Comments

Good

[nwaack]

It's about damn time we start putting an end to this idiocy.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, we will never put an end to idiocy. Putting an end to people using real-world resources to "mine" a fictitious currency? We probably can't even end that, far,far too many of us are far, far too stupid. Best we could maybe do is make the fake currency value what it is actually worth (zero), so that people will stop "mining" it in the first place. Oh, wait, no, we are collectively probably too stupid to do that also. We are just fucked, let's admit it, this is just a symptom.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about damn time we start putting an end to this idiocy.

You think one small town of less than 20k will make any difference at all? The only reason they're doing this is they're so small they don't even generate their own power. This is utterly meaningless to the crypto market as a whole.

Re:Good

[cayenne8]

...used up so much electricity that the city of Plattsburgh exceeded its allotted monthly budget of electricity.

Ok, this is a new one on me.

Since when does a city have an "allotment" of electricity per month??

I've never heard of such a thing. I never thought electricity was in any form or fashioned rationed out by the power company?

Re:Good

[saloomy]

They probably buy electricity from the city, who buys it from elsewhere. This was probably a scam to make margins on power, but crypto currency is eating away at those margins, because power utilities who they made deals with put limits and conditions, and tiers in place.

Re:Good

[Vektuz]

The electricity company cannot produce infinite electricity at a whim. They have a certain amount of generation capacity, and when demand increases, they can build additional plants - but they are expensive to run and take a long time to build.

So at any given time there is a fixed amount of peak electricity available (you can't really store it) and the cities and companies basically run on estimates on how much is in use / will be needed, thats the allotment.

If a city were to suddenly draw 10x as much power, this is a problem, as it can stress the grid. It can be overcome by building additional production facilities, but that takes years.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is a symptom of a larger disease, which is free market capitalism

If the US didn't learn from the Great Depression that a regulated economy is necessary to avoid misapplication of resources and improper allocation of financial responsibility, then we are all fucked (globally)

Re:Good

[fustakrakich]

The "allotment" is the amount at the set price. Above that you pay a higher rate. There is nothing uncommon about the practice. Free market at work.

Re: Good

[peragrin]

The city probably buys in bulk based on historical forecasts and usages. It then is responsible for distribution in city limits.

Lots of small towns and cities run their own electric company often at rates lower than normal market will do in that region.

They then do the maintence on the local grid too.

The business moved in due to the cheap electrical lied about it's usage(which probably required a waiver from the town) and proceeded to spend.

Expect to see similar stories as Bitcoin Drops in price.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It is likely that the city has it's own utility service (a lot of small cities do this). This utility probably does not produce it's own power, as it might be to small to justify such a large investment. What it does, instead, is contract with a larger utility company that they will buy up to a certain amount of capacity at a discounted rate, and if the go over this alloted amount, they must purchase from the open market, without the discount.

Companies that use a lot of energy do something similar.

Re:Good

[nedlohs]

So you think the power company can create arbitrary amounts of electricity on a whim? Rather than having a maximum generation capacity before they would have to source power from other providers?

You've never heard of overage charges in which you pay extra when you use more than a pre-agreed limit on something? DO you not know what the word "budget" means maybe?

I can't fathom how someone could live in the modern world and never have come across these concepts.

My water bill, my cell phone bill, my electricity bill, and my colocation network bill, sending a package with fedex all use similar structures.

Re: Good

[cayenne8]

The city probably buys in bulk based on historical forecasts and usages. It then is responsible for distribution in city limits.

What do you mean the "city buys"?

Everywhere I've ever lived, how much electricity I use is directly between myself and the power company.

The power company bills me directly for how much energy I use.

Are you telling me some cities buy electricity and sell it to the citizens as a middleman?

Re:Good

[cayenne8]

So you think the power company can create arbitrary amounts of electricity on a whim?

No, but it sounded like the city was the one buying or being allocated power from the electric company rather than the actual customer.

I've never heard of anywhere where the power company sells to the city and apparently resells to the customer based on what the city had bought or was allocated, etc.

I've always gotten a bill directly from the power company, not the city.

Re:Good

[vadim_t]

Well said, comrade!

Actually, what happened to good old capitalism, I wonder? Shouldn't the idea be that you can do any arbitrary stupidity you like, so long it doesn't harm people and you pay for it? So how about just sending them a bigger bill?

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't ban residential users, they banned companies from coming into their town and setting up a mining operation. The town had previously subsidized power for industrial users, in order to try to attract companies that would create jobs. The bit coin miners will just no longer be getting that subsidy, because they don't create jobs, and use up all the power forcing the town to buy it off the open market and raising the price for everyone.

two bitcoin mining operations were using 10% of the towns cheap power and increased everyone's bill by about $10 for jan and feb.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

you are probably used to residential power which is typically metered and is pay as you use it.

i am trying to simplify this a bit, but All large electrical users, such as large industries or maybe entire towns, typically pay for a block of power, or based on their peak usage for a month. and they need to pay for this amount of power regardless of if they use it each day. Because the power company needs to be able to produce that much power even if they don't use that much each day. In the case of the town, they will likely then sell that power to the customers via their municipal utility.

It appears this town is allocated cheap power from a nearby hydro electric dam, if they go over the allotment, then they need to purchase the power from the open market (other power companies).

Re:Good

[bv728]

Since nobody seems to be putting the actual facts as a response:

As part of an agreement with the power company, the city gave them the right to build a large hydroelectric dam on city property in exchange for access to an allotment of power at an extremely cheap rate. When they exceed that allotment, the city has to buy off power exchange, which is significantly more, accounting for covering storage, exchange, and transmission costs on the larger network.

The city very rarely (or never) exceeded that allotment before, and now is. Because of how the contracts are structured, that additional cost is passed on to all consumers on their bill - everyone pays based on time-windowed averaged costs of power over the month, not the exact real cost at the moment of consumption (this is pretty normal due to storage and variable rates per time block otherwise making bills goofy complicated).

The result is they voted in an 18-month stop on NEW cryptomining operations (existing ones can continue) with a plan to submit to the appropriate regulatory bodies a modification to electrical pricing that would allow them to place the additional costs from the Power Exchange on high power utilization businesses, rather than across all users. The cryptomining operations mostly seem okay with this, as the proposal still sees them get a decent chunk of cheap power.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about damn time we start putting an end to this idiocy.

Yes, let's make sure we punish those cryptominers!

Oh, and don't forget a nice gentle slap on the wrist for those who had a hand in the global financial meltdown a decade ago. I mean after all, we wouldn't want to do anything to disrupt the REAL greed and corruption in this financial world but hey, make sure you fucking come down HARD on those crypto miners. You know, because impact...

Re:Good

[religionofpeas]

What idiocy ? The idea that a citizen can use their own paid electricity for whatever legal purpose they want ?

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You often don't buy electricity from the guy who generated it. You buy electricity from the one who owns the wires that brings it to your house. In some places, that's the city. In others, it's a coop owned by the members. In others, it's a regional power provider. It all works the same way.

Re:Good

[mysidia]

NO.... Not good. Now some city is dictating what you can use your electricity for that you purchased in your own home and banning some computation.

They should accomplish their objectives some other way.

When its electrical budget was exceeded in January, the city had to buy electricity from the open market at a higher cost, which was distributed among its residents.

How about setting a monthly kilowatt hour limit high-water and low-water levels ---- If you exceed the high-water limit, then you will pay twice to three times as much for the portion of all the electricity you used above the limit, funds will go into a pool to be spent to help cover overbudget events and build more capacity: If you used less than the low-limit, then you will get a discount on all your electricity.

If the city goes above its budget and has to buy from the open market: instead of distributing the cost evenly, the cost sharing should be highly weighted to each customer based on kWH consumed divided by number of individual users.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like the simplest solution to this issue is leave the rates as is for residential customers. Tack the higher rates the city needs to pay to purchase power on the commercial/industrial users. I'm sure for a lot of the commercial/industrial users they have running averages of what they have used in the past. Set a threshold per business based on that average if they go over the average they pay some sort of surcharge. For a new business they should need to estimate their power usage and get a rate approval for that usage from the city with some threshold that they pay a surcharge over.

My utility company already does similar for residential customers. Here in Tampa Florida we have a flat rate of $0.086 per kwh for the 1st 1000kwh. Anything above 1000kwh is billed at $0.107 per kwh

For the average home staying under 1000kwh is doable most of the year, In the summer I jump over that threshold a little bit for air conditioning. Unless you live in an old home with shoddy insulation or a mcmansion 1000kwh is a doable limit. And an incentive for people to save energy.

I have to wonder as electric cars become more common if that threshold will change in some way or if they might bill usage for car charging separately at some variable rate depending on time of day the charging is done. As far as I know right now electric car users would fall under the same tiered pricing, so that will probably throw them over that threshold a lot. Though ever at the higher tier its still cheaper than gas, and still cheaper than electric in many other parts of the country.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Everywhere I've ever lived, how much electricity I use is directly between myself and the power company.

The power company bills me directly for how much energy I use.

Are you telling me some cities buy electricity and sell it to the citizens as a middleman?

