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Bitcoin Backlash as 'Miners' Suck Up Electricity, Stress Power Grids in Central Washington (seattletimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Public hearings for rural electric utilities are rarely sellout events. But the crowd that showed up in Wenatchee two weeks ago for a hearing about Bitcoin mining in Chelan County was so large that utility staff had to open a second room with a video feed for the overflow. The turnout wasn't surprising. Chelan County, along with neighboring Douglas and Grant counties, has been at the center of the U.S. Bitcoin boom since 2012, when the region's ultracheap hydropower began attracting cryptocurrency "miners."
[...] As a result, an area famous for apples, wheat and conservative politics has been transformed into a kind of cyber-boomtown, with Bitcoin mining operations that range from large-scale, state-of-the-art warehouses to repurposed cargo containers to backyard sheds. By the end of this year, according to some estimates, the Mid-Columbia Basin could account for as much as 30 percent of the global output of new Bitcoin and large shares of other digital currencies, such as Litecoin and Ethereum. But as in any boomtown, success has come at a cost. As the cryptocurrency industry morphs into larger, more energy-intensive operations, the Basin's three public utilities districts (PUDs) are reassessing how they deal with it, and whether they can -- or should even try to -- keep up.
[...] As a result, an area famous for apples, wheat and conservative politics has been transformed into a kind of cyber-boomtown, with Bitcoin mining operations that range from large-scale, state-of-the-art warehouses to repurposed cargo containers to backyard sheds. By the end of this year, according to some estimates, the Mid-Columbia Basin could account for as much as 30 percent of the global output of new Bitcoin and large shares of other digital currencies, such as Litecoin and Ethereum. But as in any boomtown, success has come at a cost. As the cryptocurrency industry morphs into larger, more energy-intensive operations, the Basin's three public utilities districts (PUDs) are reassessing how they deal with it, and whether they can -- or should even try to -- keep up.
Is there any evidence of intelligent life on Earth?
I hope the Bitcoin mining hardware and its installation conforms exactly to the local electrical code. Also, home users of more than a certain number of kWh per month should expect to pay more per kWh. Bitcoin is interesting, but it's a horribly wasteful way of transacting business.
I remember getting into an argument here about four years ago about this problem with Bitcoin- that "mining" coins is based on everyone racing to use as much electricity as possible, and the number of kilowatt-hours burned per generated coin increases with time, as part of the design. "ATMs use electricity too" was the consensus opinion.
Now we have a "currency" that gets "mined" using more electricity than Ireland uses. The wattage devoted to this crap has increased sevenfold during the past 12 months. People only use it as an investment, making it useless as a currency. "Everyone accepts it as payment" doesn't mean anything when everyone who has it is too scared to spend it.
A bit hypocritical to want to charge Bitcoin miners for how they use electricity while at the same time arguing that its none of ISP's business how their data pipes are used, no?
It's an interesting point, but it can't work in practise. With both data connections and electricity, if you're doing industrial scale work then you have to be properly connected. If you're serving a lot of data you need to be on the trunk connection, if you're arc welding then you need to be plugged directly into the grid, and the electric providers and you need to communicate and coordinate. There is a fundamental difference between residential use and business use and is why this stuff is zoned and controlled, otherwise chaos.
If you're struggling to pay your bills and your electric is getting more expensive because someone else is using the cheap residential rates to run their money-generation machine, that can't be OK... One person is paying for electricity to live, the other is using it to run machines that make them money. These actions aren't equivalent.
A bit hypocritical to want to charge Bitcoin miners for how they use electricity...
You are missing the point. Nobody really cares what they use it for, what they care about is that there is suddenly a huge and unsustainable demand for electricity in a region which lacks the infrastructure to deliver it without massive price increases for everyone. The network equivalent would be someone in your neighbourhood running a small server farm which completely sucks up all the local bandwidth so that your network connection gets slowed down and the cost to the ISP to upgrade it would mean that you would have to pay much more for your connection.
ISPs solve this problem by having tiered data plans: you pay more if you want to use more and if you want more than the maximum amount then you will need to negotiate with the ISP for the price. This way those using insane amounts of data will pay for it. The same should happen here for electricity. The only reason bitcoin is the issue is because it can sponge off the network more easily than say an aluminium smelter which would need special connections to be provided.