[ISL]

Isn't the solution to charge more?

One could have a tiered rate system, where the first N kWhr are inexpensive and the rates rise after that (just as we do in Seattle)

http://www.seattle.gov/light/Rates/docs/2018/Jan1/Schedule%2...

If supply is constrained, and demand grows, it won't stop growing until the price goes up.

An imposition of a quota system is interesting, just because it might yield free residential heating for homes that welcome miners into their basements.

[NickM]

That may not be nuanced enough for the desired results. Sounds like a lot of these places would like to still provide plentiful cheap power to industrial companies that actually create jobs and generate useful output that stimulates the local economy.

[jessriedel]

If government-directed job creation is the desired goal, why not just hand the preferred companies cash? That would be a lot more transparent and targeted than subsidizing utilities Venezuela-style.

[394549]

> If government-directed job creation is the desired goal, why not just hand the preferred companies cash? That would be a lot more transparent and targeted than subsidizing utilities Venezuela-style.

This isn't a subsidy, it's hydro power; which is limited, but cheap to produce. If the bitcoin miners drive the price up without providing many jobs, it may incentivize the actual employers that were attracted by the low price to leave for other areas. It's a net negative for the community.

To benefit from cheaper electricity, you have to use it, and traditionally that's been through employing people to operate machines. If the companies got a cash subsidy instead, they would probably pocket the cash without doing as much as they promised to do to get it.

[darawk]

> To benefit from cheaper electricity, you have to use it, and traditionally that's been through employing people to operate machines. If the companies got a cash subsidy instead, they would probably pocket the cash without doing as much as they promised to do to get it.

Money is fungible. Whether they're saving it by having cheaper electricity or getting cut a check is irrelevant.

[jdietrich]

Electricity isn't fungible. There are substantial costs and efficiency losses involved in transmission, so electricity is significantly cheaper to supply if the consumer is right next door to a giant hydroelectric plant.

Energy-intensive industries that form part of the productive economy are exactly the industries that we want to use that power. We want aluminium smelters and chemical manufacturers to be sucking up that cheap, clean energy. It's an efficient use of resources.

Churning out gigajoules of waste heat to process kilobytes worth of transactions is not an efficient use of resources. It's a colossal waste that has done nothing useful except enrich a bunch of speculators.

[jessriedel]

Electricity is highly fungible. Just include the cost of the transmission losses in the price, as is done everywhere that prices aren't being dictated by law. (And regardless, on the scale of 50 miles these are small.)

It is not the job of local municipalities to decide whether Bitcoin transactions are worth the cost of electricity. How could they possibly have the expertise to decide questions like that?

[darawk]

Charge more for the electricity. Take the profit and cut a check to the productive companies. Problem solved.

[394549]

> Money is fungible. Whether they're saving it by having cheaper electricity or getting cut a check is irrelevant.

That's wrong (and also kinda dogmatic). Money is fungible with itself, but it's not fungible with electricity. If a business gets a cash subsidy, they have all kinds of options to subvert the purposes that subsidy [1], but still collect the money. With cheaper electricity, the incentive is tied far more tightly to the actual activity of operations.

[1] which are to incentivize them to locate their operations in a particular place

[darawk]

If the local government is subsidizing them, then if they move to a different place, they lose the subsidy.

[s73v3r_]

As in many things, appearances are everything.

[jessriedel]

> This isn't a subsidy, it's hydro power; which is limited, but cheap to produce.

The government is buying electricity from the region next door to make up for shortfalls, so I am confident they could sell their cheap electricity the other direction as well when they have an excess. Not selling that electricity at market prices and instead selling it at below market rates to companies because you think they benefit your community is a subsidy.

Heck, even if you couldn't sell the electricity to neighboring regions, you should still sell it at market rates and then distribute the resulting money in a more targeted way.

> If the companies got a cash subsidy instead, they would probably pocket the cash without doing as much as they promised to do to get it.

You don't have to hand them cash for nothing. You could give it as payroll tax breaks or a million other methods that are a lot more targeted than per-KW-hr. It's lunacy to think that power usage is even roughly proportional to the number of people employed pre-bitcoin. Businesses very tremendously in their power-usage-to-employee ratio.

