The U.S government wants to crack down on the ballooning energy consumption of Bitcoin miners.

Just 137 crypto miners use 2.3% of total U.S. power — government now requiring commercial miners to report energy consumption::The U.S Energy Information Administration is now requiring large-scale cryptomining operations to report their energy consumption. Inevitably this will bring about new regulations that will restrict the energy consumption of miners in the future.

    • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      That doesn’t apply to mining crypto and the fact that you think it does tells me that you have no idea what is going on here.

      • stembolts@programming.devEnglish
        10·
        10 months ago

        The concept of opportunity cost applies to everything.

        If you think it does not, then I now know the person that should be explaining crypto electric consumption to me is a person who failed to fully grasp the concept of opportunity cost.

        Enlightening… at least…

        • rdyoung@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Once again you highlight the fact that you have no idea what you are talking about.

          In generalities, yes, it applies to everything. But with crypto in particular, especially POW coins, it doesn’t apply the way you think it does and the fact that you think as much tells me how little you actually understand about the costs to acquire and run POW equipment as well as the risks of spending money to mine coins that end up worthless. It also highlights just how little you understand about crypto algos as a whole.

          I can’t really sum it up here and to explain it in a way that most of the plebs on here would understand would take several paragraphs and I’m not sure I can dumb it down enough.

          If you are capable of doing the math and extrapolations I would suggest that you look into what the hardware for algos behind coins like btc, ltc dash, eth, etc cost and exactly what you would have mined in the early days and just how much you would have sold off just to pay the electricity bills.

          Long story short. Buying into new crypto or mining new coins with existing hardware is taking advantage of opportunities but buying new hardware and expecting to make money off it long term on even commercial rates is going to be more profitable when you wait for the hardware and the coin to mature a bit.

          For POS coins, yes, take a risk and buy in or mine other coins with existing hardware and then swap for the new one when it hits exchanges.

          In closing. You clearly have no idea what the difficulty trend looked like for btc in the early days. If you did you would know that as soon as btc started taking off even the earliest miners were on a losing treadmill to keep up and keep making a profit.