Yes. And if the city owns the power company? Then you're buying from the city. It's not uncommon for utilities to be municipally owned, or at least be quasi-government entities.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

the great depression did not affect the ussr's economy

Re:Good

[mysidia]

and when demand increases, they can build additional plants - but they are expensive to run and take a long time to build.

No.... they are expensive to build And take a long time to get the government approval to build.

And building additional plants/capacity is difficult to justify, because overbuilding is an inherent necessity, and they can't turn that around to profit until demand for electricity gradually increases.....

So anyways: This is an area where Bitcoin could help by generating demand early, so the extra capacity can be built and not sit dormant waiting before people need the electricity ----- then as demand from the population ramps up, the cost of electricity increases until the cost is high enough the Bitcoin miners can't profit, so they close up shop move on to the next area where electrical infrastructure is being underutilized.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Local bool = local rules. Po joeschmoe pilgrims pay for the crony-capitalist rippoff carpet-bagging crypto-miners. Best fuck miners in azzhole and watch therm bleed GPUs.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

What idiocy ? The idea that a citizen can use their own paid electricity for whatever legal purpose they want ?

Tragedy of the Commons.

Re:Good

[Darinbob]

Their electricity originates from a hydroelectric plant (ie, a dam), and that is parceled out to various municipalities. Ie, the region's power generation infrastructure that was paid for by tax dollars is being used by regional tax payers. Excess power can be sold on the open market, but the local cities get first dibs.

Re: Good

[cayenne8]

You bet. Hagerstown, MD buys electricity on the open market delivered via Potomac Edison (large regional carrier) and then is distributed on city owned wires and poles. Your bills say MELP (Municipal Electric Light Plant) on them, not PE. They used to have their own coal and oil fired generating station but it stopped generating in the 1980's and was finally razed last year.

Wow..that is weird.

I have never in my many years of living in different cities ever heard of, or encountered such a set up with the city acting as middleman between power company and citizens.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. That's so totally sane. Amazing.

Re:Good

[Darinbob]

They should charge overage charges to the currency miners and charge them at a higher rate. And they have every right to do so. They should even have a case of doing this retroactively if the mining companies lied about their expected rate of electricty use. They would be in their rights also to give only a certain allotment to the mining companies and pulling the plug when that is exceeded.

The super cheap price for industrial user (cheaper than residential rates!) was intended to bring in jobs. That's a naive plan that too many cities fall for, sweetheart deals to attract a larger tax base, which rarely works out. That's because there's more automation now, fewer jobs arrive to offset the industry discounts. City councils are often thinking about the good old days when a new factory would need lots of workers all eager to go out and buy houses and pay sales tax; and local citizens are all thinking that a new industry will need lots of local unskilled workers and thus save their economy. Now these cryptominers show and and show the flaws in this thinking as this industry ends up being a net drain on the city.

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

The city very rarely (or never) exceeded that allotment before,

The city didn't exceed its allotment, the people used more than normal. The city isn't the user.

It appears that this is a case of a municipal electric company that buys from a real electric company and the customers used more electricity than the city utility had planned and budgeted for. Instead of simply charging the highest users higher rates, or renegotiating the contract to remove the artificial supply limit, the response of the city is to put limits on what the customers, the residents and citizens of the city, can use the electricity they've paid for to do. They've paid for the electricity, but they cannot use it for otherwise legal purposes.

This is a new downside to a municipal utility that nobody seems to have considered before. The city is making certain uses of electricity illegal. Imagine them doing that with Internet. An ISP can put limits in their TOS, but the non-governmental ISP cannot enter your premises searching for uses that aren't approved, all they can do is cut off service based on what they see from the outside. The CITY, however, has police powers and can get a search warrant to look for illegal uses of electricity, or Internet. Not "illlegal", just against the TOS.

And, apparently, the city was so stupid that they didn't consider a progressive rate system to charge high-quantity users more and thought it was perfectly acceptable to charge everyone more when a few overused. Hmm, I see a direct ISP/Internet analogy here, too.

The cryptomining operations mostly seem okay with this,

Well, yeah, the existing operations are quite happy because they get to keep operating at a below-true-cost rate for electricity. New operations are screwed because they cannot use a product that they are paying for in the way they see fit. The remaining customers should be very wary of their wonderful government-run utility, since this is a precedent that isn't good.

Imagine a city-run water utility that bans flushing toilets during the Super Bowl because too many people try to flush all at the same time (during bad commercials or at halftime) and it overtaxes the supply. And they've got the power to enforce the law. You're not on the Group W bench for littering, you're there for flushing your toilet. Welcome to 1984.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the confusion stems from the fact that the city is the one doing the paying, rather than the individual consumers. At least, that's the reason I am finding it hard to wrap my head around this.

Re: Good

[BLToday]

Because it was already screwed up from the Bolshevik Revolution.

Re:Good

[gmack]

They scan still have capitalism, just drive the miners a short distance over the Quebec border where the power is cheaper anyways.

Re:Good

[supremebob]

Yeah... we had people mining World Of Warcraft gold and Second Life Linden Dollars for profit long before Bitcoin and it's clones arrived. If you give people an easy way to make money with their computer in their spare time, people will try it no matter how pathetic the daily returns are.

Re: Good

[rogoshen1]

and yet had the FDIC existed back then, the fallout would have been much less severe.

Not all regulation is bad, not everything a government does is bad.

Those damn libertarians always pushing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

They should charge overage charges to the currency miners and charge them at a higher rate.

Why should there be a concept of "overage" on electricity? If you buy a 60A service from the electric company, why shouldn't you be allowed to draw 60A 24/7/365? Isn't it false advertising to put on artificial limits? (This is a perfect analogy for Internet use, btw.)

But of course, they should have a tiered rate structure with higher rates for higher tiers, IF the costs are actually higher as the quantity goes up. Do you feel the same way about Internet usage?

They should even have a case of doing this retroactively if the mining companies lied about their expected rate of electricty use.

Absolutely NOT. The customers were sold a service, the use was measured, and they paid the rates that were in effect at that time. There should be no retroactive modification of rates. And how is it lying when you order a 200A service from the electric company and then use 200A for a large amount of the time? You don't have to estimate how much electricity you're going to use next month, you use it and then get charged. That's why they have METERS, you know.

Now these cryptominers show and and show the flaws in this thinking as this industry

And do we have any information that shows that any of the cryptominers tried to get a economic development designation to get a lower tax rate, or did they just start renting an empty office (or use their own garage) to mine in? I know, it's a useful excuse to rant about municipal tax breaks that do bring companies into an area (like Target distribution centers) that do bring jobs, but cryptomining isn't an industry in that sense. It can be run from your garage or a standard office building and employs very few people. The days of manual calculations of bitchains and bitcoins is long over, it is ALL automated.

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

If you exceed the high-water limit, then you will pay twice to three times as much

That's called a tiered rate structure, and it is standard practice in the utility business. At least it has been standard practice at every electric and water company I've been a customer of. Each electric bill lists so many kWH at so much per, then so many kWH at a bit more, etc. It's not a new concept. Except for these city idiots who thought charging everyone more when a few people used a lot was a good idea.

Re:Good

[vtcodger]

FWIW, here's a link to the story in Plattsburgh's local newspaper which may provide a clearer explanation of the problem. http://www.pressrepublican.com... And yes, late December and early January did feature some unusually low temperatures -- around -17F(-27C) several nights presumably causing folks to run more electric heaters than usual more of the time.

Re: Good

[BlueStrat]

I have never in my many years of living in different cities ever heard of, or encountered such a set up with the city acting as middleman between power company and citizens.

It's a way for the city to make profit on the margin between what the city pays and what they charge residents. It's a stealth tax.

This city saw it's profits being affected, and possibly eventually threatening to disrupt their entire setup as unnecessary percentage-taking middleman between electrical utilities and customers.

I wonder how they'll deal with the installation of electric vehicle charging stations coming in the very near future. Hell, I wonder how the US electrical grid as a whole is hoing to deal with the additional energy demand equivalent to the energy consumed as fossil-fuel powering current vehicles. That's a hell of a lot of energy. US generation capacity is already stretched to serve current demand with little to no reserve capacity.

Hopefully it will spur a resurgence in nuclear power generation and reworking of nuclear regulatory policies to something approaching the universe in which relatively-sane national nuclear regulatory policy resides.

Strat

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

Yes, it is a symptom of a larger disease, which is free market capitalism

Nonsense. It is a symptom of government control and the controllers being inept. This is a city utility where the overly-egalitarian management thought that charging everyone more when high-users pushed the costs up was a good idea.

Even a moment's thought would have shown why that is a bad idea. It shouldn't take Gramma getting a $400 electric bill to pay for a cryptominer's electricity to wake people up.

You might have missed -- this wasn't a free market operation to start with. The city negotiated an artificial limit on supply and a poor rate structure for reselling that supply. The fact that they have to beg the regulatory agencies for the ability to change their rate structure might also be a hint that free-market economics aren't relevant here.

