Surely they can come up with some sort of local tax on this amount of electricity usage.
Longer term this is laughable as Bitcoin is heading back down towards zero.
4
Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme which will inevitably crash. The damage that it brings to this area of the state will be the responsibility of Andrew Cuomo who made it all possible.
Yet another feather in the cap of the most inept politician on the political scene.
3
Emblematic of what happened to the US economy as a whole: "Thousands of union jobs that paid well and offered full benefits have vanished," to be replaced by parasites and casino gambling -- i.e. cryptocurrency miners. Citizens of the North Country should make these energy leeches subsidize their electricity and pay a premium on corporate taxes. Otherwise, this is an abomination.
9
Who needs this really? OMG please self destruct!
7
When the stock market crashes (or there's a major correction) the shares still have value (they are undervalued by the market) resulting from the actual earnings of those companies. This creates opportunities for new investors to buy stock at discounted prices, which in turn ultimately leads to another increase of their price. If you buy Microsoft shares, for example, and they crash together with the rest of the market, you still own a part of its profits (and can get dividends). The real value is still there.
But when these crypto Ponzi scheme "currencies" (in quotes because you can't buy a sandwich with them) crash, there is zero value left. They simply promote capital transfer from the naive and/or poor to the rich.
It's sad that some of the smartest people I know fell for this cult. They block any criticism of their dogma, especially now when they live on the denial.
5
I wonder why any government would want to support an industry that one of whose purposes is facilitating tax evasion.
4
I scouted this mining thing out months ago, the minute I found it consumed massive amounts of electricity I was put off.
I wonder how much global server power is being currently (no pun) all cloud storage etc. in addition to large scale bit mining?
Do we need it? The power comes from essentially hydro ... so are we prepared to create more dams and flood more valleys for that purpose?
It quite amazing the binary codes of ones and zeros have essential mined culture and now it may control resource management as well.
8
I'm hoping the communities, eager as anyone, who hope to see the 150 promised jobs take a serious look at the promised numbers, survey what workers are already there, and realize that, like cloud computing centers, very few people are needed once those installations have been completed.
They are enormous consumers of power, and will go where power is available, and more likely to go where power is available for cheap.
Bitcoin miners will tell any community anything they wish to hear, and have no qualms about making promises that they know they cannot keep. Otherwise they wouldn't be doing bitcoin mining, which is basically a way of trying to make money without doing any real work. That kind of mentality and view of life does not endear them to a community, or wish to spread the wealth around.
Be very very careful of trying to attract this business to your towns. A better path would be to make it as difficult as possible for them to come in, since chances are very high that in a couple years, if even that long, they'll be as gone as the aluminum companies are now.
14
A regional economy based on prisons, a casino and now on energy-wasting Ponzi scheme? Sounds depressing.
There are so many places where computational power could be better spent, e.g. modeling of protein folding (to better understand cellular processes, including cancer, and rational drug design).
There are also so many places where human intellect could be better applied, e.g. retraining the under-educated and older workers for IT. Coding is really easy, requires about 2 years of training, and could help these Americans easily earning six figure salaries, instead of having to import so many H1Bs from India. I'm not talking about very advanced positions in IT - just your everyday 9-5 jobs that anyone can do with a bit of training. (I'm saying this as an immigrant in STEM fields myself.) There is a lot of hope for these poor Americans, but casinos, prison-industrial complex, Bitcoin, or drugs are not it.
15
Bitcoin: creating something from nothing?
Not at all! Creating nothing from something: No tangible product-- mined directly from the wealth of those who compete for the electricity to run the servers, followed eventually by landfills full of old useless computer servers.
How ironic that a "decentralized currency" should serve to line the pockets of a few sneaky, geeky "miners."
Never before was a con game more obvious.
14
Turning gold into lead...
5
A total waste: a waste of electric power and brainpower that does nothing except pollute our air and hasten climate change. Thanks.
7
Hope you get out soon - my 14 year old son is telling me that high end graphics cards are dropping like a stone pricewise!
