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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.
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.
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.
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.