this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 114 points 9 months ago (81 children)

This is a loss for everyone. Fuck these clowns.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago

Trump judge.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Everyone is a bit shit here (including whoever came up with that title...). No one "won" anything here.

DoE wanted to use "emergency" measures to survey miner's energy use, which is likely outside of the scope of the original intent of such powers (which appears to be why the judge granted a temporary restraining order?).

The Bitcoin miner's claim the data release would cause "irreparable harm to their business..." If that's not an admission of guilt, then I don't know what is.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

temporary restraining order?

It's just a type of pretrial injunction. You need to show that irreparable harm would come if the DOE did this. It's helpful to have the case look like you'd win. Since the judge already said that it looks like they'd win, he'd likely extend it all the way to the end of the trial.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/temporary_restraining_order

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 9 months ago (9 children)

Cryptobros and crypto miners are some of the most worthless people in the world. Just a waste of oxygen and resources.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

That's exactly who billionaires who have yachts and private jets want you to take your anger out on. Good job falling for it.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago

Jokes on you, I have enough anger for both!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

won't someone think of the poor speculators

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I feel exactly the same about the billionaires.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

keep mum about energy use

Whose mum?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

There is a "Your mum" joke in there.

Your mum is so fat, that bitcoin miners litigated to keep abusing her power grid.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (13 children)

This is dumb but only because we don't worry about energy use any other time. Tons of places in my city keep all their lights on 24/7 unnecessarily, we all are sitting on a "useless" social media, video games and movies and music are all energy uses. I don't want the government to start limiting energy use on things it deems unimportant. Who gets to decide what counts? Just implement a carbon tax and energy use will go down if people don't want to pay. We don't need to police everyone's usage, we just need the cost to actually reflect the externalities.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We could just solve the problem the capitalist way and just charge businesses extra for their power usage. That'll get them to care.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

I want to agree with you, but crypto mining is orders of magnitude more energy than the worst lazy energy leaks.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

So true. These fu**ing schools keeping their lights on the whole night and vacations, with their old lamps, while people like me measure their lamps and turn everything off...

Also the amount of 4K or more useless data transfer, ads, unnecessary youtube videos where there could be only audio (if they made that free, you can use any FOSS client and do the same)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (3 children)

US headline

"keep mum"

There is one impostor among us

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Probably ai generated

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Mum as in quiet is uncommon but not unheard of in the us. Probably more common than mum for mother, anyway.

"Mum's the word"

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The economic drivers of Bitcoin mining make it so that the cost of the electricity needed to mine a Bitcoin will always be just a bit less than the value of a Bitcoin.

Every time speculators hype up the value of Bitcoin the amount of money wasted on electricity increases.

Bitcoins are mined at a preset rate of 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. Which does at least get cut in half every few years. But this waste of energy is going to continue so long as there’s a market for Bitcoin.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Somehow Ethereum 2 exists with Proof of Stake and everybody is still using Bitcoin. That tells me that nobody important (for this context) cares about wasted electricity.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It's more that noone cares about the actual use cases of crypto and are just using it as speculative gambling.

Bitcoin is the literal equivalent of a horse and carriage while cars exist. If any crypto survives it should be the proof of stake crypto not the badly designed bitcoin (noting of course, for its time it was amazingly innovative, just that it's no longer actually useful).

Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.

[–] prole 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Not to mention the whole design flaw that it's meant to be completely private/anonymous but ironically is one of the most public and traceable things ever created.

Bitcoin was never meant to be that, people were/are just idiots.

Monero on the other hand... Something made possible because Bitcoin came first.

[–] prole 7 points 9 months ago

FYI there's no such thing as "Ethereum 2." It's just called "Ethereum."

And you're right, every time these mainstream articles mention the power consumption of crypto, they never mention ETH. Weird.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Genuine question: If I use a cryptocurrency such as Monero for its privacy benefits (only for spending, not as an investment), am I indirectly making crypto mining more profitable and hurting the environment?

ps. I don't use any crypto yet.

Edit: actually I don't care that much about private money. What if I were to just use some crypto because it's convenient? Would that be bad?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

There are so many things we interact with that hurt the environment that I wouldn’t take too much personal blame if I were you. The big time miners are the ones using the electricity, and they could use their profits to invest in renewable sources for their mining. They just don’t do it, much like how every other company in the world doesn’t take environmentalism seriously and just says “you first”.

The government needs to focus on making renewable energy investment a requirement for the biggest offenders. That is the only way we will force large scale change that actually matters.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

[…] use roughly as much electricity as all of the nation’s home computers combined

Bitcoin mining also risks stressing out the power grid in Texas, a crypto hub in the US where the state’s grid operator has paid Riot more than $31 million in energy credits to curb its electricity use during heatwave-induced demand spikes. Bitcoin mining has also brought sputtering fossil fuel power plants back to life and raised electricity costs for some residents in New York.

It's clear why the survey is necessary.

Why did they make it an emergency survey in the first place? Is there no "normal" survey alternative?

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