4
Is it just me, or does the Mayor of Plattsburgh look just like Andy Dick?
Low-life American greed, stupidity, and waste strike again.
6
Once this whole farcical bitcoin thing collapses, maybe the space and electricity used by these "miners" (really?) could instead be used to grow tulip bulbs.
9
As one who grew up in Franklin County, my takeaway is the new tag line for this beleaguered yet beloved slice of NYS.
“Even more depressed than St Lawrence County”.
My dumb question is, where was all this ‘excess’ power going before? It’s not like the river stopped flowing in the ensuing years after Alcoa and Reynolds and GM pulled out. Weren’t they selling it to the highest bidder then?
Totally agree that 2 guys and a server farm should not be jacking up rates for all when there is little or no local economic benefit. 150 workers??? Right.
This is the factory of the future. 1 guy to feed the dog and the dog keeps the guy from touching the machine.
10
Bitcoin and blockchain in general have a lot of potential. Securing information is something people are experimenting with refugees, migrant workers, and even within our supply chains. However, the fact it uses to much energy is discouraging. Maybe environmentalists and cryptocurrency companies could find a solution?
2
Good article to begin the dialogue. How many well paying jobs does it require to generate 1 kilowatt hour?
In theory, we could hook up exercise bikes to the grid, generate power and be paid in cryptocurrency.
In theory a socialist dream to base currency on the value of labor. In reality, a capitalist would see the ROI opportunity to buy a bunch of bikes, hook them up in a cheap warehouse and use contract workers who were paid commission in cryptocurrency.
Shoot, I forgot about the expense of tariffs on imported cycles.
It will always be extremely challenging to be financially secure when all you have to bring to the table is an able body.
There are no simple solutions on this fragile and complicated planet.
4
Perhaps this is what the Chinese money behind the proposed Circular EnergG trash-to-electricity plant in the Finger Lakes is for. There is no way to get the electricity onto the grid, but there are plenty of empty warehouses for bitcoin miners. The pieces fit almost too nicely.
5
How much longer will governments around the world tolerate this enormous waste of electric power which raises everyone’s rates and puts more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Most Ponzi schemes just leave the last-in suckers with the loss of their money. Cryptocurrencies, which also rely on a continuing flood of gullible newbies to boost the price, consume vast amounts of electricity to support this con game.
There’s no free lunch on climate change from using hydropower, either. There’s finite installed hydropower capacity, so utilities will need more fossil-powered generation to serve increased load from cryptocurrency “mining.”
17
Can I trade in my ostrich, emu and chinchilla farm to get a slice of the bitcoin action?
14
@Harmon Smith LOL!
1
@Harmon Smith Check on the bottom of your Chia Pet box.
Uh, maybe because they're wasting something that has value (electricity) for an imaginary currency fabricated by a Japanese hacker.
My six year old son recently created his own currency by drawing on little squares of paper. They originally traded at $0.25 per "Calvin Buck," but the rate is now $5,000/CB. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Contact me if you want to get on this rocket to instant wealth before it is too late.
Calvin Bucks are as real as bitcoin. No, really.
23
@Steve Acho
And backed by the full faith and credit of Calvin (est. 2012).
5
I live in the 21st Congressional District which has many communities that are being inundated by these bitcoin operators. It is time for our upstate towns to stand up for our interests and resist businesses that are basically leeches.
We need legislators at every level who will fight for us. Tedra Cobb, who is running for the seat in this district, is well aware of what the issues are with these operations. I urge people to support her campaign.
19
One reasonable strategy is tiered pricing: the more you use, the more you pay. That's what happens to me in California, and it rewards people for conservation.
29
In Saudi Arabia, electricity is currently generated by burning petrol. Consumers are charged by the amount of electricity used in a month. The more you consume the higher the rate per kilowatt hour. There are different rates for consumptive categories (i.e. residential, commercial, agricultural & charities, industrial, governmental, medical & educational). There is also a monthly charge for 'meter reading, meter maintenance and bill prep, based upon the ampere capacity of the breaker(s).
