In 2021, when China banned bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, crypto miners flocked to the United States in search of cheap electricity and looser regulations. In a few short years, the U.S.’s share of global crypto mining operations grew from 3.5 percent to 38 percent, forming the world’s largest crypto mining industry.

The impacts of this shift have not gone unnoticed. From New York to Kentucky to Texas, crypto mining warehouses have vastly increased local electricity demand to power their 24/7 computing operations. Their power use has stressed local grids, raised electricity bills for nearby residents, and kept once-defunct fossil fuel plants running. Yet to date, no one knows exactly how much electricity the U.S. crypto mining industry uses.

That’s about to change as federal officials launch the first comprehensive effort to collect data on cryptocurrency mining’s energy use. This week, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an energy statistics arm of the federal Department of Energy, is requiring 82 commercial crypto miners to report how much energy they’re consuming. It’s the first survey in a new program aiming to shed light on an opaque industry by leveraging the agency’s unique authority to mandate energy use disclosure from large companies.

“This is nonpartisan data that’s collected from the miners themselves that no one else has,” said Mandy DeRoche, deputy managing attorney in the clean energy program at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “Understanding this data is the first step to understanding what we can do next.”

read more: https://truthout.org/articles/crypto-mining-may-use-more-electricity-than-the-entire-state-of-washington/

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    Crypto mining is heavily concentrated in areas where there is geothermal (eg Iceland) and adjacent to hydroelectric plants (eg China).

    Do you have a source for this? Because I didn’t find anything with a quick search. I did find some evidence that the US gov is interested in tracking this though.

    • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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      9 months ago

      Yes but unfortunately it’s become paywalled

      https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume

      I’d be curious about the US study, but mostly if it looks at global trends. The US doesn’t have much geothermal or free (subsidized) hydro, so it may not be a good representation of the global ecosystem.

      All studies are going to be best-guesses, but HBR estimated 39-73% of bitcoin mining to be carbon neutral. Even the lower figure is twice the US grid’s percent of renewables.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Nic Carter is a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, a Cambridge, MA-based venture firm investing in public blockchain startups, and the cofounder of Coin Metrics, a blockchain analytics firm. Previously, he served as Fidelity Investments’ first cryptoasset analyst.

        So this article is obviously slanted in favor of cryptocurrencies.

        But their dataset doesn’t include all mining pools, nor is it up to date, leaving us still largely in the dark about Bitcoin’s actual energy mix.

        And there’s the rub, we can’t really know for sure what the cryptocurrency landscape looks like in terms of energy use. We do know cryptocurrency mining/processing will be attracted to lower cost energy and lower income taxes.

        The author shows a lot of examples of how cryptocurrency mining can be eco-friendly, but we don’t know if it actually is eco-friendly. For example, how likely is it that cryptocurrency miners would try to either steal energy (e.g. this example)? What about other types of energy fraud? Since cryptocurrency mining isn’t constrained by borders, there’s a huge incentive to go somewhere they can get away with cheaper operation costs, regardless of ethics.

        That said, if we can move away from mining to just verifying transactions (e.g. proof of stake), that would cut energy use significantly.

        But regardless, cryptocurrencies need to generate actual value to the average person. If they remain primarily used for speculation, people won’t see the value. I think cryptocurrencies have a lot of potential, but they need to prove their worth. Make them better than traditional money (e.g. faster, cheaper transactions), and people may actually use them. To quote another part of the article:

        How you answer that likely depends on how you feel about Bitcoin. If you believe that Bitcoin offers no utility beyond serving as a ponzi scheme or a device for money laundering, then it would only be logical to conclude that consuming any amount of energy is wasteful. If you are one of the tens of millions of individuals worldwide using it as a tool to escape monetary repression, inflation, or capital controls, you most likely think that the energy is extremely well spent.

        • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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          9 months ago

          What? Crypto currencies proved their worth Long before speculators joined the scene

          Unfortunately, theres no way to keep speculators out