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A Coal Power Plant is Being Reopened For Blockchain Mining (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Sure, you could mine bitcoin on that old PC in your garage, or you could use a whole power station to do it. That's the idea behind the Blockchain Application Centre -- an Aussie tech initiative that will see one of the country's now-shuttered coal-fired power plants reopened to provide cheap power for blockchain applications. It's the work of Australian tech company IOT Group, which has partnered with local power company Hunter Energy on the project. According to The Age, Hunter Energy will recommission the Redbank power station in the Hunter Valley, two hours drive north of Sydney. Once the power plant is reopened (expected to be completed within 12 months), it will offer wholesale or "pre-grid" power prices to blockchain companies, allowing them to do things like mining cryptocurrencies, without having to pay retail power prices.
So not onlly are we going to waste tons of electricity, we're going to pollute now too.
This is so pointless. All that energy, and all those computing resources, for nothing. What the hell is wrong with people?
God damn it, this fucking insanity has to stop. Not only has it impacted my ability to upgrade to a bitch'n graphics card but now they want to poison the air I breath for this shit?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
What do your misconceived ideas about the left have to do with bitcoin mining?
This country has so much sunlight that melanoma is a major health concern.
Bitcoin seems to be more loved by the Libertarian sect, which doesn't seem to give a damn about environmental causes and thinks that polluting businesses should "self regulate" themselves. Yeah... because that worked so well back in the 1950's and 60's.
If we let people use electricty "on demand" people might not understand the artificial scarcity of our resources.
The public school education system works very hard to educate people about how we shouldn't use anything and live in the woods.
Better to stop this so we can pat ourselves on the back without interruption.
It's too bad Australia seems to be run by fossils these days though, so that won't happen.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Huh, is this some sort of competition to find the dirtiest of money?
All this stuff is speculation and it will crash again.
Happy landing.
Pretty sure you meant to say "I'll be dammed"...
Coal is Making Australia Great Again.
TFA is on a really bad website. Thank God for noscript. If you're one of the rare slashdotters who reads TFA, then get this add-on first.
That seems like a long time in blockchain time. . . Isn't proof of space supposed to take over at some point, in which case the demand for computational and power resources in this space will be dramatically decreased?
Then again, it is mid April, 2018 and I still cannot buy web storage hosted on file coin's network. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
A think we need to update Drake equation and add a parameter for crypto mining.
I think the power company just wants to add "blockchain" to their name so the execs can cash out, but my quick back-of-napkin math makes me think it might actually work if they can fully sell it out. Assuming a 100MW plant, it would take US$25-40 million to get up and running, which would require $500/year/kW in rent for a 12-month payback, which equates to a US$0.05/kWh electricity savings to make it worthwhile.
But it seems like a lot of risk for something 12 months out before generating cash flow that is already a bubble.
This has got to be the most pants-on-head retarded nonsense I've heard yet. Is Australia vying for the title of 'most fucked up' with Florida or something?
Who told you that?
There is no 'extra production' from any of the worlds dams. It's all pretty much sold off, within environmental constraints (you can't let rivers go dry or regularly put walls of water down them). Excepting perhaps Iceland, but they built the thing to make aluminium, so not even there.
Whoever told you that bullshit had no respect for you. Terrible liar who thought you were stupid. Surplus power, in China?
Either that, or you just made it up on the spot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
One year restart time...One year is an eternity in cryptocurrency time.
At the end of all that, they're competing in a world power market, with an area that requires AC for datacenter cooling. So they'll effectively have to have power rates on the order of half the rates in a cold area, just to make up for heat pumping costs. Which doesn't even get into options like heating an office building with waste heat.
They could easily end up with a pile of coal, a refurbed plant and no customers. Hopefully the plant is right on the mine and the mine was still running. I can't imagine they're sticking their necks out too far.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I guess we get to breathe it now. Awesome. What's the ETA on that giant meteor that is just supposed to just put us all out of our misery?
I used to joke that some video cards require you to bring your own power plant, but this is ridiculous.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
HAW HAW!
You stupid fuckers' planet is headed for a special mention Darwin award!
oh wait...
crap.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Gee, is it just slightly possible that all forms of power have drawbacks but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and embrace the worst possible option that kills millions of innocent people every year to save a buck?
This space intentionally left blank
1880's to 1920's. You know the story: sweat shops, robber barons, child labor, Pinkerton, etc. The 1950's and 60's brought us great wealth, but we were also the only untouched first-world country after the war. Thus, we were able to afford some concern about pollution, conservation, welfare, civil rights and the like. Taxes were high and business was good... until the Oil Crisis in the 70's. We've been in trouble ever since.
Also evident by the drive to replace nuclear plants by gas+renewables. (mostly gas, also some coal: see Germany.) Genuinely concerned and informed environmentalists support nuclear, because it is the source of energy that requires the least raw materials, and has the smallest environmental impact.