Welcome them and charge them appropriately for their usage. The residential and small business owners shouldn't be footing the bill so 'big business' can generate more profits for themselves!
15
@Liam Cavendish: I love this idea. Maybe for businesses the rate charged could vary based on kilowatt hours consumed versus number of employee hours worked. (not per employee, because we don't want to encourage them to hire a bunch of people for an hour per month)
Even better would be a formula that would tie electricity rate charged to both number of employee hours worked AND the pay rate of employees (to encourage growth of higher-paying jobs that employee a good number of people for the amount of energy they use).
1
Very simple, power utilities should charge the bit coin mining centers a surcharge, to offset the cost to the locals. Done, end of story...
10
@Steve -- there are probably some regulatory restrictions on a utility's ability to charge different prices to different customers based on the nature of their business. If you think about the implications, that is probably a good thing. But, at least in towns like Massena where the bitcoin farm is off the scale compared to any other single customer, there should be a way to set up different rates for users at a certain level. However, make the power expensive enough and the bitcoin miners will go elsewhere.
3
The electric bill seems to be a red herring in this dispute. The real issue is that crypto currency data mining is essentially a code breaking operation. These massively parallel systems can be quickly adapted for breaking other kinds of data encryption codes.
7
@W - Not really, no. All Bitcoin mining is now done using ASICs (application specific integrated circuits), meaning they use chips designed to perform pretty much a very small set of algorithms needed to perform mining as quickly and efficiently as possible. It is impossible at this point to mine Bitcoin profitably with general purpose processors, no matter how much parallelism you employ. Unless you have an alternative application which is extremely similar to Bitcoin mining (which is unlikely), the hardware being used is useless for anything else.
5
Amazon and Dominion Energy recently lost a battle in Virginia to run new overhead high-voltage lines to a new cloud computing center. Dominion, a public utility, was allowed to spread the additional cost of underground service, $172 million, to all of its ratepayers, by Virginia state legislative action. The legislature justified its action on Amazon job creation. The cloud computing center will create hardly any jobs. "The business of America is business." - Calvin Coolidge, Ronnie Reagan's idol
18
Proof-of-work solves a relatively unimportant problem (the need to trust a third party) in an environmentally disasterous manner. I hope we can move to something else.
In the meantime, though, some enterprising person should start a business selling residential heaters that have mining rigs in place of heater coils. They're equally efficient at generating heat, and at least the former pay back a bit.
4
@M. A mining rig can cost around $1k. A space heater $40. It costs about $8k to mine one Bitcoin.
About 70-80% of the possible # of bitcoins has already been mined.
2
Another financial bubble, brought on by years of 0% interest rates and generous Central Bank policies. That, and "innovations" like cryptocurrencies.
Like all the other bubbles, this one won't end well.
15
Just a monumental waste of time and resources, with seriously negative externalities being imposed on the rest of us.
23
Socialization of costs, privatization of profits, subsidization of (mostly) young white guys. It never ends.
47
More gifts brought to us by the “rigged for the rich only” tax code.
6
Tulip bulb crazes are not sustainable. And neither is their energy use. Looks to me like the tech revolution is a net loss for the planet. And it's tacky to boot. Guess that makes me a Luddite. Other than for a few medical advances, civilization peaked with the hot shower and cold beer in my opinion. All the rest of the new stuff is physically, mentally or emotionally poisonous dross. That we have a Donald Trump in the Oval Office only confirms civilization's decline.
23
The use/waste of a lot of energy for the benefit of a very few producing nothing of tangible use or value -- just speculation. These places should bear 100% of the cost of electricity above the average use by the surrounding community wherever they set up shop.
20
Zero jobs and electricity hogs
Charge them appropriately as super users by megawatt used
Anything less is a legislature or council not doing their job
22
@Deirdre "A legislature or council not doing their job" is a time-honored tradition. What do you think campaign contributions are for?
