There will be no such areas soon, globally the cheaper energy sources will be getting scarcier and more expensive. Energy hungry entities will buy cheaper ones first.
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At its current difficulty level BTC mining isn’t practical on any GPU.
I couldn’t find any hash rates for the P40 as it is 6 years old now, but the 3090ti benchmarks I found had a BTC/sha256 hash rate of 9688.7 MH/s (In comparison the Antminer S19 is 95 TH/s so is roughly 9800 times quicker). The current global BTC rate is 238.67 EH/s so it would take 24 billion 3090ti’s to match the current ASIC usage.
With Nicehash since I would assume, if sellers make use of the minimum profitability parameter to ensure they aren’t mining at a loss, then buyers are likely to be forced to pay more, or not mine if it becomes unprofitable.
One of the most interesting options which I think was mentioned quite a bit earlier would be an algorithm or method that is related to unique participants so that it could make all participants equal and remove the opportunity for it to be overpowered by large investors. Consensus via public IPv4 IP could be one option, it wouldn’t be fool proof, but would definitely impact large farms if the profitability were lower than the fairly high costs of large public IP blocks, but could potentially allow individual participants to become involved without the cost of expensive hardware or energy usage.
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The electricity isn’t in the hands of the government. How can you claim the government is responsible when a DECENTRALIZED ENTITY (the actual oil industries) are raising prices. See how bad decentralization of important things is?
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A renaisance for the VPN providers. 
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Most VPNs only operate with a very low number of public IPs compared to the number of customers and rely on port mapping and address translation to enable multiple customers to share public ips.
On most VPNs that offer a dedicated IP it costs extra, - for NordVPN, (the first i found) its $79.25/yr subscription and an extra $70 for a dedicated ip so would get very expensive on a commercial scale, I also have a feeling that VPN providers would very quickly run out of addresses or could quickly increase pricing once they become aware of demand.
As I said it was only a suggested way of considering users to be unique, it may well not be the right answer, but I do believe that something that removes the barrier of high initial and running costs is likely to result in increased uptake, provided it can’t be manipulated.
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Wow.
How would the actual ledger be managed and where would it be stored?
To me there doesn’t seem to be any immediate reason to change the decentralised way the ledger is currently stored on multiple nodes.
My suggestion is that it is the mining/block verification process that would benefit from the changes, since it is artificially engineered to reward processing capability through the hashing process, if this could be replaced with a form of verification through consensus instead, similar to Ethereum’s POS but with equal weighting rather than prioritising those with the highest balance. By removing the hashing element you could allow huge numbers of participants to become involved with devices such as Raspberry PIs or even cheaper devices.
I’m not suggesting that I have the idea for a perfect solution, only that your question about how BTC could continue without large farms got me thinking about it and cost seems to be one of obstacles in preventing peoples involvement.
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The governance over IP ranges is in centralized hands. This isn’t a viable resource to run a consensus mechanism. Just imagine what power a bot-net had with such an algorythm.
Ok, that’s a fair point, possibly there is another method of identifying unique users…
It seems like there needs to be some form of answer because at the moment POW or POS both come down to who has the most money, and if we’re faced with the situation that those with the most money control the currency, then it seems pretty similar to traditional financial structure and transfers the existing relative positions.
For a significant change to occur there needs to be something that levels the playing field, otherwise the ‘system’ continues as before but through a new medium.
They control their own BTC mining operation but they don’t control Bitcoin, also, we have seen that BTC miners have hefty crippling bills to pay where many seem unable to hold on to any of the BTC they mined which is due to the lower value of BTC and the cost of an Asic and other costs such as electric, rent, and insurance
For these reasons the miners are only the people who assisted in creating the new BTC, ownership of the BTC mined will most likely go to a crypto exchange which is owned by lots of rich people.
Crypto Mining Giant Bitmain Is Going Public With a $40 to $50 Billion Valuation.
This is interesting news, So Bitmain has been the leader selling Asic’s to everyone and they only have the overheads of a normal company that creates specialist processing units. They will probably do better than most other miners as they have specialist cpu designers in house. they might have a way of upgrading their mining hardware cheaply.
The company has gone public and is valued at 40 to 50 billion, so if they are building a power station just to power their mining operation it might be possible to see profit in the long term. For comparison the uk is currently building a nuclear power station which currently costs £30 billion and will supply around 6 million homes.
Bitmain will also have a regular income from any other company still mining BTC, so In my opinion BTC mining will continue, but at a slower rate. Imagine that, a company with so much money they can commision their own nulcear power plant.
Also, I believe everyone is excited about 5mn technology which generally means they can make processing units smaller and fit more computing units onto a processor and use less power.
…in ponzi schemes.
ROFL. They should valuate themselves in gorillions.
The whole idea is being able to transfer BTC pseudonymous. When did that change? If you UID the miners successfully you can as well just force them to post their “corporate ID” on their transactions.
But I guess BTC is going down so a new kind of “user/customer” needs to hold the bags.
