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New York Power Companies Can Now Charge Bitcoin Miners More (arstechnica.com)
Last Wednesday, the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) ruled that municipal power companies could charge higher electricity rates to cryptocurrency miners who try to benefit from the state's abundance of cheap hydroelectric power. Ars Technica reports: Over the years, Bitcoin's soaring price has drawn entrepreneurs to mining. Bitcoin mining enterprises have become massive endeavors, consuming megawatts of power on some grids. To minimize the cost of that considerable power draw, mining companies have tried to site their operations in towns with cheap electricity, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S., regions with the cheapest energy tend to be small towns with hydroelectric power. But mining booms in small U.S. towns are not always met with approval. A group of 36 municipal power authorities in northern and western New York petitioned the PSC for permission to raise electricity rates for cryptocurrency miners because their excessive power use has been taxing very small local grids and causing rates to rise for other customers. The PSC responded on Wednesday that it would allow those local power companies to raise rates for cryptocurrency miners. The response noted that New York's local power companies, which are customer-owned and range in size from 1.5 MW to 122 MW, "acquire low-cost power, typically hydro, and distribute the power to customers at no profit." If a community consumes more than what has been acquired, cost increases are passed on to all customers. "In Plattsburgh, for example, monthly bills for average residential customers increased nearly $10 in January because of the two cryptocurrency companies operating there," the PSC document says. The city of Plattsburgh, New York has since imposed an 18-month moratorium on commercial cryptocurrency mining to "protect and enhance the city's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources."
Wasting energy to participate in a pyramid scheme is not a basic need. Just cut/cap their power supply.
If you never have, it's not "anymore". "Already" might be acceptable, though
I guess now white folks know what it's like when gentrification sets in and slowly pushes people out fo their homes.
And yet that seem to be the american way now.
doesn't NY buy most of its electricity from Hydro Quebec? Also, why target coin miners when they could more simply charge more based on consumption? oh, that's right they already do that.
Current cryptocurrency is uselss. Unbound computer work for reward is a fundamentally flawed concept. Cryptographic blockchains should be run for maximum possible efficiency, the distributed proof of transfer suffers nothing from being efficient. In fact it gains from it, making cryptocurrencies easier and faster to run. But they aren't designed that way, they're all designed for an gigantically unnecessary amount of compute power to be thrown at them until such time as the amount of electricity and hardware they use is equal to the reward they put out, despite the low, slow amount of transfers they manage.
Cryptocurrencies need to become actual currency, not artificial investment tools that produce nothing of significant value while wasting valuable power and hardware.
Keep in mind that the only thing that is really happening here is that only a fixed amount of electricity is available each month at subsidized pricing rates. The only change here is that crypto miners get lowest priority of subsidized power. For example, lets say that every month the city gets 40 gWh of subsidized electricity from their contract with the power company that permitted the construction of a hydro dam within city limits. On a given month, lets say the residential and non-crypto mining industrial buildings in the city use 35 gWh of power, and the miners use 15 gWh. In this scenario, the miners will get 5 gWh at the subsidized rates, but will have to pay regular price on the remaining 10 gWh past the city's quota of subsidized power.
Seems pretty reasonable to me... the miners still get access to some cheap power, so its better than what they would get elsewhere, but at the same time the consequences of their excessive power consumption doesn't end up forcing the residential customers of the city to buy a percentage of their power at full price, which was what happened previously.
I did not know how far this would go.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
And when they'll add powewalls, the situation will become even more interesting!
You insensitive electrical clods!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
The average consumers shouldn't have to see their power bills increase just because of cryptominers.
It depends on how much baking bread and pizza the mining resembles. There's this thing where electric companies monitor kWh amounts from month to month, per business and residence, and charge accordingly. Electricity on a particular grid is a finite resource, and sudden spikes in usage get billed accordingly.
My suspicion based on the summary talking about "towns with cheap electricity" is that miners were expecting to go unnoticed in residential areas while consuming commercial levels of electricity. The summary talks about a jump in costs to residential customers, and cryptomining is pretty squarely a commercial activity.
Long story short: It probably looked exactly like people opened up a bunch of commercial endeavors and thought they were going to only be charged residential rates. Residential neighbors don't like subsidizing one another involuntarily.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure most municipalities have some form of business licensing. So if you're running a bakery, they know because you put that on your license.
How do you think law enforcement catch growers? Why do you think illegal growers setup generators to avoid being detected? A decent mining rig will consume quite a bit more electricity than a typical business. There are many researchers that got grants to build clusters for research that literally can't build the system they described in their grant proposal. the increase in cost of memory and video cards and lack of supply isn't a joke.