7
These 'miners' provide zero value add to the communities they operate in and the 150 job claim is untruthful. Just look at all the places in this country where huge data centers were built with often the same promise of job creation. They are looking for cheap power and will make whatever claims are necessary to give them a better chance of operation in the areas with cheap electricity. And to be fair to the communities who see a spike in electric rates when consumption is high, the increase the rate payer sees should be based on THEIR consumption - if they are responsible for 1 % of the usage then they pay 1% of the higher rate. With all the computing power, the utility could have charged the higher consumers of electricity more for their consumption, they just chose not to for their own ease of smearing it across all the rate payers. And if the local municipal power authorities were smart, they would start putting legal measures in place to ensure that moderate consumer do not get hit with a large increase in rates because your largest consumer forces you to purchase power on an exchange at a much higher rate.
16
Money, in a way, is basically congealed energy. These cryptocurrency mining operations use more energy than they create in basically an exercise in which no useful work is done.
Yes, yes, verifying the block chain. I submit that costs outweigh benefits in that operation.
And when you weigh in the externalties and entropy created by all of this electrical power usage, and the opportunity cost of doing some useful work, things like Bitcoin are a net loss for society.
19
It probably would've been good to mention that the growth in BitCoin value was due entirely to market manipulation and insider trading by a few investors, and that BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies were essential for Russia's attempts to influence US elections, according to this paper on both counts. There's almost no real world interest in cryptocurrency other than those who are trying to get rich off of it or avoid detection for some reason.
22
If a company that promises 150 jobs drives up electricity rates making it more costly for a company that employs 500 to make its products, to say nothing of straining local people's winter heating budgets, I wouldn't call that a glass half full, I'd say, Watch out! Your drink is spiked!
53
Hats off to Plattsburgh's elected officials for doing the right thing in placing a moratorium on future Bitcoin ventures. These days, how many times do politicians show allegiance to regular citizens instead of selling their votes to the big money crowd? Not many.
17
It seems like you could do 12 month hydroponic gardening in that empty factory footprint.
Cover the flat roofs with solar cells, and use power when needed.
13
The question I have posed to experts in crypto currency and block chain at convention panels discussing the topic of crypto currency is, what is the base Return on Investment?
Add together the hours spent on mining, (time is money) the expense in purchasing servers miners, the price of electricity and other utilities, (rent) not to mention the fluctuation of the price of crypto currency, what is the bottom line that these miners are making?
Also, is there a property tax incentive that some of these municipalities offer to miners?
Without this type of information your article only tells only a portion of the story of crypto currency mining.
Roxanne Henkle
Spazhouse, Intuitive Research.
13
"[T]he biggest employers in the area are prisons and a casino..." Basically, two of the leading indicators of a fundamentally broken regional economy.
29
It wouldn’t surprise me if this method would be the only way to pay for anything from shopping to eating out. Credit cards would be a thing of the past and your paycheck will be bitcoin statement.
3
Yup, your right. I can see it now. Cash is slowly being obsolete.
Incredible amounts of energy wasted so that child sex traffickers and drug dealers have a functioning payment system.
45
@Andreas Aren't they just the entrepreneurs and job creators exalted by the powers that be?
1
Uninformative opinions.
News should be more factual.
This story turns on jobs.
The journalist didn't even try to delve into who is hired, what they do.
One line: "only a few clusters of workers were visible on a recent midday tour of the plant"
And we were too bored to ask what they do or how they like their job.
15
I drive through this region regularly and marvel at the profound signs of depression everywhere. The fact that anything is happening at these factories should be viewed with cautious optimism. This isn’t coal burning or a nuclear plant, the article fails to explain what if any environmental impact crypto mining has on the local or regional area. Yes it uses high amounts of electricity but the article fails to mention in detail that the Moses-Saunders damn, the source of the cheap utilities provides renewable energy. We aren’t burning coal to power these computers folks, lower that instinct to be outraged.