We don’t have to with Bitcoin, because every user has the ability to enforce the rules by running their own node and interact with people that have a consensus about what the rules are.
In reality this makes the Bitcoin consensus rules basically impossible to change. Because the more people use directly a node the more difficult it will be to convince them all to change them.
PoW and PoS are very different when it comes to this.
As it turns out, PoW Miners actually don’t have a huge influence on the consensus, they mainly provide a service to the network. PoW mining is like a lottery where you auction of new minted coins. As the market matures, margins get lower and lower until the expenses almost match the worth of the coins. So they don’t get insanely richer by mining, they just run a business that mines Bitcoin, similar to other businesses. When it comes to consensus rules, they just follow the network, that’s what they have to do to stay in business.
https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/uasf/
This is very different in PoS. The people with the most money staked in validators actually have an influence on the consensus rules. We have seen this already with networks like EOS, where there is now effectively a cabal of the richest holders that keeps everyone else out and has effectively taken over control.
PoW is such a simple solution that solves a lot of problems PoS has to build insanely complex constructs to replicate. Just take for example distributed random selection of the block producer. This is important to have censorship resistance. PoW gets this naturally simply by the fact that a random miner will find a valid block first. PoS or similar systems have to create complex algorithms that depend on the state of the network to generate randomness. A state that future participants can’t even validate, so it’s actually pretty easy to forge a fake history, while with PoW it’s basically impossible, because the burned energy is literally visible in the hash.
Obviously it uses a lot of energy, but with 60% of all produced electricity wasted because of inefficiencies or simply no buyer, there is just a lot of potential for Bitcoin to run without having any additional ecological impact. We see this happening already as price pressure on miners increases and they have to seek out ever cheaper energy, with the cheapest always being green curtail energy that would otherwise go to waste.
You mix up very distinct things.
Average of 60% power loss. This is because current technology can’t do better. The technology and the type of fuel used to generate electricity affect the efficiency of power plants. For example, in 2019, of the 11.9 quads of natural gas consumed for electricity generation, natural gas plants converted 45% (5.4 quads) into net generation of electricity. By contrast, of the 10.2 quads of coal consumption, coal plants converted 32% (3.3 quads) into net generation.
Nothing can prevent this. Nothing.
Curtailment is just “reducing the stress on the electricity grid”, that’s it. They either shut down a coal/gas plant when demands drops or start one up when demand goes up.
What do you even mean with these random buzzwords? Maybe you think one can “curtail” by using BTC mining? Not unless they are ON SITE at the power generation. So how can it be decentralized if they need to sync with the grid? That’s why I wonder on how you keep saying it’s individuals and not a large (inter)national company that would set up and manage the BTC miners on all these sites. Do you think power plants should let random people in who are “too cool to ID themselves?”. Maybe in a TV show for children but not in reality. BTC’s value is still low… and with all the mining companies going bankrupt, at least Aaron will get paid more for his efforts.
If nothing can be done to prevent it why would that be counted as a loss of power? If around 50% of gas is lost during the process of converting it to electric then it would never have been electric and shouldn’t be counted as such. Gas and coal have a low efficiency when turning it into electric.
Also in the uk the pylons used to transfer the electric to where it’s needed lose around 50% of the electric that was generated. As I mentioned earlier, the uk was literally giving away electric for a good 30 years, now they are in a position where they can barely afford to build new power plants. This is what needs to be highlighted, the blatant loss of electric due to poorly funded research into pylon tech.
Greenpeace and other organisations are silly for not protesting about the actual infrastructure of electric and complaining more about a valid use for it.
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Because it’s a loss. Simple as.
I don’t even know what to tell you. I explained you before how the solar power plant in Morocco isn’t a good solution for countries far away due to the transport of energy.I guess you can scroll up?
Sure, they are free to do so.
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It is a loss yes, but it’s also a low efficiency in gas/coal, not a loss of electric. Uranium efficiency is around 91% so the other 9% is a loss imposed by nature.
You’re right it is a loss all the same, but it’s not the same type of loss as producing say 1000kwh of electric and then only selling 900kwh. The 100kwh of excess electric can’t be stored effectively so it gets wasted. If there is a local BTC miner they would be happy to buy this electric that would otherwise be wasted.
You should definitely contact the university of Calgary, also Penn State University and tell them your findings, professor. Make sure to keep us posted on their replies.
Also, update the wiki with your knowledge!
Let me know when it’s corrected!
Not saying you try to scam me, but… science disagrees with you.
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Hmmmm, so methane that they normally let float into the atmosphere and damage it is being used and paid for to introduce new BTC by some innovative entrepreneurial young men. Sounds like good business and consideration for the environment to me, I don’t know about anyone else. It’s very important to understand the truth, for without it we are truly lost.
I might go and live in Texas myself and do some business.
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True,
Setting up at the source/production of the energy is the lowest cost and is exactly what is the future, like I said before. And like Ford said before me (resource and production close to each other). Economical sound concepts don’t really change much over time.