Bitcoin and the Power/Energy/Electricity Grid concerns & questions

[very_452001]

Hi,

In USA the country is separated in to 3-4 power grids correct?

So the currents grids are version 1.0 meaning the grid distributes constant power electricity to all areas equally regardless of the areas has high energy usage or not?

In Biden's current infrastructure bill they plan to change the grid to Smart Grid 2.0?

Can a Smart Grid detect bitcoin mining and automatically turn off electricity for the bitcoin miners if Biden's government bans bitcoin mining?

In UK there's Smart Meters that shows how much gas/electricity is being used in the home. They replace old meters. These smart meters know when you open the fridge or turn on your tv to monitor your energy usage. They have helped the police catch drug criminals growing cannabis in their homes that requires a lot of energy like bitcoin mining.

Main questions are:

- Energy prices are getting more expensive as we can all see now, so for Bitcoin mining to be profitable bitcoin prices needs to go up otherwise it becomes unprofitable and miners will leave the bitcoin network making the bitcoin network less secure and vulnerable to 51% hack attacks correct?

- A drop in hash rate makes btc mining more easy attracting new miners to join the btc network to secure the network however what if the smart grid 2.0 detects and stops new bitcoin miners joining the btc network?

- The governments around the world are pushing their agendas for to stop global warming and bringing up ESG regulations. When this time comes then how can bitcoin miners mine bitcoin off the grid?

- Energy/Power rationing is happening around the world now in many countries due to high energy rising costs where governments have to ration energy usage in their own countries to decide who gets the power. They allow essential hospitals and airports to get the electricity but what about bitcoin miners?

[fiulpro]

Only individual miners would leave the whole things since got them it's not really profitable but when you talk about other companies working on large scale, I do not think that they would leave the whole thing, for them it would be more profitable since they would be able to cover what the small miners couldn't.

Smart grid would not work everywhere would it only work at places where it's implemented and the point would be implementing it in the first place therefore we have to have a whole set of laws for it. USA is a big country and I do think that there would be a lot of proceedings they would have to do Before thet can actually make this into a law.

UK is already forming laws to take care of gambling in cryptos as well, I wonder if they would be open to stop the miners since the miners are the basis of every crypto friendly country and I do think this would be very different for both US and UK. Their government have different approaches towards gambling.

[odolvlobo]

- Energy prices are getting more expensive as we can all see now, so for Bitcoin mining to be profitable bitcoin prices needs to go up otherwise it becomes unprofitable and miners will leave the bitcoin network making the bitcoin network less secure and vulnerable to 51% hack attacks correct?

As energy prices go up, hash rate may decline. However, the hash rate is arbitrary. It is the cost of mining the provides the security.

- A drop in hash rate makes btc mining more easy attracting new miners to join the btc network to secure the network however what if the smart grid 2.0 detects and stops new bitcoin miners joining the btc network?

Would the "smart grid 2.0" just be in the U.S., or world-wide? If the ban is in certain countries, then miners will move to other countries. It's hard to say what a world-wide ban on mining would do, or if it is likely or even possible.

- The governments around the world are pushing their agendas for to stop global warming and bringing up ESG regulations. When this time comes then how can bitcoin miners mine bitcoin off the grid?

Just like electric vehicles, Bitcoin gets its power from the electricity providers. It is up to the providers to decide whether or not to burn carbon.

- Energy/Power rationing is happening around the world now in many countries due to high energy rising costs where governments have to ration energy usage in their own countries to decide who gets the power. They allow essential hospitals and airports to get the electricity but what about bitcoin miners?

Rationing is about setting priorities. I doubt that Bitcoin would have any priority at this time in most places, so mining would probably be restricted in countries that are rationing. However, that doesn't prevent miners from moving to other countries (as they did when China banned mining).