My sense of the article and the comments here is that due to the nature of the business, their is unfounded scorn being levied on these entrepreneurs. Go take a trip to this region and tell me something isn’t better than nothing because the alternative IS nothing. That is of course until the legal weed market finds its way to NY state. But until then, these towns have an opportunity to negotiate (I.e. tax) these companies through municipal regulations. What ever the outcome is between company and municipality it’s an opportunity that did not exist when these buildings were sitting abandoned and empty. Cup half full people.
10
Not to mention local tax revenue. If they pull in 600K on their best day, how much are they paying in annual taxes to the county? It’s not chump change and upstate needs any help it can get.
5
Well put. Bringing money to the local municipality in the form of taxes and (some) investment is a plus. I don't think 150 permanent jobs is realistic though, but this is a negotiation that the city and state should approach very carefully and smartly.
I suggest that the state regulate such miners very carefully. For example, they can require miners to only rely on excess renewable energy such as water flowing though a dam with excess generating capacity. This avoids them crowding out consumers, as was the case in the article.
The State also did well to have a special electric rate for miners. This can help recoup any additional cost for infrastructure required for the additional draw, and can also allow for reinvestment into infrastructure for all.
In my opinion, the State should turn the tables and set the conditions for miners to effectively fund new investment into renewable energy sources.
Instead of focusing on whether this particular business that turns electricity into profits is "worth it", just regulate it for the good of the State and its local economies.
@Eric Who is "we?" Those of us who don't just drive through are working very hard to turn around a slumping rural economy. There are actual barriers to many of the solutions you and other commenters present here - which is why municipalities are turning to moratoriums - until they can assess how best to secure community benefit for their residents who are seeing nothing but skyrocketing power costs.
"Something" is most certainly not better. Next time you drive through, stop and stay awhile.
3
I have read a lot about cryptocurrencies in the press and I have yet to find a decent explanation as to WHY this requires as much power as it does.
The more I read the more it strikes me as a very elaborate shell game. You buy complicated specialized machinery to make bitcoin, you pay tons of money in energy bills and generate a gigantic carbon footprint to operate the machinery - all of this serves exclusively to create artificial barriers to entry - and then you sell the bitcoin to bitcoin investors, who also must have tons of money, and they ultimately convert it back into money?? At least tulip bulbs produce nice flowers. This is the height of absurdity, capitalism at a ridiculous extreme.
97
This is a travesty - a waste of a valuable resource to enrich a very few. It's worth noting that each bitcoin transaction uses 80,000 times more electricity than a Visa transaction. (Source: Stephen Williamson, a former vice president and economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis2018, https://tinyurl.com/yd69zvty)
It's also a travesty that hydro utilities are STILL being caught flat footed by not having pricing and service connection policies in place to deal with Bitcoin. I would hope that, in the event of an energy shortage, service to bitcoin server farms is interruptible - better that than cutting off homes, schools and hospitals.
35
The same thing has happened in the Pacific Northwest. The local utility districts have responded by making it much more difficult for miners to sign up for power.
20
From what I understand banks are the real predators and bitcoin can make financial transactions without the fees that credit cards, banks and other financial institutions charge. The open accounting system is transparent. There are many problems to be worked out, but having zero load for transactions saves money, lots of it.
5
An example of 'Randian' philosophy so prevalent these days. Let the bubble be blown up until we all pop. Kids don't know what 'recession' and 'depression' really entail.
11
Where's the federal regulation of these energy hog faux currencies that can cause harm to our economy?
Why are these people given a pass when it comes to accountability for what will certainly be unintended consequences?
23
Let's be abundantly clear.
Bitcoin miners such as Coinmint consume enormous amounts of electricity and produce nothing of any tangible benefit for society. They are industrial parasites gobbling resources and fueling greed.
147
@Dave Kerr It's the American Way.