Re:Good

[Darinbob]

Because there may not be that much electricity. Also such a high use puts greater demands on the infrastructure, and so it is more expensive to supply the service. I meant a tiered rate, which is how overage charges are sometimes done, though sometimes tiered rates are by time of day. Especially in the case of this city when the low cost electricity shared with residential users is a fixed amount, you do not want one customer taking most of it.

Consider if this was the water service. If an industry moves in, digs a well, then sucks the water table dry, it has a severe effect on the neighbors. Or if they just turned on the tap and forgot about it. These cryptominers did have a noticeable effect on the electricity rates of all users, not just themselves. Granted, a lot of that was naivete on the part of the city.

Sure, it should apply to internet. The big snag that caused all the early complaints was with early high use users of cable internet who shared their wires with their neighbors. They started whining loudly about how service was declining over time as more of their neighbors started using the internet. It's not an infinite service, there isn't infinite bandwidth. Extra demand can increase supply, but not instantly. Again, naivete on the part of ISPs for offering "unlimited" plans.

In this case, it wasn't a straight up tax break, but a steep discount on electricity (2c per KWh I think, compared to national average of 10c). And it was an industry and the city knew it existed, this wasn't a case of people secretly mining from their bedrooms.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You should get out more. Last two cities I have lived in have been like that too. Even Lincoln, NE uses Lincoln Electric.

https://www.les.com

Feb. 1, 1966, Lincoln Electric System was formed and a single utility began providing electric energy in and around Lincoln, Neb. In November 1970, Lincoln voters approved formation of a semi-autonomous administrative board of local citizens to oversee operations of the nonprofit, customer-owned utility.

Today, LES services approximately 200 square miles within Lancaster County in Nebraska, comprising the cities of Lincoln, Prairie Home, Waverly, Walton, Cheney, and Emerald. See a map of the service area.

The primary goal of our approximately 500 employees is to provide an adequate and reliable electric supply at the lowest possible cost to our approximately 118,518 residential customers and 16,649 commercial and industrial customers.

They purchase power in bulk and then resell it at a rate that covers costs but is cheaper then any commercial place would.
It works great when its done right. Its why many people would like to see municipal internet in their area. You would have to argue with a large number of people if you tried to get rid of LES.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

They didn't ban residential users, they banned companies from coming into their town and setting up a mining operation. The town had previously subsidized power for industrial users, in order to try to attract companies that would create jobs. The bit coin miners will just no longer be getting that subsidy, because they don't create jobs, and use up all the power forcing the town to buy it off the open market and raising the price for everyone.

two bitcoin mining operations were using 10% of the towns cheap power and increased everyone's bill by about $10 for jan and feb.

Oh, I read the articles before posting. They don't negate anything I said. This is a nothing story about a tiny town planning to doing something that it really can't get away with in the long term because it's poorly managed. It's a massive overreaction to a minor problem they created themselves. They don't have to subsidize power but even they know that a shitty lawyer could get this "moratorium" overturned easily. Hell, it hasn't even gone into effect yet and I doubt it will because if the area is zoned commercial and the business is legal they can't stop it because it uses more power than they want. New York is deregulated so you can buy power from where ever you want.

Bottom line is this is a pointless filler story on a trendy topic about something that will most likely never go into effect.

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

Because there may not be that much electricity.

What is this a response to? Because what? It's obvious there was enough electricity -- they were buying it and reselling it and charging everyone higher rates. There is nothing in that story about anyone running out of electricity. There was "that much" because they sold "that much" and the customers used "that much".

I meant a tiered rate,

Fine, but you said "overage charges", which is a fee applied when you go over a set limit. Different thing altogether.

Consider if this was the water service.

I already have, as I used water service as an example of a city utility making flushing a toilet at certain times illegal.

If an industry moves in, digs a well,

If there is municipal water service, digging wells is prohibited.

These cryptominers did have a noticeable effect on the electricity rates of all users, not just themselves.

They shouldn't have, and it should not have resulted in a ban on specific uses of electricity. Uses, I will point out again, that require intrusive measures to determine. (I.e., you can't stand outside a building and say "I can prove they are crytomining inside.") This is an example of poor management of a city utility which didn't result in a change to the rate structure but the creation of a law specifying what you can and cannot use electricity to do. A legal solution to an issue created by stupid management. It is telling you that you can use all the electricity you want, unless you want to use it for this purpose. Just like telling people they can use all the water they want as long as they don't use it to flush their toilet.

Sure, it should apply to internet.

Roger.

In this case, it wasn't a straight up tax break, but a steep discount on electricity (2c per KWh I think, compared to national average of 10c).

It was not a tax break because taxes weren't involved. It was a low rate for electricity for everyone, not just the evil industries. This is pretty clear from the fact that the issue is rising electric bills for residential users, too. If there were different rate structures involved, the rates for one kind of use would be independent of others.

Re:Good

[Applehu Akbar]

It's about damn time we start putting an end to this idiocy.

Who knew that cryptocurrency mining would turn out to be tougher on the environment than gold mining?

Re:Good

[fustakrakich]

The power company's contract is with the city, not the individual consumers

Re: Good

[TheRealMindChild]

Try not living under a rock. It is also done with water too.

Re:Good

[jd]

To combat global warming, we need demand reduced. It's no good producing Starship Enterprise levels of power if everyone is dead.

Re:Good

[psmoot]

FWIW, PG&E, my power company, charges rates tiered by usage (e.g. the first N kW-Hours are cheaper than the second, third, and fourth N). You can also sign up for a time-of-day plan, which is cheaper most of the time, more expensive from around 2-8 PM. Finally, there's a program which gets you a bit of a discount all the time in exchange for exorbitantly expensive electricity on high demand days (basically scorching hot summer afternoons).

We used to be on the last plan. My wive loved the discount until we hit a heat wave. Then it sunk in that running the AC or anything else just got really expensive.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming is a myth. Stop perpetuating that lie.

Re:Good

[serviscope_minor]

No.... they are expensive to build And take a long time to get the government approval to build.

No, they simply take a long time to build. Power stations are big. Big things take a long time to build. You can't just go to Harbour Freight and buy a couple of Siemens 500MW Gas turbines. Even after approval power plants take years to build.

Re:Good

[Sigma 7]

Now some city is dictating what you can use your electricity for that you purchased in your own home and banning some computation.

Actually, it's the city that purchased the electricity, and passes the lowered rates onto the people and industries in the city. Because of the nature of the reduced rates, it's perfectly acceptable for the city to provide requirements for people or industries to likewise be billed at the reduced rate, whether it is to provide jobs for the community or making a custom arrangement so that it doesn't disrupt others.

The libertarian argument should be reserved for those who purchase electricity directly from the power companies, rather than those who constantly sink a discounted rate from the city grid.

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

Because of the nature of the reduced rates, it's perfectly acceptable for the city to provide requirements for people or industries to likewise be billed at the reduced rate, whether it is to provide jobs for the community or making a custom arrangement so that it doesn't disrupt others.

No, it is not acceptable. The city is operating a utility -- a government created and controlled monopoly -- and should not be putting requirements like "job creation" on the ability to buy power. They CAN have a rate structure to give a break to companies that will be creating a lot of jobs, but they didn't do that. They chose to make certain uses of electricity illegal. That's also not acceptable.

rather than those who constantly sink a discounted rate from the city grid.

Since the city operates the only grid available, it needs to do so without arbitrary or capricious limits on what the power you buy can be used to do.

I'm fascinated by the dichotomy that appears to be occurring here. The claim that the "cable company" is a "government-granted monopoly" (which is not true) is used to argue for all kinds of regulation on what they can and cannot do. Here we have a true government-granted monopoly and it can do whatever it wants, from social engineering to outright criminalizing certain actions.

Re: Good

[rlk]

Municipal power companies aren't that uncommon. They often charge lower rates and provide better service; after an early snowstorm in October 2011 in Massachusetts, the municipal utilities had their towns back in operation a lot faster than the private ones.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

When you are a commercial user of electricity (eg Steel and Aluminium smelting) you pay in fixed blocks for how much you will use. If you don't use that much, you are still committed to spending that, or more as a penalty. So if your business uses $10,000 in electricity per year, and suddenly uses $5000, you are still on the hook for $10,000. This is often why data centers don't care about energy efficiency. They would rather you run cryptocoin miners or seti@home, or some other thing to meet their power allotment than waste it.

The matter-of-fact thing is, electricity has a cost to generate. For coal, oil, and natural gas, there is an input cost. For geothermal, hydro, wind and solar, there is a storage cost. So if you are operating a hydro plant, you're never going to run it at a rate that the reservoir is rapidly depleted, especially if it's also used for drinking water or recreation. But if it's reaching the spillway, you would rather push it through the generators than let it go through the spillway. Hence, hydro power is always cheap, and if you chain it with geothermal, you can use the same water twice. Wind and Solar however have no built-in storage, so when you turn on your wind and solar, you scale back your hydro generation so that the reservoirs are refilled faster. If however, the dam is simply overflowing with water, you're better off generating 100% of the electricity from hydro and disconnecting the solar and wind sources since they're not as reliable.

So in the case of this city, it's likely it has no generation capacity at all. Many other cities around the US and Canada are likely to follow suit if they do not get their energy from Hydro sources.

