Sham bam bamina! posted:

Ghostlight posted:

buttcoin-wise, 74.1% sounds like a ridiculous number, but it's just by virtue of the significant mining centres being built basically directly on hydro-power dams that produce more than their infrastructure can export - they even note that they see the centres in china migrating between dams through the year based on the rainy seasons.

kw0134 posted:

yeah, this always made sense because mining is marginally economically viable where you can push the price of electricity to its minimum, and that's been hydro since forfuckingever. it's like the aluminum smelting industry being "green" because half the export economy of iceland is aluminum smelters pumping out ingots by the megatons from cheap geothermal power. in most developed nations there are very few places where you have excess electricity just waiting around to be used and where large bitcoin mining ops have tried to come in it sucks all the power away from organic demand such that it causes material increases in the rates and results in a subscriber revolt.

since bitcoin mining is a starving leech that can drain the blood from a caribou in under thirty seconds, these aren't benign actors in a healthy power grid.

FAUXTON posted:

there's also the fact that difficulty increases with miner population, so you can make an argument that the increased miner population driven by the cheapness of hydropower outstrips any upside by making all mining more power-hungry including the ones burning coal.