[gruez]

probably because subsidizing electricity sounds better to voters than handing out cash. same reason why governments prefer giving tax breaks rather than cash to entice multinationals to "create jobs".

[wtracy]

What if the allotment of cheap electricity for each company was calculated as a function of the number of people employed by the company whose primary residence is within county limits?

[fuixhbzd]

Those are residential rates. Industrial rates tend to get cheaper because the have a sustained demand, unlike residential's spikey demand.

I used to mine in Magnolia and paid way less than RSC rates. Only peak/off-peak mattered.

[s73v3r_]

But now you're punishing those who aren't mining crypto.

[pandasun]

Why does this need a solution? There's nothing wrong with mining.

[dang]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

[pandasun]

Sorry that they are unsubstantive to you, would have expected more from an admin than a comment like that.

Edit: your comment got me thinking, what is substantive to you? Is it just the general hivemind of HN that's only allowed here?

[dang]

The hivemind doesn't agree with itself on anything, so that can't be it.

A comment is unsubstantive if it doesn't include any more information than 'boo' or 'yay'. (Although polite empty comments like congratulating someone are just fine.) On HN we want discussions where readers can learn a bit more than that someone likes mining.

Edit: another unsubstantive comment you posted was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17672125, which was worse because it invokes the uncivil why-dont-you-move-to-another-country-then internet trope. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules more carefully here?

[pandasun]

Thanks for getting back to me. I have to disagree with your first point. There is very much a hivemind on HN, and any comment that doesn't fit in there gets downvoted. I find myself scrolling all the way down every thread to get different points of view, by the time I get to the interesting comments I can barely read them because you made the CSS make "unpopular" comments barely visible.

>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17672125

Fair enough.

> https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why is this selectively enforced? "Assume good faith." for example? I haven't seen anyone do that on here.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17681471

This was a genuine question of mine, it's currently -2.

I wasn't the first one with this thought: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a19666/we-cant-just-t...

[pandasun]

Hey dang, haven't heard back from you. Was just wondering on your opinion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17700387

I'm currently negative 3 points for trying to start a conversation about the topic at hand. How is this not a hivemind? I followed your instructions and yet this still happens.

Look forward to your response.

[SlowRobotAhead]

I wonder what the chances are that you believe in man made climate change?

IDK, I see a bit of an issue turning energy into heat so people can get play a commodity game, most of whom don’t understand at all.

[gruez]

>IDK, I see a bit of an issue turning energy into heat so people can get play a commodity game, most of whom don’t understand at all.

Is it any better than spending money to dig up yellow rocks or carbon crystals to be used as status symbols?

[jdietrich]

Not really. I think that the gold and diamond industry is hugely destructive and I'd encourage everyone to avoid their products wherever possible. Gold has some valid industrial uses, but diamonds are just bullshit and I think the world would be a better place if everyone believed that.

If De Beers found diamonds in my neighbourhood, I'd petition my local government to refuse them a permit to mine; if that permit was granted, I'd petition them to enforce high environmental standards and ensure that the externalities of that mining activity are appropriately priced.

[PyroLagus]

Diamonds do have some industrial uses, but those can be lab-grown with absolute purity, and for jewelry, synthetic diamonds are actually 20-40% cheaper than mined diamonds and look better, whether that's because of a higher clarity or colors that "real" diamonds don't have. So there's really no reason to mine diamonds anymore except to market them as more expensive and more luxurious "real" diamonds, which is just bullshit. And there's no reason to buy mined diamonds unless you look to spend extra money and want to support an environmentally destructive and exploitative industry; the very same industry that financed wars to get what they want and tried to make sure that lab-grown diamonds couldn't be called diamonds even though they have the very same chemical composition so they could keep selling their blood diamonds without ethical and cheaper competition. Luckily, they lost that battle.

And since we can't create gold in labs yet, at least not more than a few atoms, it's actually better to buy diamond jewelry (as long they're lab-grown) than gold at this point. Just don't buy the De Beers lab-grown diamonds; even if those are ethically produced, we shouldn't support that company in any way, shape, or form.

[briantakita]

Never mind the energy used to prop up the Militaries, financial systems, & other centralized industries?