Speaking of which, those Aluminium and Steel tariffs, bad idea. If they're imposed on Canada, Canada will just shut off all US exports of electricity, which is what the US uses for producing their own steel and aluminium. Don't start a trade war with Canada. Energy and Water are two very big levers we have, and they are not uses as weapons in a trade war currently because of treaties on their use. But if the US is willing to rip of a treaty, so is Canada. Wouldn't it suck to suddenly have all water sources in Canada stop flowing to the US? Wouldn't it suck to have all energy sources cut off? Like Trump thinks he's got Canada by the balls here with NAFTA, but really it's the other way around. NAFTA was "a horribly bad, and unfair deal" for Canada and Mexico as well. The only thing that should be renegotiated in NAFTA is the free-flow of citizens between our countries and minimum job wages/healthcare to be at parity. Because that is what is "sending jobs to mexico", their lack of minimum wage standards, and what is sending Canadian and American jobs across each others borders (lack of wage parity, lack of healthcare parity), and often Canadians take a job in the US because Canada is not competitive wage-wise, and likewise Americans take Canadian jobs because they need the healthcare.

Bring wage and healthcare into parity in NAFTA, and all the other concerns will iron themselves out quickly.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

kryptokurrency is a myth. stop perpetuating that lie.

Re: Good

[TrumpThemAll]

My power bill charges more money per kw the more you use. They are now charging more for power used during the day time too. This is killing me because it work from home using computers. I rarely watch TV and I have switched all my lights to led and it still costing me a fortune.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that seems rather sensible! Now how could i turn this into clickbait headline?

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you familiar with MMORPGs or the term gold farmer?

Re: Good

[aliquis]

LOL.

The typical scenario is that the central planned allocation is wrong.
The free market not so much / at all.

Since there's demand for these currencies people provide them.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an adage that "regulations are written in blood" because even though sometimes years can obscure the real reasons, many regulations exist because in the past someone was seriously harmed, even died, because of the thing being regulated.

Take building codes, sure we all love to complain about them but the fact is that before building codes existed, people put up all kinds of shoddy construction that frequently led to real problems. In the old days before things like indoor plumbing and electricity maybe you could get away with very little regulation, but running live power through the walls of a house means that if done wrong, there is a very real risk of death.

Or people love to complain about the FDA, but before all those odious regs existed, we had a "free market" where people sold opium based products as teething pain relievers for babies.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the article published by a government established NPR station (WBUR) which quoted a government employed power worker stating that they were doing a better job than privatly owned power companies because they didn't have to worry about the "bottom line".
Of course he also didn't mention that his company doesn't have to pay any governmental taxes either.
Also mentioned, at the rate they are burying power lines, they will be proudly finished by 2168. Nice.

Re:Good

[redlemming]

If the US didn't learn from the Great Depression that a regulated economy is necessary to avoid misapplication of resources and improper allocation of financial responsibility, then we are all fucked (globally)

It's pretty clearly established that bad government regulation caused the Great Depression - and kept it going for far longer than needed. The economics literature is full of studies - and there are a number of books out there as well.

For example, federal mis-handling of the money supply was a primary contributor. Also, the majority of the bank failures were caused by regulations that limited the investments the "county" banks could make, making them very vulnerable to failure.

Hoover and especially FDR made matters worse with numerous bad decisions - the worst of which was implementing and keeping the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (which in and of itself would have been an economic disaster even in the absence of the other bad policies). At times in the "Roaring 20's" the US had the lowest unemployment in the developed nations - but after 8 years of FDR the US wasn't even in the top 10. Correction of the process started when many of FDR's policies had to be suspended due to WW2 - and the Great Depression was finally ended when those policies were thrown out entirely after the war.

The literature is full of other examples. You might start with the book "New Deal or Raw Deal" by Folsom, or FDR's Folly by Powell. "Out of Work" by Vedder and Gallaway is also informative.

Yes, regulation is needed - Adam Smith made that point clear in 1776, and there is lots of history since then to confirm the point, but bad regulation is not desirable. It is very difficult for government officials to know what regulations are appropriate, and they often get it wrong (as evidenced by the failures of Keynesian policy over the years since WW2).

Despite myths to the contrary, the US industrial system during WW2 was very much a capitalist system with only some government regulation - it was set up by William S. Knudsen, who resigned from his position as CEO of General Motors out of patriotism to take on the task for one dollar a year. Nobody in the government knew how to run industrial production - but Knudsen did, and he set things up to balance the capabilities of industry with the needs of the war effort (taking into account both what large businesses could do, and how smaller businesses could help). It was not something a government bureaucrat could have achieved - it took a capitalist with a deep understanding of capitalism and manufacturing (Knudsen had come up through the ranks, starting as a machinist), balanced with strong patriotism, to make things work.

Re:Good

[justin3928]

Why should there be a concept of "overage" on electricity? If you buy a 60A service from the electric company, why shouldn't you be allowed to draw 60A 24/7/365? Isn't it false advertising to put on artificial limits? (This is a perfect analogy for Internet use, btw.)

But of course, they should have a tiered rate structure with higher rates for higher tiers, IF the costs are actually higher as the quantity goes up. Do you feel the same way about Internet usage?

Do you expect your electrical bill to be fixed every month? Electricity is not changed by capacity. The resource being sold is electrical power.

"overage" is merely usage tiers: X $/kwh for power up to R1. Y $/kwh for power above R1.

For (consumer) internet, the resource being sold is bandwidth, regardless of volume.

Re:Good

[MemeRot]

Not true.... we could build some terraform scale powered CO2 scrubbers. Its leaving greenhouse gases in the atmosphere thats a problem, not demand for electricity

Re:Good

[eric_harris_76]

Yes, it is a symptom of a larger disease, which is free market capitalism

Well, that's the stupidest thing I've seen today. On the Internet. On Slashdot. (The competition is pretty fierce if FB and G+ are included.)

A government-regulated public utility business (or is it government-owned?) sells more product than it expected to, due to a new category of customer, and charges the customers who didn't buy that unexpected excess product more.

Hanging that one on capitalism -- free market capitalism, no less -- is quite remarkable.

It's like blaming obesity on fasting, or blaming parking tickets for car.crashes.

Your prize: a dictionary of economic terms.

Re:Good

[catprog]

My understanding was it was a very good rate for a limited amount. The miners then took all the cheap stuff.

Re: Good

[Anonymous Coward]

But the peering agreement between ISPs is volume ($.04 per GB or some such) regardless of bandwidth.

They sell it to you as a speed thing because they expect "20 mbps speed!" Users to use a average of X GB per month and leave them a set profit

Going over a given amount of data makes things more expensive for everyone long term, just like with electricity. If you torrent non-stop you cost your ISP a huge amount of money, while everyone else is profit

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

Do you expect your electrical bill to be fixed every month?

Where did you get that ridiculous idea? I said nothing even close to that. I expect the rates to be fixed and not as flexible as this city is making them. That means the bill will vary. Where did I say otherwise?

Electricity is not changed by capacity.

Huh? Where did I say THAT? How would it change?

"overage" is merely usage tiers:

No, "overage" means a charge if you exceed a certain amount. Tiered pricing, which I've already talked about, is not the same thing.

For (consumer) internet, the resource being sold is bandwidth, regardless of volume.

It is not regardless of volume. When people make too much use of their bandwidth, they're sometimes getting overage charges, or sometimes getting capped. That's why this is a perfect analogy for Internet. (And I will also point out, there are many Internet plans that are volume with no mention of bandwidth.)

If you buy a 60A service, there should be no point where an overage charge kicks in. You should be able to draw 60A 24/7/365 and not be capped or find a new charge on your bill for being over. Just like many, if not most, people here argue that if you buy "up to 100Mbps Internet" you should not find yourself capped or with an extra fee because you went over some limit.

As a further analogy, why is the city electric company not able to provide the service it sells? If they sell 1000 60A services, then they should be able to provide 60kA 24/7, or for a 30 day month, 43MWH. (The true number for this city is certainly much higher, but this is an example.) For Internet, this would be analogous to selling 1000 100Mbps lines and therefore should be able to handle 100Gbps and a total of 30Tb for a month to their customers. That's what people say when the issue is Internet, why isn't anyone pointing this out for electricity?

Re:Good

[Obfuscant]

My understanding was it was a very good rate for a limited amount.

Which makes "free market" irrelevant here. The actual amount wasn't limited, it was an artificial limit imposed by a city contract.

The miners then took all the cheap stuff.

The miners bought what was being sold at the rate the city charged for it. Just like Gramma bought what was being sold at the rate the city charged for it. Are the miners to blame for the city being inept and creating an artificial scarcity?

Re:Good

[Xenx]

Except, power production is in fact limited. Only so much power is produced from a particular source at a particular rate. Then, there is the infrastructure to handle the power load and so on. Any finite resource will invariably be worth more, the less available it becomes. Thus, it's perfectly logical that cost would increase when the additional loads of miners are taken into account. The utility starts having to pay more per kWh to meet the demand. That additional cost per kWh gets passed down to the customers. Each customer is still only charged for their usage, but the base rate is now higher.