Crypto miners are easily the biggest jackasses in the "tech" sector over the last decade
I'm right there with them and feel those communities' pains. I hope th...
New York has since imposed an 18-month moratorium...to "protect and enhance the city's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources.
Wtf, politicians! Now I want the miners to win >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Power Theft Soars, Utilities Companies Powerless To Stop It.
You could think about it for ten seconds? Or you could read the article?
If your bakery does that then you get the higher rates. If your crypto mining doesn't then you don't.
I don't know if crypto currencies have value. I know generating your own power does have value. Go for it.
And to add to this, a typical residential home uses between 5 and 10 kwh/sqft per year. This new rule clearly applies to outliers.
For the most part, mining is unethical and selfish. If they want to be dickwads, they can do it without riding on the backs of the rest of us.
Umm you must have this backwards a high demand causes more competition which will drive the costs of memory and GPU's down over the long term.
Never will. And never have.
This isn't even in the top 100 "reasons one should not live in new york."
Why not charge a carbon tax and encourage power usage instead?
With the carbon tax intake, we could invest in renewable energy power plants, that will still be available when bitcoin reward halving made mining unviable.
NY - We firmly believe that the internet should be treated like a public utility, giving no favors to specific entities!
also NY - We are going to choose who benefits most from our cheap electricity.
You are, of course, missing the contract that came with the cheap power. The TVA and a few other Federal entities built these dams specifically to provide short term jobs and affordable power for communities. The sales contracts on this power specify that it must be used for affordable power to customers in the buyer's region. If bitcoin miners (or ALCOA, or other big power users) use enough that the grid operators (this is new york, not nearly as deregulated as West Texas and much of the midwest) then the power company has breached that purchase contract. Consequently, the power company is effectively obligated to do something of this nature, which is to charge a higher rate for big users.
This isn't an evil power company policing morality. This has nothing to do with your 1kw mining rig, it has to do with a hundred kw+ customer running up prices for everyone.
I would classify this as spatial arbitrage, or perhaps regulatory arbitrage if they were taking advantage of the way power was supplied to large consumers during certain times.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Huge server farms of automated trading, suck up tons of power ... will these rising rates apply to them, too ?
Unless you take into account scarcity. Prices are still high because supply can't keep up with demand and the GPU manufacturers hesitate to increase supply because the crypto craze might end soon.
If you just charge them more for the electricity than they can make mining cryptocurrency with the electricity, then they'll go away -- problem solved! I still curious why the bitcoin miners don't locate where the electricity is the absolute cheapest.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now they're charging my hydroponic grow operation a lot more! (And mining is probably generating a lot of false positive for the investigators looking for grow operations.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And to add to this, a typical residential home uses between 5 and 10 kwh/sqft per year. This new rule clearly applies to outliers.
Clearly applies to businesses that still make things. Stamping plants and steel refineries will easily dwarf cryptocurrency businesses in the same way that they dwarf residential users.
All this is going to do is require existing businesses in the area to donate more to reelection funds until everyone has a special exemption for this special rate.
Net Neutrality antagonists point when treating power needs this way.
How sad! They might have to cut back on their expensive binge boozing and urinating on homeless men outside the bar they stumble from every Saturday night!
Hell, they may even have to give up douchebaggery altogether! Oh, how will they ever manage to function then? Will they never be a "Bro" again?
In a market economy, the benefits of scale lead to quantity discounts, i.e. things become cheaper in higher volumes/quantities as the benefits of mass production propagate through the system and are further spurred-on by competition.
In a managed economy, political concerns and other policy agendas constrict the supply and rationing occurs. In order to make the rationing seem more palatable to an inattentive public, the policy makers then start to price higher quantities/volumes at progressively higher per-unit costs and begin to restrict the uses for which products or services can be purchased (usually targeting unpopular persons/activities).
If your electric power utility is going to charge you more per kilowatt-hour as you consume more energy, or if they are going to make you pay more per kilowatt-hour depending on how you plan to use the power, you are already experiencing camoflaged rationing and you already live under some form of Marxist market distortion which will probably only get worse over time; they're probably not building sufficient capacity to meet future demands.
So.... People using the power they are paying for pay extra because they are using the power they are paying for? They like going to the supermarket for apples. They are $1 each. But you want 1,000 apples. Bulk discount, right? Appareny not. They charge you *more* for each apple, using this logic.
Only boring people are ever bored.