"The business of America is business." - Calvin Coolidge, Ronnie Reagan's idol
"We're doing God's work." - Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs CEO, explaining to Congress why Goldman bets against its own clients
1
Benefits to "communities" seems to be one angle in the article, and the subject of most of these comments.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars paid for the daily kilowatts in question flow, through utility companies' payrolls, to thousands of workers and families who live in -- guess what? -- communities. So maybe...take a step back, zoom out, look at the big picture, and see benefits. It's a big world. Judging new technologies strictly on the effect they have on your own few square miles is shortsighted and kind of creepy.
3
@William Romp
One valid concern is the vast amount of energy wasted on these cryptocurrencies. But I guess that only matters to those of us concerned with climate change and the future livability of our environment.
40
@William Romp Using energy just to provide energy industry jobs is like digging holes and filling them in just to provide construction jobs. These "miners" are turning valuable energy into what is really useless currency. (We already have currencies, so it seems Bitcoin is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist).
Furthermore, the article says that about 27% of all bitcoins ever mined is either lost or stolen. Sounds worse than traditional currencies.
All that energy could be used to create actual things or provide services for actual people.
28
@NJNative Zoom in and tell me how many man hours in a kilowatt.
i doubt that increased kilowatt usage creates jobs or raises income of current workers until the current grid can no longer meet the increased demand. however, you are right that the benefits not mentioned are in the ROI for energy investors who are people looking to make money off money. that does include retirement plans . someone always benefits and someone always gets stepped on.
A sucker is born every nanosecond in cyber world. Somewhere, P.T. Barnum is having a good laugh...
15
Parasites on Society.
34
As a resident of the North Country, I was struck by your lackluster portrayal of our area. It's enough to make potential businesses run in the opposite direction.
Plattsburgh has a well-regarded community college and 4-year State University, so it isn't all hicks and trees around here.
37
@KS
And St. Lawrence County has four universities, two of them SUNY schools. They are the largest employers now that industries packed up and moved away. The students do bring economic life to our depressed region, but the rest of the county residents are not necessarily benefitting from university enrollment or jobs. Industry supported by the Seaway hydropower plants were the economic backbone of this county for a very long time. It's all gone, now.
4
This article describes yet another brick in the wall of global warming. Wasting huge amounts of energy creating nothing but imaginary wealth for people who couldn't care less their mining is pouring heat and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Gold mines at least produce gold, copper mines copper - but a bitcoin mine creates absolutely nothing but magic numbers.
59
"influx of entrepreneurs to this economically depressed region, all seeking to capitalize on the soaring value of digital currencies, like Bitcoin."
"But neither local resistance nor a steep decline in the value of Bitcoin..."
I'd say this is high school journalism but it wouldn't have gotten by in my high school, which is it?
Yet more wealth for a few who actually produce nothing tangible.
11
@no kids in NY
"Yet more wealth for a few who actually produce nothing tangible"
...such as Wall Street traders?
11
Fake news.
A microwave uses more energy than a computer. Even computers mining bitcoins.
@George Orwell "Coinmint installed four transformers that could draw more than 13 megawatts, or enough power to run about 10,000 homes. It was more than one-tenth of the local utility’s total allocation of low-cost hydropower."
That's a lot of microwaves.
23
@George Orwell Do you run your microwave 24 hours a day?
12
Well a 1200W microwave uses about 1200W, except you only run it 90 seconds to warm up some tea water. The S9 bitminer uses 1500W and it runs 24/7, and the photos showed racks of them blasting away.
Anybody who says bitmining doesn't waste piles of electricity is plain old LYING.
24
The same thing is happening in Eastern Washington (Reported in the Seattle Times) where cheap hydroelectric attracts miners. However, there aren't any abandoned factories available.. Instead the miners are renting apartments units which is driving up rents.
22
Bitcoin and other “mined” crypto currencies are like the emperor’s new clothes – all those “factories” with their endless computer servers, immense electricity use with attendant heat waste (and greenhouse gases in most cases) are all just for show. In the end, the sucker who buys bitcoin is buying the same thing as the emperor in the fable — nothing.