How to enforce the ban

[aglider]

Is the most interesting part!

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Cutting the power?

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Pinky's Brain]

Cripple them with fines if discovered, jail sentences if possible.

Balance risk/reward towards the risk enough and even low chances of discovery don't matter.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Anonymous Coward]

What an idiotic response. Consider that your odds of catching me are infinitesimal. You'd have to threaten me with eternal damnation to balance your risk/reward ration in the manner you advocate.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Oswald McWeany]

Is the most interesting part!

Having a neckbeard results in police having probable cause to search your property for bitcoin mining rigs. The thing is, it's all a scam, they're just trying to steal their Cheetos.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[the_skywise]

The TRUTH behind the civil forfeiture laws. It wasn't for money or cars... The PoPo wanted THE CHEETOS!

Re:How to enforce the ban

[silas_moeckel]

Commercial as in a datacenter full of rigs not some guy at home.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds of you being caught are near 100% unless you start stealing power from neighbors, at which point they'll rat you out and you're definitely going to jail. Guy I knew started mining a few years back, power company sent repair men over because they were sure something was wrong with his wiring since he was using so much power.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Train0987]

It is trivial to catch you. The amount of electricity you use is readily available by the power company and when one address consumes 10% of the entire town's allotment you'll stand out like a sore thumb.

Law enforcement has been using electricity use to find pot growing operations for decades.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[will_die]

No officer I am not running a bunch of computers, I'm growing weed.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Anonymous Coward]

Anecdote: I knew a guy who ran a bunch of servers in British Columbia who regularly got swept up in crackdowns for growhouses. As the number of states with legalized marijuana industries increases, what makes you think it won't work in reverse?

2008: lie to the police and say you don't grow weed, you run multiple home servers
2018: lie to the police and say you don't run multiple home servers, you grow weed

Re:How to enforce the ban

[mysidia]

You'll probably have provided an explanation for that when you got the POCO to upgrade you to 3-Phase 1000 AMP or more electrical services,
because the typical residential 100-Amp panel doesn't provide a lot of capacity for doing large-scale mining.

You can provide a reason for your electrical usage "Running BOINC clients" and high-volume GPU-based computation for personal research in mathematics, cryptography, and AI machine learning development.

The electrical consumption cannot be used to establish that you are running a commercial mining operation.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Anonymous Coward]

i see you didn't rtfa, this isn't about residential customers. and if you are are a big mining shop using 10% of the towns power, it is kind of difficult to hide that.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Actually, I do RTFA]

You're right. How are they going to find an activity highly correlated with (and outlawed because of) consuming tons of electricity. Why, you would need to track how much electricity every building in town uses.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Obfuscant]

Easy to catch you. It's called your electric meter. How do you think they catch the in-house pot farms?

The electric meter cannot catch you running a cryptomining operation. It can only tell the electric company that you are using a certain amount of electricity. They caught pot growers because a higher rate of electric use was used as justification for a search warrant, the execution of which is when they caught the people growing weed.

Isn't it wonderful, we now have a city where they can see a high electric usage and get a search warrant to look for cryptomining operations? What will be next on the prohibited uses for electricity? You're running a foundry or a true pot producing operation (with clay and a couple of kilns eating the electrons) -- that's now illegal because it uses electricity in a way we don't approve.

Either the townie crypto police or the DEA is going to come knocking based on the abnormal KWH used.

In both cases it will be the city police or county sheriff. Nobody gets credit for stopping the evil drug mongers if DEA does the raid, and politicians are all about getting credit. "Re-elect Bob for Sheriff, he's tough on drugs..."

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Obfuscant]

Why, you would need to track how much electricity every building in town uses.

It's a city-run electric company. They can track how much electricity EVERY customer uses. They can even correlate it with the time of day (if they use smart meters) and service level (60A, 100A, etc). If you use 100% during daylight but not at night, you're probably not cryptomining. If you use 100% at night but not during the day, you're probably a grow op. If you use 100% all the time, here's your search warrant, we're looking for a lot of computers.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[jd]

Voltage regulator. The circuit breakers that exist in the power grid already suffice. Just set the point to pre-spike levels for each district. If the district exceeds that, it gets cut out of the grid.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Anonymous Coward]

It can establish probable cause for a search warrent looking for computers, software, or documents containing evidence of illegal mining at the address, and then city cops can confiscate your computers as part of their investigation.

Once they have your equipment it's somewhere between easy and mind-blowingly-trivial to prove whether they equipment was mining cryptocurencies depending whether it's general use hardware and they have to look for mining software installed or ASICs that literally can't do anything else. But even if they can't pull that off they can still hang onto your gear as evidence for a really long time maybe even sell some of it off.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Enigma2175]

Are you hearing a "whooshing" sound right now?

Re:How to enforce the ban

[Obfuscant]

No, you are hearing a reemphasis of the point that a city run utility is different than a privately run one, if in nothing more than this ability to track users and act upon it. I do not know if the OP was being sarcastic, but my comment supports that if it was.

Re:How to enforce the ban

[thegarbz]

Is the most interesting part!

Same way you refuse any other industrial power purchasing contract: don't sign.

Why is everyone seeing rises?

[Anonymous Coward]

So commercial cryptominers don't pay their fair share? Why should rates rise for anyone else?

Oh right, everything is privatized so fuck the citizenry

Re:Why is everyone seeing rises?

[silas_moeckel]

You rent out some space in a cheap electrical area when the rates rise you move it elsewhere.

Re:Why is everyone seeing rises?

[Train0987]

Constantly moving to evade capture and the resulting downtime must be factored into your cost of operating. At some point it no longer becomes profitable.

Re:Why is everyone seeing rises?

[tsqr]

So commercial cryptominers don't pay their fair share? Why should rates rise for anyone else?

Oh right, everything is privatized so fuck the citizenry

Privatized does not mean what you appear to think it means. The utility is run by the city government.

Re:Why is everyone seeing rises?

[wyattstorch516]

The town gets a limited amount of cheap electricity from hydro power. That was enough for the people who lived in the town before the miners moved in. Once the miners came in all of the cheap electricity got sucked up and they had to buy the more expensive electricity on the market.

Blaming this on privatization is immature and infantile. Are you up for tenure at a college university?

Re:Why is everyone seeing rises?

[silas_moeckel]

They are not evading capture they are moving from one cheap power source to another when they raise rates. The problem with their power use was it meant the provider had to buy on the overpriced market vs meeting demand with local generation methods.

Difficulty will rise so high

[xack]

That only people with free or stolen electricty will be able to compete. We already see it with malware miners stealing peoples resources. I expect most electric companies will have mining restrictions in a few years, giving rise to “electricity neutrality” debates.

wrong problem

[supernova87a]

The city doesn't need to ban currency mining. They need to fix their electricity tariff (rates).

If currency miners find that it's economical to spend electricity like this, it means that the city is not charging commercial / residential customers the appropriate amounts when they exceed reasonable usage levels. They need to fix that. It probably means that a bunch of other things about their electricity and water and government services are priced incorrectly / being abused as well.

What can you do? All these local/town governments were set up with rules dating from 50 years ago, and they've never changed or adapted since.

Re:wrong problem

[Pinky's Brain]

Not all electricity consumption is equal. A citizen pays a lot more taxes per Wh consumed than a cryptominer. A factory employs people and thus brings in lots of taxes too per Wh consumed.

Cryptomining has externalities hard to capture in non discriminatory rates. Any discriminatory rate which accurately captured them would make cryptomining there unsustainable any way, so might as well ban it.

Re:wrong problem

[PolygamousRanchKid]

All these local/town governments were set up with rules dating from 50 years ago, and they've never changed or adapted since.

They don't want to change or adapt . . . it's right there in TFS:

The official reasoning for the moratorium is to "protect and enhance the City's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources."

. . . "in the purity of their precious bodily fluids!"

What will they do when that whippersnapper Elon Musk comes to town, with his newfangled cars that will sap the City's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources . . . ?

Re:wrong problem

[Vektuz]

This is sort of a half-fix but what would ultimately mean is that when a city installs a lot of solar/other stuff (for the benefit of their citizens to lower pollution/electricity costs/etc) and thus have excess cheap power to sell back to the grid or use, bitcoin miners would move in and use up all excess while its cheap, leading to the permanent residents of a town getting no cost benefit to doing it. They might even have to fire up the coal plants again to meet demand.

I can totally understand permanent residents of a city working with the council to basically say nope to that. They live there. Its their choice, thats how city governance works.

Otherwise what ends up happening is that the miners move in and starts increasing demand whenever the cost is under a certain amount, which means the cost has a strict floor at the price of bitcoin generation. It can never ever be cheaper than that, because the moment its cheaper than that, miners absorb all the excess, causing the cost of electricity to be tied to the price of bitcoin, something you probably don't want for your city if you live there, especially if you've been investing in infrastructure to reduce energy prices / clean pollution.