The real "problem" is that Bitcoin mining is harder to centralize & control, so certain jet-setting, energy-guzzling, interested parties will play the morality card. The general population is not allowed to use untaxed energy, but those who control the energy are allowed to. It's the original scheme of civilization.

> I wonder what the chances are that you believe in man made climate change?

Key in on the word "believe". It's a faith. Not saying the climate is not changing, but I am suggesting we ought to have healthy skepticism & awareness of the history of the networks of people (i.e. the priesthood) who demand that we allow them to tax energy; lest the wrath of the gods (e.g. Gaia in this case) tear us asunder with their judgment. Unless you pay your tribute, using their money, of course.

[jdietrich]

If climate skeptics are right, we will have only hastened the inevitable transition away from fossil fuels - there's only enough coal, oil and gas in the ground to last us another century, give or take.

If climate skeptics are wrong, millions of people will die due to avoidable natural disasters and hundreds of millions will become climate refugees.

Those are our choices - do the thing we need to do anyway, or put it off until later and risk catastrophe.

Asking whether or not climate change is "real" is entirely the wrong question. It's always the wrong question. We need to ask what the probability is, how wide the error bars are and what the effect size will be across the range of possible outcomes. Even if our predictions are wrong by a couple of orders of magnitude, reducing our carbon emissions is +EV. Doing something now is obviously the best course of action, because you avert a high-probability and high-magnitude loss at a relatively low marginal cost.

[briantakita]

Your set of choices is limited & reflective of a certain narrative.

First, many (including Russia) contend that petroleum is not old plant matter, but made from a geological process. We also have plenty of Coal & Natural Gas; never mind Solar energy.

There's also weather modification (e.g. Stratospheric aerosol injection). There's also other forms of energy.

There's also Electrogravitics, which contends that Gravity & Electricity are related. The Electrogravitic model provides a unified model that is simpler than String Theory.

If Electrogravitics is an accurate model, then we are living on a massive engine (planet Earth) & can, as Nikola Tesla has demonstrated, harvest the energy generated by this engine.

[SlowRobotAhead]

While not unfair... I think the difference between the two scenarios you aren't understanding is the absolute truth that: We will use every drop of oil there is, until it's gone.

Solar doesn't make great plastic. You know what carbon fiber is - it's burnt plastic that's been processed with lots of oil and electricity. We know of no better stable and denser energy storage than hydrocarbons, we're going to use all of it.

[hcknwscommenter]

Very good points. The other point that people often misunderstand is that there is a VERY HIGH PROBABILITY that anthropogenic global warming skeptics are mostly or entirely wrong.

[wild_preference]

I wonder what the chances are that you eat industrial animal products while signaling how concerned you are about the environment.

[hcknwscommenter]

Wow. What an unfair statement. I am mostly vegan, drive as little as possible with my third hand high-mpg vehicle, and make a conscious effort to reduce reuse and recycle. However, yes I eat industrial animal products (not a lot but . . . ). Does that mean I'm just signaling because I think, and state, that cryptocurrency mining is a hugely wasteful environmentally damaging and morally dubious activity?

[SlowRobotAhead]

I bet I have very different beliefs than you in lots of things - and agree bitcoin is a massive waste.

I think this is a place where hippie vegans (sorry!) and redneck Luddites can agree :)

[SlowRobotAhead]

I never stated my position at all. Just asked what his is, since he sees no problem wasting massive amounts of energy on bitcoin. Many of the people caught up in cryptocommity are the ones turning around and posting about melting ice caps with no sense of irony or shame at all.

I could be entirely opposed to the idea of a tax solution to "fight" climate change while also being entirely opposed to bitcoin because of the uses of money laundering, drug purchasing, a My First Day Trading schemes.

I'm personally opposed to bitcoin for lots of reasons, mostly like kids think it's a decentralized currency, when really it's a very centralized commodity (any one of 12 people could effectively destroy bitcoin at any point in time) - but...

I'd be a hypocrite if I considered myself into bitcoin and environmental issues.

[pandasun]

> I wonder what the chances are that you believe in man made climate change?

Is that a question? Or a statement?

[ISL]

Because, at least from the municipality's perspective, supply is constrained.