However, greed and ignorance are not limited to the left.
There is a possible silver lining here. If we can 1) consolidate bit coin mining, 2) have them use power plant scale amounts of power, then we have a new resource which is concentrated waste heat. Bit coin gives off waste heat but when distributed no center may be large enough to make practical recovery valuable. But if a whole power plant is devoted to this then a new scale may be emerging.
They need to think about how to co-locate thermal power intensive industries. Some things like smelting iron probably require even more thermal concentration than possible. But things like baking bread or raising shrimp or some chemical industry activities might need lots of low level heat. Perhaps, in a nice ironic cycle, one could power CO2 sequestration using the waste heat.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes, because the government was so worried about environmental protection in the 1950s and 60s... Biggest and worst polluted areas in the US are government sites where they enriched and refined nuclear weapon stockpiles.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Leftists are boogeymen created by conservative talk show hosts.
I'd actually say that Bitcoin is a product of libertarians. The sort that don't think our monetary system should be left to the government. And yeah, "how do deal with pollution" gets you a variety of answers from that crowd.
I'm not a huge fan of coal and reactivating this plant for digital jerking off is about the stupidest thing humanity can do. But you can only get to "millions" of innocent people if you make some serious extrapolations and assumptions of lung afflictions and global warming causing mass deaths. Meanwhile on the other side of the equation is the "save a buck" which has a very measurable impact on saving lives in 3rd world countries. More people in the world die due to lack of access to electricity than due to any pollution side effects of electricity production.
In fact, people in poor countries are so desperate for cheap fossil fuels that there are tragic mass deaths as people try to scavenge spilled gasoline from tanker trucks where they go in risking their lives for a cooking pot worth of fuel.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
"We techies are so very environmentally responsib ... ooh, shiny bitcoin!"
Something fishy is going on here. Australia has some of the highest insolation levels of any developed country. It would be cheaper to build a new solar plant in the sunniest part of the country and run it for 10 years than it would be to restart an existing coal plant. Hunter Valley is a nice place to live, but bitcoin miners DGAF about that, they probably don't even live in the country.
I guess the only benefit to coal is it can run 24x7, but I have to think the biggest cost of bitcoin mining is the energy, not the equipment, so just buy 2x the amount of miners...
I smell some sort of government subsidy.
What 'proceeds'?
Film at 11
Won't help them
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Will they have the necessary CO2 scrubbers and sequestering technology to make it pass the Australian pollution regulations? Or is it that this Anti-Science intelligence deficit disease (ASIDD) is just as contagious over there as it is here in the US?
Is this article from The Onion? Coal-powered Bitcoin may just be the pinnacle of the human capacity for assholery.
Yeah, like gaming is 10 times better...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
STFU Ivan.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Race to the bottom.
Bitcoin is now leftist libertarian? Back in 2016 it still was not merely right, but "extreme right"
There's no such thing as "leftist libertarian". That's like "capitalist Trotskyite".
oh fuck me - the IdiOT Group, offshoot of the young liberals
the neoliberal hard right goons have found another excuse to keep coal going
sounds like a brain fart
want to make money while your sitting around being an entitled, fucking yuppy, we've got fake money
need something, but you're too fucking stupid to do it yourself, we've got slaves for hire
fucking selfies, make me a drone in clear plastic, then I'll be excited
Go well
The problem is that you Libertards don't want to acknowledge any impact of your actions on others on account of your tendency to indulge in magical "there are boundaries only where they're convenient to me" thinking.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Steve Bannon claims to be a capitalist Leninist, after all...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Marx encouraged capitalist adventures that financed and grew communism.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
So not onlly are we going to waste tons of electricity, we're going to pollute now too.
Don't get too smug, US coal exports to Europe have *doubled* to make up for the power shortfall from the decommissioning of some nuclear plants to appease environmentalists.
Since when are libertarians left? Absolute libertarians ultimately believe in the right of the strong. They are also utilitaristic and therefore even worse than fascists.
Libertarian-ism was a leftist philosophy before the right wingers hopped on the bandwagon. Leftism is about empowering the people, getting rid of government, or at least making it as local as possible whereas rightism is about empowering the aristocracy, or now a days the rich.
From https://www.urbandictionary.co...
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically libertarian-ism that empowers the people rather then libertarian-ism that empowers the rich.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
See https://slashdot.org/comments.... funny enough American Libertarians are actually old time Liberals with their belief in economic freedom, unluckily there has been so much propaganda over the 20th century that terms have changed with the current belief that Stalinism equals socialism and somehow the modern capitalist is not authoritarian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I know a lot of 'bitcoin' fans. I've never heard that claim. I think you just made it up
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'