It gets worse, too. You might decide 'fine, let the market decide', so you are forced to build more electricity-producing plants to meet this rising demand and keep pushing costs down or face brownouts / blackouts in residential. Its really, really really expensive to build electric generation plants and the infrastructure to support them, and it takes a really long time, and they are expensive to maintain running, even if you 'turn them off'. But the miners move out whenever there's some other better opportunity elsewhere, leaving you with all this infrastructure your permanent residents payed for and are being taxed on...

Re:wrong problem

[OrangeTide]

It's the kind of city that would also ban solar panels for the same reasons.

Re:wrong problem

[Anonymous Coward]

A citizen pays a lot more taxes per Wh consumed than a cryptominer.

Then charge less in taxes, and more for electricity.

If electricity is being priced below market rates (and the balance made up from taxes), then it encourages people to use electricity even when the benefits to their lives are less than the cost of producing it. That's inefficient, and should be corrected.

Re:wrong problem

[edtice1559]

Which if you look at the actual moratorium, that's what they're doing. They just need time to get it in place. Hence the 18 month hold on new crypto-currency mining.

Re:wrong problem

[mysidia]

How about, things like you know:

Premium Weighting = (Kilowatt Hours used) Divided by (10 * Number of monthly Worker-Hours + Customer/Guest-Visit-Hours employed inside the facility)

Then you have an "allowance" based on how much local economic activity is generated.

Base Price = Standard discounted electric price, e.g. $0.10 / kWh

    Then for the monthly bill...

Price per Kilowatt hour consumed = (Base Price) + max(0, (G-Factor) x (Premium Weighting) x (Base Price) )

For example: 50000 kilowatt hours used by 5000 man-hours * 10 = Gives a weighting of 1.00, but 10x as many kWh gives a weighting of 10.0

Price per KwH = $0.10 + (G-Factor) X 1 * 0.10

The G-factor being set somewhere between 0.01 and 10.00 based on the month's "Overdemand" level for electricity
and some index of usage tiers; the greater the excessive overall demand by all users the higher each electric customer's indexed G-Factor will be be.

Re:wrong problem

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Did you even read the fucking summary??

The city doesn't need to ban currency mining. They need to fix their electricity tariff (rates).

They banned mining for 18 months until they finish finalized new rates

It probably means that a bunch of other things about their electricity and water and government services are priced incorrectly / being abused as well.

The city has a hydroelectric dam on city property. As part of the agreement to let a power company run it, they get a certain amount of heavily subsidized electricity. It worked fine for years until bitcoin mining came around.

What can you do? All these local/town governments were set up with rules dating from 50 years ago, and they've never changed or adapted since.

Well, you can change the rules or ban mining. Personally, I'm not sympathetic to Silicon Valley's "I invented a new technology, now the laws in place have to change to accommodate me" attitude.

Re:wrong problem

[Pinky's Brain]

Market rates are also non-linear based on consumption increase over time and duration. A coinminer starts up a lot faster than even a datacenter and drops out a lot faster too. You can't spread your investment for the increased capacity like you can with most normal consumers.

If cryptominers had to pay the true cost of their folly they'd have to pay multiple times that of normal consumers. Maybe even 10s of times.

Re:wrong problem

[Obfuscant]

It's the kind of city that would also ban solar panels for the same reasons.

Solar panels that can be seen from off the property certainly would be banned unless they were part of the original structure in any historical district, and historical districts are filled with structures that were built a long time before solar panels existed.

There was a recent story locally about a property owner being fined because the window frames on his new, energy efficient windows in a historic building didn't look like they were made in 1850. It's hard to make progress anywhere that wants to stay rooted in the 19th century.

Re:wrong problem

[Khashishi]

A citizen pays a lot more taxes per Wh consumed than a cryptominer.

Maybe it shouldn't be this way.

Re:wrong problem

[jd]

This is a case where you're far better off nationalizing. It's not like everyone has a wire to the power company they specifically buy from. Set the price per watt at 1.25x time the estimated power cost of generating the average bitcoin in the next quarter. That way, it's not economic and we can use electricity for useful things like Folding@Home and BOINC.

Re:wrong problem

[Obfuscant]

thus have excess cheap power to sell back to the grid or use, bitcoin miners would move in and use up all excess while its cheap, leading to the permanent residents of a town getting no cost benefit to doing it.

Other than being able to buy the cheap electricity, right, the permanent residents get no benefit.

You might decide 'fine, let the market decide', so you are forced to build more electricity-producing plants to meet this rising demand and keep pushing costs down or face brownouts / blackouts in residential.

Costs will go up if you have to build more infrastructure, which should be represented in the rates you charge the customers, in a tiered manner.

The solution to not having sufficient capacity is to build more. The secondary, temporary solution is to raise prices to reduce demand. That means prices for all uses of electricity. The worst solution is to start banning legal uses, since that only leads to more bans as the demand from other users goes up. That electricity not being used by cryptominers can be used by others, and eventually it will be. What do you do then? Do you build more capacity or ban the latest high-volume uses?

But the miners move out whenever there's some other better opportunity elsewhere, leaving you with all this infrastructure your permanent residents payed for and are being taxed on...

This is a case of a city buying electricity from someplace else. They didn't need to build capacity, they need to negotiate a better contract with their provider. They also need to create a tiered rate structure so Gramma doesn't wind up paying for the cryptominer's electricity. When the cryptominer starts paying higher rates and decides to move out, the city is not stuck with unused production facilities, those facilities exist elsewhere and can be used to make electricity that the cryptominers buy from the place they moved to.

The only reason taxes are involved is because this is a municipal utility. Were it a real electric company (with their own production and not just a reseller) then there would be no tax implications. Since the city is a reseller and not a producer, there are still no taxes involved because the city isn't building production that may or may not become idle.

Re:wrong problem

[dwye]

Personally, I'm not sympathetic to Silicon Valley's "I invented a new technology, now the laws in place have to change to accommodate me" attitude.

Well, the laws DID change to accommodate them, sort of. :-)

they get a certain amount of heavily subsidized electricity.

And there is the problem. It would be just as bad if an aluminum plant moved in. Or another Oak Ridge. Or anything else that required lots of cheap power to be economical.

Tragedy of the Commons

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case the City obtained a benefit for everybody, lower electricity prices, because of their ability to negotiate in bulk.

The crypto-miners abused this common resource, resulting in increased electrical bills for everybody once that the prior negotiated lower rate was exhausted.

This really points to a design 'flaw' in all crypto currencies, and that is the offloading of transaction processing to the masses.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Bert64]

Their negotiations failed to account for demand... If anything, the presence of cryptocurrency mining operations increased usage and thus increased their bulk negotiation position.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Train0987]

How to you negotiate a position based on a demand premise that may or may not exist next week, much less next year?

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Anonymous Coward]

except they are subsidizing commercial operators, like these two bitcoin operations. with the expectation that they would have brought jobs, which can then be taxed to recover that subsidy and provide additional revenue to the city.

So basically they are selling the power to the bitcoin miners either at cost or maybe even at a loss with the expectation of getting jobs. But bitcoin mining doesn't really produce any jobs.

did the city screw up? yes, and they realized they messed up, thus they are just stopping more crypto miners from moving in until they can figure out how to fix it.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Bert64]

If their bulk negotiations allows them to buy power cheaper, then supplying it at cost to bitcoin miners as well as other users provides benefits to all those users.
Bitcoin miners still have to pay tax on the property which houses their mining equipment, it may not bring in as much tax revenue as a factory full of workers but it still provides benefits to the area.

Re:Tragedy of the Commons

[Anonymous Coward]

The miners in Plattsburgh are renting their space in some of the lowest value properties in the market. Additionally, they're run by out of state (and out of country) investors that pay no taxes on the income generated by their operation. And, because the power is a municipal department, the city generates no profit in the increased sale of power. There is almost no benefit to the community from these operations.

Not my fault

[110010001000]

This isn't my fault. I only use Bitcoin from green sources.

You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[Anonymous Coward]

US Utilities Have Finally Realized Electric Cars May Save Them

So it's good that Electric Cars will consume more electricity, but bad that bitcoin mining consumes more electricity? Maybe I'm not trying hard enough (and I'm sure you'll let me know if that's the case), but I fail to see how one is good and the other is bad. The only bad thing I see coming out of bitcoin mining from this story is that the increased cost is being spread throughout the entire customer base when it probably could have been applied more directly to the bitcoin miners with a better tiered rate plan.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[Green Mountain Bot]

Electric vehicles reduce the use of other resources in exchange for increased use of electricity. Bitcoin mining has no such positive externality.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[Train0987]

The story says that a single miner consumed 10% of a region's entire electricity alotment. A single electric vehicle is not going to do that.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[Gavagai80]

Cars are extremely useful, cryptocurrencies provide nothing of value to the economy. Cars charge mostly at night when other use is low, mining rigs usually run all day. It's not hard to see the difference in value.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[religionofpeas]

Bitcoin mining has no such positive externality.

Let the market decide. This is not a communist state.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[jd]

The market was the entire point of Marxist economics and Lenin's strategy. So letting the market decide IS a communist state.

Re:You Can't Have It Both Ways!

