Not everything is connected to the grid, you know.
Here's an example of a single hydro dam a LONG way from the grid which (pre-Cryptocurrency gold rush) had 12 MW of unused power generation capacity plus they were talking up the possibility of adding an additional 20 MW of generation.
Almost everything is connected to the grid. And even if it isn't... Even if it is an isolated hydro plant only connected to a data centre, other useful digital services could have run there instead.
There's really no getting away from the fact that cryptocurrencies waste huge amounts of energy, significantly contributing to climate change just to move money from idiots to arseholes.
Not just energy too - think how many resources it takes to make 120k GPUs. He should feel deep guilt about it.
> other useful digital services could have run there instead.
that's not really true. unless you have a specific example.
there are gigawatt hours of energy already being expelled and wasted with no purpose, and this has continued for decades now.
other "useful digital services" typically need high bandwidth internet infrastructure, or all energy use gains are lost by the physical movement of the data they are processing. in the middle of nowhere where these energy sources are, this becomes more obvious. crypto mining did not need good internet infrastructure, it is low bandwidth and can operate in fairly high latency (ie. in ethereum, valid blocks are found at a target of every 15 seconds, which means you have on average 15,000ms for the majority of the network to accept your block. satellite is okay enough for that).
but ultimately this isn't to change your mind with new information, here is where we are, if you really think you have a solution that nobody else noticed, then you should thank cryptocurrency for pointing it out to you (or pissing you off enough) because you're going to save us all with your amazing observations about wasted energy being expelled for decades.
otherwise, there were some large scale crypto operations that was not removing energy from any other purpose, were not polluting in the process when using clean energy, were reducing pollution when repurposing flared energy, and simply expanded a market for energy.
I am very happy that ETH switched to PoS. Now it just runs in the other data centers that are already in the same location and uses a fraction of the power.
The GPUs were already made and older models. The PS5 chips were seconds that never made it into PS5's. They would have gone to waste regardless.
If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy. I find gaming a total waste of time/energy, but I don't tell people to stop playing games or that they should feel guilty about it.
Just because they had already been made doesn't mean that you using them has no impact on the world. If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.
You're clearly smart enough to understand that; you just don't want to because it makes you feel guilty. Honestly I think you should just own it. I assume you made a suitably large amount of money? I can't say I wouldn't have done the same but I hope I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
> If is really interesting to me how people have some sort of moral obligation to tell others how to spend energy.
It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
> If you hadn't used them then other people would have, there would be less demand for GPUs, and fewer GPUs would be made in future.
No. They were based on stock that didn't sell. It is a common misconception with GPU mining that you had to use the latest and greatest. The 4-5 year older tech was more ROI efficient and we got access to it, so we used it. Nobody wanted it cause it was old. We put it to use for a few years and now it'll either find a new home or get recycled for parts.
> I would have the honesty to admit I basically burnt down a forest to take money from idiots.
See... that's a personal attack. I don't see things the way you do. In my eyes, attempting to build a better financial system isn't 'taking money from idiots'. Given all that's going on in the banking world today, I find it hard to believe anyone would want to continue with the status quo.
You literally have Yellen sitting in a room with her friends deciding which bank should live or die. I'd like to see that and a whole lot more in traditional finance get cleaned up. Helping get ETH off the ground was a good thing... now that it is on PoS, this whole debate about energy use, is a moot point.
> It's almost as if we all live on the same planet and the way we spend energy affects other people!
Sure, but don't be hypocritical about it. I'm sure that there are 1000's of ways that you personally don't do your part either. Ever fly in a plane to take a vacation? No one on this planet is doing a perfect job at minimizing their footprint and I certainly don't feel like I'm above anyone else to criticize others on their energy ab(use).
You are correct. There is one in upstate new york as well. An old Alcoa smelter factory powered off the Moses-Saunders dam. It is so remote and sparsely populated that transmitting the power elsewhere is just too expensive. I've even seen their energy bills and the transmission costs alone are insane.
Obviously some resolvers are misconfigured and a depressingly large number of production DNS servers around the internet will be running remarkably outdated software that couldn't handle the KSK rollover via the RFC 5011 method properly (though how many of these actually have DNSSEC enabled is an open question). For example, I've heard of resolvers breaking because they mishandled the transition and replaced KSK-2010 with KSK-2017 as soon as they got it.
I saw the postponement late last night, and my immediate but completely untested pet theory is that the reason they're getting so many 'broken' resolvers running such new software (RFC 8145 was published in April 2017, unbound 1.6.4 was released June 27, 2017) is short-lived container instances that only have the old root trust anchor reporting in before they've had a chance to obtain the new KSK - if they even stay up long enough to get it.
From the root-dnssec-announce mailing list, it sounds like more information is due Friday:
"Duane Wessels started the research on this and has done a great job. He's presenting it at DNS-OARC in San Jose on Friday."
I'm looking forward to the talk on Friday (and the easy conversation starter at NANOG... we can't keep talking about dying clock silicon forever)... but I absolutely agree with tptacek on this one, DNSSEC is worse than useless (solves no actual security problems; introduces many new problems; absurdly complex and poorly implemented across the board), and this doesn't help the optics one bit. I've gotten myself down to one DNSSEC zone I have to run (a .gov, lord help us all) and have been trying to get the resign going since the new key became available with literally zero forward movement. Lots of fun.
So, how do you suggest to replace DNSSEC then, assuming that your enemy is a nation state intercepting your DNS queries and responding with NSA QUANTUM before the legitimate server does?
Of course, the chances are that no small number of apps you might be tempted to restrict will promptly crash since they'll assume that having asked for the permission up front means they'll get whatever data they want when they ask for it.
When someone at my office spotted this story earlier in the day, a bunch of us quickly ran around playing with an android app (which doesn't have permissions to phone home and censors out some of the data) to see what info we could pull off our cards.
Name, number, and expiry are readily available. We figured you could probably replay that data to get some free gas with stolen credentials... but the scanning range with phones is more akin to "hold the card up against it for several seconds to read" than "walk through a crowded room".
That is probably a moderately-variable function of the power output and sensitivity/gain of the radio in the phone (and card) used. (A crowded subway in Japan would probably be ideal conditions. :p) Other phones may have noticeably better range, or range might be increased by simply going out of spec using lower level RF controls (if lower level access is possible per-controller, since as I don't see anything about power control in the Android docs).
A high-gain antenna at the NFC frequency (13.56MHz) would be about 11 meters wide and 6 meters long. This is probably why there isn't much long-distance NFC skimming going on.
(If you're an ARRL member, there's a good article on building a 14MHz directional antenna at http://www.arrl.org/files/file/protected/Group/Members/Techn.... It's big, and one resonant at 13.56MHz would be a little bit bigger. But it is something that's physically possible and would make for an interesting experiment.)
High performance DNS software can handle well over 100k QPS on a single core on commodity hardware, but that's not an apples to apples comparison since the benchmarks I'm remembering didn't include any weighting or geo-distribution special sauce.
Here's an example of a single hydro dam a LONG way from the grid which (pre-Cryptocurrency gold rush) had 12 MW of unused power generation capacity plus they were talking up the possibility of adding an additional 20 MW of generation.
https://www.hydroreview.com/business-finance/boralex-acquire...
It's not going to be the only one.