[franky1]

As energy prices go up, hash rate may decline. However, the hash rate is arbitrary. It is the cost of mining the provides the security.

average UK electric price in UK in say 2012 was 13pence kwh
now its 17pence kwh

but. hashrate since 2012 as scaled up by a factor of millions

..
in short ASIC efficiency will scale up the hashrate. while not scaling up the electric cost by the same factor

infact in just the last year. people moving away from using antminer s9 and moving to s19pro have seen that although 1 asic uses 2.5x more electric. and electric has increased by 10% per kwh in price in this time.. the hashrate has not declined.

however. due to mining communities not wanting to shoot self in foot by making difficulty jump by 800%
(14thas vs 110thash)
they have decided to not just replace all rigs of a mining farm from s9 to s19. meaning there was no jump from 100exa to 800exahash in the last year. instead they changed 8x s9 for 1 s19pro. to give same hashrate.. but now instead of using 10.4kwh for the 8 s9's they are only using 3.25kwh for the 1 s19pro

and slowly add another s19pro over time. trying to keep the balance of difficulty rise below 5%

[TangentC]

Hi,

In USA the country is separated in to 3-4 power grids correct?

So the currents grids are version 1.0 meaning the grid distributes constant power electricity to all areas equally regardless of the areas has high energy usage or not?

In Biden's current infrastructure bill they plan to change the grid to Smart Grid 2.0?

Can a Smart Grid detect bitcoin mining and automatically turn off electricity for the bitcoin miners if Biden's government bans bitcoin mining?

In UK there's Smart Meters that shows how much gas/electricity is being used in the home. They replace old meters. These smart meters know when you open the fridge or turn on your tv to monitor your energy usage. They have helped the police catch drug criminals growing cannabis in their homes that requires a lot of energy like bitcoin mining.

Yep, 3 power grids.
https://www.electricrate.com/data-center/us-power-grid/

There are three separate energy networks in the country’s power grid system, split into three regions. They operate independently of each other and exchange very little energy. The Eastern grid and the Western grid mimick the division along the Rocky Mountains (‘The Rockies’) while the state of Texas has its own electric grid.

US has moved to Smart meters already.
Utilities can monitor electricity usage immediately, and they can remotely disable electricity usage at the smart meters.

So if there was a US government ban on bitcoin mining, due to the excessive amount of energy used, their is no way they could hide.
However Proof of Stake design such as Cardano and Algorand use so little electricty, they would not know if you were staking or playing on your xbox.  
Plus you could run proof of stake networks off a laptop connected to a battery charged by 1 solar panel and no one would know.  

The biggest catalyst for the type of government banning regulation you are concerned with ,
usually only happen once the Bitcoin miners exceed the normal energy capacity of a given country.
China only banned bitcoin mining once it threatened their power grids by draining too much of the China energy resources verses the normal populace.

The following should sum up the energy situation of Proof of work bitcoin mining for you.
_______________________________________________________________________________ _____

https://forkast.news/headlines/kazakhstans-power-shortages-crypto-miners-scramble/
https://compassmining.io/education/kazakhstans-power-shortage-outage-bitcoin-mining/
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/kazakhstan-rations-power-after-coal-fired-plant-outages-2021-10-15/
https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-to-restrict-crypto-miners-amid-power-shortages

Kazakhstan to restrict crypto miners amid power shortages

Facing a sudden energy shortage, officials must be regretting their recent embrace of the crypto industry.
Then China offered a reality check this summer when it banned cryptocurrency use and mining on its territory.
Many farmers simply moved operations across the border, turning Kazakhstan into the world’s second-largest crypto miner.
The country’s share of global mining soared from 1.4 percent in September 2019 to over 18 percent

Bans of Bitcoin PoW mining in Kazakhstan , not far away.
China Smarten up, and so will Kazakhstan ,about the dangers of PoW to the people and energy grid,
although odds are Texas holds out until their power grid is destroyed and throws Texas back to the stone age for years.  
Watch Texas growing power nightmare here : http://www.ercot.com/
Odds are less than 2 years until a Texas Power Grid collapse during a winter storm, thanks to the increased energy drain by PoW bitcoin miners.
_______________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________

* The main problem with energy wasting proof of work is not that it uses electricty but the fact that the energy drain on the grid grows by % as large as adding a new country to the planet earth, almost every two years, which is why PoW is unsustainable in it's current form. *

[franky1]

i dont see china/kazakhstan completely banning mining forever.

infact just last week china opened up discussion to reform/change their stance on it.
https://hd.ndrc.gov.cn/yjzx/yjzx_add.jsp?SiteId=372
so definitely not a "ban, end of story"

what i see occuring is LICENCED mining much like in the UK needing a LICENCE to brew alcohol for more then personal use.