[drinkypoo]

Also, in a generation or two we will be able to use the cars themselves to provide power during short periods when demand exceeds supply. EVs will actually make the grid more stable.

Scenario

[SuperKendall]

*Police bust through the door*
FREEZE! YOU ARE ALL UNDER ARREST FOR MINin....

*sees monster MJ grow op with lights and plants everywhere*

Oh, never mind, carry on then. We thought you had computers usin' all that 'lectricity.

Re: Scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are black, end up with a bullet in your ass.

Re:Scenario

[Anonymous Coward]

Power density of a MJ grow operation is far less watt/sqft than any modern datacenter
Even if using outdated HPS or MH 1000W bulbs (630 W CMH is equivalent) you are running about 15w/sqft.

Of course Air conditioning, fans, air purifiers, water pumps etc will add about 20% to that, but it is far below the 100w/sqft that datacenters will use.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Shoot them onsite. No mercy.

Easy to steal electricity

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole concept of crypto mining is to transform the costs (electricity, etc) that are forced onto another party into revenue for themselves. Because that's the way to maximize profits with crypto currencies.

Crypto Miner Survey

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone ever met a crypto miner that wasn't a complete jackass?

Let them mine all they want, but ban using grid

[f00zbll]

If some jackass wants to blow money to mine, go ahead and buy a generator. We need to pass a law banning mining with electricity from the grid. As long as they aren't sucking resources from the national grid, they blow their money how ever they want.

Pretty easy to work

[SuperKendall]

Constantly moving to evade capture and the resulting downtime must be factored into your cost of operating. At some point it no longer becomes profitable.

A trailer rig full of mining computers that you can quickly hook to a commercial power outlet should do nicely and keep costs of relocation way down.

Re:Pretty easy to work

[Train0987]

You don't think that would be noticed? Come on, I understand the crypto crazies will believe almost anything but do you truly think they'll believe that would work?

Re:Pretty easy to work

[Baton Rogue]

A trailer rig full of mining computers that you can quickly hook to a commercial power outlet should do nicely and keep costs of relocation way down.

I doubt that the amount of electricity needed to run a "trailer rig full of mining computers" is going to require more than just an extension cord that you plug into a wall socket.

Re: Pretty easy to work

[Anonymous Coward]

âoeCommercial power outletâ isnâ(TM)t a thing. There are a few ways to hook up a temporary trailer but any of them are going to be metering your power and charging based on usage.

Re:Pretty easy to work

[silas_moeckel]

Google and others have been doing DC in a shipping container for a long time.

Old ideas that are still unproven

[OrangeTide]

If the US didn't learn from the Great Depression that a regulated economy is necessary to avoid misapplication of resources and improper allocation of financial responsibility, then we are all fucked (globally)

I'm very confident that we learned little. We're still pushing 100 year old ideas of laissez-faire capitalism, supply-side economics, and trickle-down economics. Even in the 19th century the ideas of trickle-down were well known enough to be controversial in its day.

"That's what happens when the Republicans take over—not only Nixon, but any of them. They simply don't know how to manage the economy. They're so busy operating the trickle-down theory, giving the richest corporations the biggest break, that the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket." -- President Lyndon B. Johnson

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, because the alternatives to capitalism have worked out so well.

Is capitalism perfect? No.

Is capitalism better than any other economic system? Clearly.

And please don't hold up Lyndon Johnson as an example of how to manage the economy, he left it a huge mess when he decided not to run for re-election.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[OrangeTide]

Yea, because the alternatives to capitalism have worked out so well.

Supply-side economics is not the only form of macroeconomics or capitalism. You present a false dichotomy.

And please don't hold up Lyndon Johnson as an example of how to manage the economy, he left it a huge mess when he decided not to run for re-election.

I'm hardly holding him up. I'm presenting that criticism of Republican trickle-down is something that has been with us even longer than Reaganomics. The party hasn't changed significantly in their strategy and platform for 50-60 years, at least on this one point.

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even read his post? Nowhere did he say to get rid of capitalism.

Sometimes I think you people see what you want to see.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Curunir_wolf]

They simply don't know how to manage the economy.

Nobody does. It's the authoritarians that think they know how to "manage" an economy better than 300 million free agents that creates nightmares.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[mmdurrant]

I don't think there are enough data points to conclusively determine whether capitalism is better than any other economic system.

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take the authoritarians over the people who actually ruin my waking life.

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Curunir_wolf]

I'll take the authoritarians over the people who actually ruin my waking life.

Are they gaslighting you?

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Gaslight, backlight, smokeout, stakeout, you name it, they're doing it.

In comparison, mere nightmares? Whatever. I can live with those.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Is capitalism better than any other economic system? Clearly.

This is opinion. 'better' is subjective.

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is greed. If people who had more were happy to live well of but also use their resources to support the greater good the word would be a better place. And may do. But even more dont.

The governments should be protecting us from climate change and wide spread stupidity. I think, like the old days, where the government and the church were split (with reasonable success) we now need to seperate a goverments financial arm and the parts which protect the planet and the people. Otherwise we'll all loose the long game (70 years). Why do the governments not spend time planning how to make sure we are all in a good state 300 years from now? Sure things will change but (seriously) projecting that far ahead and revising it every 10 years would be of great benifit.

Re: Old ideas that are still unproven

[Wycliffe]

Maybe the solution to fix our out of touch congress is to make them even more out of touch. If the members of congress were allowed no contact with lobbyists or anyone else during their term and their assets were frozen for their entire term then maybe they could make neutral decisions for the good of everyone. I think hitchhikers guide got it right having a neutral third party in charge.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Your prophet/god doubled the national debt in 8 years "managing the economy". Give me a break, it's not a democrat/republican issue. They're both paid for by the real trouble makers.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[MercTech]

Combine fiat money with removing regulations on credit contracts and you get the bubble of the 1920s followed by the crash and depression of 1929. When inflation is killing savings, it makes buying on credit look very very good. But, once the market is saturated the dominoes fall.... falling sales, layoffs, failure to pay revolving credit accounts, economy crashes and burns. Then you have a SEC making sure more money is not loaned than the loaning institution can cover. (broad strokes on the Great Depression) For over 100 years we have the Republican Party trying to give everyone the opportunity to get rich just like they did ignoring that concentrated wealth concentrates power to leverage deals to make sure they and they alone get to keep the wealth. Meanwhile the Democratic Party works hard to make everyone as poor and their neighbor while the old money elite running the party gets to keep all their old families have accumulated to leverage power. Is it really Demos vs Repubs or is it Aristocrats vs Plutocrats?

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Rolgar]

Have you considered Distributism? All of the free market prosperity without the corporate shenanigans and extreme concentration of wealth.

Because Socialism and Capitalism suffer from the same problem, concentration of economic power and therefore political power in the hands of a few well connected individuals.

Re:Old ideas that are still unproven

[Anonymous Coward]

Search for some other LJB comments on the welfare state.

  conflating the specifics of regulated monopolies (power companies, e.g.) is not interchangeable with the complexity of attempting (failing) "financial responsibility" with a regulated economy.

How to put a cap on your city's economic growth

[Anonymous Coward]

Set a ceiling on energy consumption. What a dumb idea, good luck competing with surrounding areas when population increases directly translate into decreased "electricity rations" for everyone else.

Plattsburgh Craigslist flooded with video cards!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just kidding. Plenty of folks on ebay willing to pay higher prices.

Economics 101

[Locke2005]

No laws required. If you just charge them more for the electricity than the value of the cryptocurrency that can be mined with that electricity, all but the most stupid will stop doing it! I still don't understand why they don't set up commercial operations here in the Northwest, where we have the cheapest electric rates in the country due to proximity to Bonneville Dam.

Re:Economics 101

[tomhath]

That just introduces other problems, like trying to separate commercial versus private use inside a private residence. Which also gets you into zoning issues. Bottom line is that they want to sell electricity to residents and businesses that benefit the residents (like restaurants, etc.). There's no reason for them to encourage a short-term fad like coin mining that has no public benefit and then be stuck with extra power capacity when the fad dies.

Re:Economics 101

[jd]

No problem. You just tell the restaurant owners and customers that the price is prohibitively high because that data centre over there stole all the power. Oh, and baseball bats are 50c each. The marketplace will decide.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Plattsburgh's energy ghestopo

[WaffleMonster]

The ONLY solution they should be considering is properly pricing energy.

Re:Plattsburgh's energy ghestopo

[tomhath]

It's a publicly owned utility. The only thing they should be considering is overall public good. The laws capitalism don't apply to the city council.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

To ban electric cars in 2020. or walkers subsidise

[creslinux]

Does this mean when electric cars are adopted on mass those that cycle or walk will subsidise the dirvers?

What Authority?

[Anonymous Coward]

In a free country, under what authority can a city ban you from using the electricity you pay for however you want?

Can someone please explain ...

[WoodstockJeff]

... just what this coin mining is supposed to be DOING? Is it dedicating massive amounts of computing power to solving scientific problems that require more computing power than is otherwise available?

Or is it just a bunch of computer science geeks figuring out how to make computers play with themselves?