But man, look how beautiful and valuable it is.
19
What a useless waste of electricity and resources.
82
@mollie
You referring to the U.S. Congress?
4
I cannot believe a publication as respected as the New York times would publish an article such as this without revealing the price of the commodity in question. How much does a kilowatt hour of electricity cost in Massena? This number is central to the issue.
Would this paper write an article on climate change without mention of how much the temperature has changed, the value of the dollar without mentioning the exchange rate, the cost of gasoline without price per gallon or the murder rate in Manhattan without a number?
Poor journalism.
24
3.9¢ per kWh in Massena NY vs national average of 13¢ per kWh (accurate as of July 2018).
4
@John Kelly Prices fluctuate.
1
@John Kelly
Yup, electricity rates and comparisons were the prime numbers this reader was curious about as well.
Land rush reporting in more than one way.
1
How about requiring known heavy Bitcoin miners to, at minimum, get all energy used by their mining computers from solar or wind (from their OWN panels and turbines, if possible) and use efficient (Energy Star etc.) components?
So long as they can generate the energy they need and not leech the grid, I wouldn't mind them even in Puerto Rico; but until then they are a selfish burden. It's not like the transactions are really anonymous, especially once it's time to cash them in to buy at your bodega or pay your parking tickets.
(And no, the solution is NOT to make the bodega chuck its cash registers and take bitcoin and Apple Pay...)
25
@SR, the bitcoin miners are in northern NY because they are able to use cheap, "renewable" hydro-power, generated from dams on the St. Lawrence River.
2
@ANON
But the article is about the miners taking cheap power that would otherwise go to residents. Considering the uselessness of bitcoins, as well as global warming impact, this miners should have to be last in line, after all residents and other customers.
2
@ANON
Hydro-power is the least environmentally friendly of the renewable power sources. Moreover, whether it is truly renewable is open to question.
Plattsburgh and other “mining centers” should charge the crypto-makers a higher rate for power than they charge other consumers. Congestion Pricing for power - and there has to be a price point where it’s still cheaper than other places in the planet and also more expensive than what everybody else pays so that Plattsburgh location stays attractive. That said, if the crypto- making business really employs only 2 people, or some other nominal number, who are not even “locals”, so that crypto-making is not bringing benefit to local economy and is DRAINING resources or causing disruption to local economy- why would Plattsburgh even want to facilitate their presence? No benefit = bye bye,
Upstate NY economy is another place where all the factory jobs left and it’s in many ways exactly same as the economy in Midwestern towns where the factory and auto makers left. Regular people struggling in same ways with sparse employment opportunity to get back to where their families once were. Plattsburgh should use the special economic gift of cheap power to attract business that employs lots of people (e.g. Chobani Yogurt). Inviting parasites won’t help.
57
@Long Islander,
"Parasites"? Hmmm...seems you have a hot button.
"Regular people"? Is there any other kind?
"No benefit = bye bye"? Socialist views are unpopular in America, you know.
1
@William Romp, thanks for the unintended compliment to socialism.
What will happen to the rest of the towns Upstate, NY? Their economies are never going to recover.
5
Actually they will in the future, guesstimating 10-20 years. The military forecasts that the area around the Great Lakes will jump in population as the South and Southwest are decimated by hurricanes, heatwaves and desertification.
4
This is insane. Built into this idea of mining a speculative "nothing" is a need for exponentially increasing amounts of electricity, leading to what infinity?
49
"Coinmint promises to bring jobs".
Come ON! Job doing what? Sweeping the server room? Security? The do know the don't run an ACTUAL mine, right? No reasonable person with a fundamental understanding of what crypto-currency mining is could possibly believe this.
126
@Michael Cain personal managerial, building management, security, operations, safety, power management, technical support among others. There are so many electronic devices in those facilities, you'll have to have an army to help manage and mantain the integrity of all of them, even the power management that supports them.