meaning hobby miners cant just buy a rig and operate. they need to ask for permission. do it officially.
china never had an issue with the large mining farms operating from hydro power and purchasing electric contracts for the excess energy a hydro power plant produces
what they dis liked was people hobby mining where they blew out circuits and sent their neighbours into brown outs(in experienced home miners that have no electrician expertise)

[pooya87]

In USA ~
- Energy prices are getting more ~
- ~if the smart grid 2.0 detects and stops new bitcoin miners ~
- Energy/Power rationing is happening around the world now in many countries due to high energy rising costs ~

There are 195 countries in the world and only some like US are like this. Miners will always choose the best option available to them based on electricity cost, labor cost, regulations, taxes, climate, etc. When things get hard in a country, the hashrate located in that country drops while it increases elsewhere.

BTW the grid can only detect big mining farms that use a lot of electricity which is abnormal not all miners that are smaller and use far less electricity which is not so different from normal usage.

There are a lot of countries with super cheap electricity and price hasn't changed that much in the past couple of years either. For example the electric company where I live recently released the detailed price rates and for home users it is about 0.002 $/KWH (for big cities such as the capital with higher cost), there are cities with lower price of 0.00074 $/KWH.
The above values are for home users and there are certain conditions (such as overusing electricity) where the price rises but only slightly. The last electric bill I paid was about 30 cents (google tells me the average electric bill in US in 2019 was $115 per month LOL).
The price for certain industries are even lower, for example the rate for agriculture field is as low as about 0.0005 $/KWH.
Unfortunately the document didn't mention the rate they are giving bitcoin miners (the big farms) but it is in the same range and shouldn't be higher than 1 cent/KWH.

[Hydrogen]

Main questions are:

- Energy prices are getting more expensive as we can all see now, so for Bitcoin mining to be profitable bitcoin prices needs to go up otherwise it becomes unprofitable and miners will leave the bitcoin network making the bitcoin network less secure and vulnerable to 51% hack attacks correct?

- A drop in hash rate makes btc mining more easy attracting new miners to join the btc network to secure the network however what if the smart grid 2.0 detects and stops new bitcoin miners joining the btc network?

- The governments around the world are pushing their agendas for to stop global warming and bringing up ESG regulations. When this time comes then how can bitcoin miners mine bitcoin off the grid?

- Energy/Power rationing is happening around the world now in many countries due to high energy rising costs where governments have to ration energy usage in their own countries to decide who gets the power. They allow essential hospitals and airports to get the electricity but what about bitcoin miners?

Bitcoin mining operations are extremely mobile and can be setup anywhere in the world with cheap surplus electricity.

China has already tried shutting down not only the power grid -- but the entirety of mining operations in the country and it was unsuccessful.

The biggest thing you're missing is cryptocurrency mining and power plants being natural allies. Energy producers LOVE the high power consumption of proof of work mining. Miners in turn LOVE energy producers who give them good prices and excellent terms. This is a combination that can be had anywhere in the world if necessity demands. Bans by china or the USA won't necessarily have a significant impact.

As el salvador has shown any small country can benefit economically by embracing crypto. If crypto mining is banned in the USA, it may merely mean that some small nation will benefit from america's loss. The way the american crypto mining industry benefited from china banning it.

[franky1]

BTW the grid can only detect big mining farms that use a lot of electricity which is abnormal not all miners that are smaller and use far less electricity which is not so different from normal usage.

the grid can detect smaller amounts.
its not like there is only 1 power meter at the power plant. what you will find should you seek out around your neighbourhood is electric relay stations. yep each neighbourhood has one somewhere.
ontop of this houses and buildings have their own meters which allow power companies to charge users for the electric they use.

most countries do not care about a hobby miner with 1 rig..
what they do care is if someone is trying to be a farm with dozens to hundreds of rigs using the residential circuit

power plants in most countries do not care about mega farms. as long as the mega farms are buying electric allotments from the EXCESS capacity, and not the paid capacity that goes to industry/residential

china and other countries cannot just turn up at someones house and say "stop". what has to happen in all countries is a complete ban of all operations. and then licence/permit and regulate who can use it. so that they can then stop those that are using it outside the desired preference of use.

china and america are not actually against all mining. they actually like the hydro powered farms that buy the excess. but they dont like residential area's converting their garages into 100+ rig mini farms as it causes the residential neighbourhood circuit to trip which causes brownouts in neighbourhoods