Re:Can someone please explain ...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Mining is, essentially, a bunch of computers try to crack a password that another bunch of computers made up (and forgot) in the previous mining step.

So, pretty much less beneficial than either option you suggested. At least when computers play with themselves we get computers who are really good at Go.

Re:Can someone please explain ...

[vadim_t]

Bitcoin mining is approximately this:

1. Take a bunch of transaction data
2. Append a random number
3. Hash the entire thing
4. If the hash starts with enough zeroes (you get a result that looks like 00000A3234...), and you're the first, success! This earns you money.
5. If the hash doesn't have enough zeroes, pick a different random number, goto 2.

The number of zeroes you need depends on the difficulty level, and the difficulty level depends on how many people are participating in the network.

Now, why do this? Because this allows for decentralized generation of money. There's no central authority that can issue coins, but this creates the problem of how do you inject money into the economy without letting everybody who wants to give themselves a billion dollars.

And this is the solution they came up with. The hashing means anybody can solve the problem, and everyone can verify that it was indeed solved. The difficulty scaling means that as people add computing power, difficulty grows ensuring that money is always injected roughly at the same speed, keeping things stable.

Re:Can someone please explain ...

[Anonymous Coward]

6. Emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for all of the energy expended to compute that one random hash that satisfies the double SHA-256. Waste massive amounts of electricity and GPU/ASICs to generate that little random POW that represents nothing but the time and energy wasted to find it.

Distributed among ALL users?

[superdave80]

I live in California, so this may not apply to their situation. Here we have certain 'tiers' of use, and the price increases as you use more. My first 100kwh might cost 15 cents/kwh, but above that, the price rises to 20 cents/kwh for the next 100kwh, and so forth. I think a better solution for this city would be to incorporate something like this, because I'm not sure how you 'ban' a crypotocurrency company, since it's just computers running in a building somewhere. It would be difficult to enforce.

Re:What Authority?

[Train0987]

By the authority of the people who elected their local leaders.

It should ban all high electricity use

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Why ban crypto currency alone? That is discrimination.

Re:It should ban all high electricity use

[Curunir_wolf]

Why ban crypto currency alone? That is discrimination.

Because it's a useless activity that does nothing for anyone but suck up resources that could be put to productive use?

Re:It should ban all high electricity use

[Anonymous Coward]

Define productive.

Crypto currency mining = money right in my pocket after it's sold for USD.

Metal smelting (also uses lots of power) = money right in the pocket of the owner after it's sold for USD.

Re:It should ban all high electricity use

[jd]

The metal can be used for stuff such that the value it contributes exceeds the value of the metal, the crypto coin can't be used for anything.

Re:It should ban all high electricity use

[youngatheart]

From TFA:

the US average is a little over 10 cents per kilowatt-hour...

Plattsburgh... industrial operations, which include cryptocurrency operations, paid even less at 2 cents per kWh for electricity. Plattsburgh obtains its electricity from a hydroelectric power dam... The city's moratorium isn't designed to remove cryptocurrency mining from Plattsburgh.

The city was able to make a deal to give a very attractive benefit to it's residents and businesses, a benefit which stopped making sense when they started exceeding their capacity. Now they're having to respond to an emergency situation and doing it thoughtfully. It's only making a big news splash because it has the right buzzwords for clickbait. If this were a city with cheap water responding to a sudden surge in bottled water companies, it'd be the same basic situation, but zero clickbait interest.

Re:Socialist policies are part of the problem here

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a government supplied solution so the power was being sold at 2 cents when the cost is closer to 10 cents nationally. In a proper free market system the price would have gone up and it wouldn't have been cost effective to mine crypto currency here..

What you see is free market at work. Selling power to large steady-load entities at $.02/kwh is a common and very profitable practice for utilities.
A large factory that runs 24/7 with a steady load allows the utility to operate their base-load plants at steady state, so a hydro, or nuke plant that has near zero incremental cost for increased load just runs and prints money. It also works almost as well for keeping coal plants running efficiently.
They charge residential users more because those customers cost more and have spastic loads.

Alternatively if it was still cost effective due to the lower costs of operating power plants in the region more power would get produced from newer plants that would get built.
That may not be reality- because the investors in said plants don't see a long term enterprise so they'd end up with a glut of electricity and no customers. However that just means the electricity bills would rise to a point of the national average probably. At that point it's not cost effective to mine. I don't see the problem other than that this city implements socialism rather than leaving it to a free market.

The way most utilities deal with this is in the contract they have with the user. To get the lowest rate, you must agree to some form of real-time pricing.
In the southern USA, a factory may be paying .02/kwh normally, but when summer afternoon loads shoot upward, the utility may have to buy outside their system, but everyone in the region has the same problem.
I've seen prices go over $35.00/kwh for power we had to buy from other utilities during extreme summers.

So the real-time contract passes the price to the large customers. They usually either shutdown, reduce usage, or some have their own generation that costs like $1-2/kwh, or their own management/engineers make decisions such as "it's only for a couple of hours, bite-the-bullet, keep production going".

It appears to me that this is really where Plattsville screwed up - they should, but apparently did not, require RTP pricing contracts for their large commercial users.

Electricity demand

[Anonymous Coward]

In a story posted earlier today on SlashDot the article said electrical companies were seeing a plateau of energy usage and were lobbying for electric cars to increase the demand for electricity. Now here we have a story that says currency mining is being banned in response to high electrical demand.

So which is it? Is demand for electricity so high that towns need to outlaw mining to stablize things, or is electricity demand so low that utility companies are desperate to increase usage?

Solid solution

[theendlessnow]

Some suggest that the only way to keep them out is to build a (fire)wall.

Proof by assertion is not much of a proof

[jd]

Ummm, no. Capitalism is not the best of the alternatives. I doubt many on Slashdot know of any alternatives. (Communism is not an alternative, it is a theory of control not currency. Barter is not an alternative, barter is simplified capitalism.)

If you can post ten different alternatives and state, with fallacy-free logic, why they're inferior, I'll accept your claim. If you make no effort, you are implicitly accepting that you really didn't look at any alternatives before posting that.

Re:Proof by assertion is not much of a proof

[drinkypoo]

Ummm, no. Capitalism is not the best of the alternatives. I doubt many on Slashdot know of any alternatives. (Communism is not an alternative, it is a theory of control not currency. Barter is not an alternative, barter is simplified capitalism.)

You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble with a look at a dictionary. The definition of capitalism is that capital controls the means of production. It's not about the form of currency, it's about the form of control.

Find the miners, make them pay the extra costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say you are city T and are allotted X kwh / month. You exceed X by 20% and pay Y to cover your costs. You then find out who consumed enough power to send you over X, divide the cost of Y on a curve among those people, and send them the bill. Next month, you are back to less than X kwh.

Why punish all of your residents for the misbehavior of just one or two of them that are driving up the costs to astronomical levels? The information of who suddenly exceeded normal limits out of the blue is readily available.

It's an accident of history

[Anonymous Coward]

In the early days of electricity - before the start of large scale bulk power connections, all electric companies were small. As time went on, economics changed, and favored larger electric power companies. However there are still areas where the small muni power companies survive and in many cases provide a respectable profit.
Example Dominion Power in Virginia was first the power supply system for the Richmond Transit system (1888). Transit and utility power were separated in 1944. In central Virginia there are a number of "COOP and Muni systems that purchase bulk power from Dominion (bulk power can also be purchased on the PJM spot market, then Dominion charges only to transport the power). Oh what a tangled web we weave.
 

Capitalism is not a system of currency

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing medium of exchange with an economic system. They are two things, and you can often mix and match the two how you like. And barter is not the only alternative to fiat money.

A hypothetical society can have the economic system capitalism with commodity money as the medium of change. Your commodities might be silver bullion and bales of marijuana (my hypothetical society lives in Colorado). You can absolutely write a contract that promises the exchanges real commodities (promissory note), or even the futures of those commodities.

Another society might use a mercantile system and fiat money issued by an agreed to central bank.

Wenatchee bans at-home Bitcoin mining for one year

[Anonymous Coward]

Feb 24, 2018 - Wenatchee bans at-home Bitcoin mining for one year. The ban is effective immediately. City Council will discuss the issue again March 22 at a public hearing. During the ban, city staff and Chelan County PUD officials are expected to work to determine the best way to regulate cryptocurrency mining in residential areas.
https://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2018/feb/23/wenatchee-bans-at-home-bitcoin-mining-for-one-year/
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230

wrong solution

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to have a slightly lower rate to attract commerce. The problem is that if you set the rate too high for commerce, they will shy away and go pay tax in the neighbor city. The problem is that THIS type of commerce abuse this and shift an external cost toward the city. You may naturally try to have mining operation pay more, but in some places this is not allowed by law to discriminate type of business for cost, but allows to discriminate what type of business are allowed (e.g. you may not tax strip club higher, but you can refuse in the zoning to have strip club).

I fully agree with their solution frankly. Yours lacks real world consideration.

Reagan

[NewYork]

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan

Exceeded its monthly budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does that mean, that they sold more power than before?

Wait, if my business is to sell power to customers, shouldn't I be happy about record sells?