2
@Michael Cain
I don't know anything about mining crypto-currency but I do know that sweeping and security jobs mean lawful employment. If you don't have a job and need one, getting one of these jobs means a leg up. Let's not dismiss their importance.
Maybe something better will come along, maybe not. But these jobs put food on the table.
I think the question you're really asking is how many jobs and for how long? There's something fly-by-night sounding about these firms.
10
Actually, you don’t need a lot of people. Decent sized data centers can run with a core staff of about 20.
12
This is just really stupid.
35
"Coinmint promises to bring jobs to the region, but critics are skeptical."
And they should be. Bitcoin and other crypto currencies are arguably "a marvel of technology", although with all the power that it consumes this is very debatable. Also the enormous resources it takes to do business transactions that can be currently executed by banks (which do trillions of transactions a day at a fraction of the cost) leads me to believe that Bitcoin fails spectacularly to fulfill the promise of a new financial technology. Of this, I admit, I am wholly ignorant.
However, on the basis of monetary economics, the whole concept of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are doomed to failure.
If you don't believe me, its wise to listen to people who really do know and understand business and finance. People like Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon.
So this begs the question, how can people in one field be so smart in one field (technology and computer science) be so stupid in another area?
60
Greed.
23
So when we need to conserve and limit energy exploitation, we have Bitcoin folks misusing energy. Good grief.
82
I hope the community government that allowed a private foreign company take advantage of their infrastructure didn't give away tax breaks for the promise of jobs jobs jobs.
It would be different if the electricity was used to run supercomputers modeling economic forecasts, scanning the skies for impending asteroid collisions, even hosting a new stock exchange. But Bitcoin mining? Sounds like socialized risk for private profit.
96
The aluminum industry and other industries that used cheap hydropower in Massena were producing something of value. Their products were sold around the world. Local people benefitted from this manufacturing and it created an economic boom for this region that lasted for almost a century. We are in a slump, economically, in the North Country, but our rush to invite businesses who simply want to capitalize on cheap energy sources will backfire. There is no employment coming from these bitcoin businesses, no real estate sales, no economy associated with them. Take it from this historical archivist for the county, we need real business that will produce jobs. These bitcoin businesses produce nothing but profits for investors, at our expense!
162
@Wildwitch57
No one cares about value. Money is the driver.
3
The operators of Bitcoin mining servers should be charged the full cost of the electricity they consume, including the cost of the greenhouse gas emissions that power plants are permitted to emit. Otherwise, the costs of Bitcoin speculation will continue to be subsidized by the public that sees no profit from such speculation.
144
@Dylan
Seems perfectly logical and reasonable, which is why it will never happen.
3
Forget these speculators. Bitcoin and its progeny are black market currencies. They are designed for illegal transactions over the internet, where cash cannot be exchanged. The production and maintenance of these systems require massive and exponentially-increasing electricity use that is damaging to the environment, and provide almost no jobs. All to make it easier for criminals to engage in worldwide transactions and escape prosecution.
88
Nationalize bitcoin and its production.
Problem solved.
:)
4
Wikipedia reminds us that (Alcoa) aluminium production, which was at these sites, uses "prodigious" amounts of electricity and is usually located near a power plant. It is a very high energy consumption industry to begin with.
1
@PH Did you the article? The big plants were connected straight to the state power grid, not the municipal.
17
Great piece.
Isn't Bitcoin finite? The open leaves the reader with the impression these companies can 'mint' more.
1
No, it is not finite.
They "mine" it.
Only limited by how many servers you can build, and how much electricity you can get.
Snake Oil.
15
@elitt - "Isn't Bitcoin finite?"
Yes, there are 21 million bitcoins and the last one to be calculated -- "mined" -- is in the year 2140. Since that's more than a century away, all involved are punting on this issue.
6
Also keep in mind that mining has diminishing returns. The concept is designed to make mining more difficult as the coins in existence increase. More wasted electricity.
1