2018.03.12 比特币开采将电力转化为金钱

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Bitcoin Mining Turns Electricity Into Money
A close-up portrait of bitcoin miners in eastern Washington reveals the real hustle at the heart of cryptocurrencies.

By Alexis C. Madrigal
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Since bitcoin emerged from the internet’s muddy bottom into a global asset class, there have been many attempts to understand what this computation-based currency might mean for the world. No claim about bitcoin, or “the blockchain,” as the general category of technology is known, is too big for advocates (“the most disruptive tech in decades”) or detractors (the “biggest bubble in human history”).

But a profile of the town of East Wenatchee, Washington, by Paul Roberts in Politico Magazine is a must-read revelation about the physical reality of bitcoin mining. Whatever else bitcoin might be, it is—first and foremost—a way of converting electricity into money.


Bitcoin mining is what we call programming computers to do arbitrarily complicated calculations in a puzzle competition that gets harder as time goes on. The hardware and software necessary to do this are, more or less, commoditized. Mining has always been an aspirational name, but if we accept the metaphor, the miners are mining electricity.

So, to make money as a bitcoin miner, the only things that really matter are scale and access to cheap electricity. That’s sent bitcoin miners scurrying all over the Earth looking for low electricity prices. They tend to find it near big dams, which corral river water through massive turbines. In the right geographical circumstances, this can generate the cheapest power on earth. And East Wenatchee is one of these places, thanks to the Columbia River and the Rocky Mountains that lend the water its power.

Before cryptocurrency mining came to the region, locals enjoyed very low power prices because the local utility sold power at higher prices to other regions. “The region’s five huge hydroelectric dams, all owned by public utility districts, generate nearly six times as much power as the region’s residents and businesses can use,” Roberts writes. “Most of the surplus is exported, at high prices, to markets like Seattle or Los Angeles, which allows the utilities to sell power locally at well below its cost of production.”


This subsidized electricity is what the bitcoin miners seized on. This was an arbitrage that worked. “By the end of 2018, according to some estimates, miners here could account for anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of all bitcoin mining in the world,” Roberts writes, “and impressive shares of other cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Litecoin.”

Five years ago, that might have generated a decent bump in electricity consumption, but remember, bitcoin mining is designed to use more resources as time goes on. To keep up, bitcoin miners have had to make tremendous leaps in scale. In 2012, a bitcoin mining outfit might have measured its consumption in the kilowatts.

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Now, the sites are scaling up so fast that we’re talking about gigawatts, which are thousands of megawatts, which themselves are thousands of kilowatts.

“Over the past 12 months or so, the three public utilities reportedly have received applications and inquiries for future power contracts that, were they all to be approved, could approach 2,000 megawatts—enough to consume two-thirds of the basin’s power output,” writes Roberts.

One estimate of the bitcoin network’s total energy consumption, the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index, is up to 55 terawatt hours. A terawatt-hour would be 1,000 gigawatt-hours. The orders of magnitude just keep piling up.

And that’s after taking into account the substantial energy-efficiency improvements that miners have made.

Back in East Wenatchee, new infrastructure will be required to keep feeding the mining rigs. And of course the costs for those substations and distribution lines will fall, partly, on the public utilities. It’s a remarkable hustle. And what if the industry implodes? Then, the locals will be left with an overbuilt (and therefore more costly) electrical infrastructure and a bunch of empty warehouses.

The point, too, is that the scaling-up process cannot stop. That’s how the system has been built. Even if bitcoin mining’s power needs, in the global energy picture, are still negligible. To realize the technology’s backers’ visions, the electrical consumption would have to keep growing at this breakneck pace. At a time when climate change requires that energy demand be bent downward, bitcoin miners sucking up city-size supplies of cheap and carbon-free hydroelectricity is a massive problem. And in China, where most mining is done with subsidized electricity produced in coal-fired power plants, it’s an even bigger problem.


This externality alone could wipe out a range of the benefits that bitcoin advocates imagine could result from the use of cryptocurrencies. Let’s stipulate that blockchains are useful and interesting. But will they be worth the energy it takes to do all that computation?

Bitcoin was incubated in libertarian circles, but it depends in part on government largesse. As in Washington, electricity production usually involves government subsidy of one kind or another. This makes sense: Access to electricity is one of the keys to economic development and pretty much any definition of a good life. But it also stands as one more reason that bitcoin ought to be regulated, just like the rest of the banking industry.

Alexis C. Madrigal is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, and the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He is also a co-host of Forum on KQED.




比特币开采将电力转化为金钱
华盛顿州东部的比特币矿工的特写，揭示了加密货币核心的真正喧嚣。

作者：Alexis C. Madrigal
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自从比特币从互联网的泥潭中脱颖而出，成为全球资产类别以来，有许多人试图了解这种基于计算的货币对世界可能意味着什么。关于比特币或 "区块链"（作为技术的一般类别）的任何说法，对倡导者（"几十年来最具颠覆性的技术"）或反对者（"人类历史上最大的泡沫"）来说都不算太大。

但是，保罗-罗伯茨在《政治杂志》上对华盛顿州东韦纳奇镇的介绍是一个关于比特币开采的物理现实的必读启示。不管比特币是什么，它首先是一种将电力转换为货币的方式。


比特币挖矿就是我们所说的给计算机编程，让其在拼图比赛中做任意复杂的计算，随着时间的推移，难度会越来越大。做到这一点所需的硬件和软件或多或少都已商品化。采矿一直是一个令人向往的名字，但如果我们接受这个比喻，矿工就是在挖电。

所以，要想作为一个比特币矿工赚钱，真正重要的东西是规模和获得廉价电力。这使得比特币矿工在地球上到处寻找低电价。他们倾向于在大坝附近寻找，这些大坝通过巨大的涡轮机将河水聚集起来。在正确的地理环境下，这可以产生地球上最便宜的电力。而东温纳奇就是这样一个地方，这要归功于哥伦比亚河和洛基山脉，它们赋予了水以力量。

在加密货币开采来到该地区之前，当地人享受着非常低的电力价格，因为当地的公用事业公司以较高的价格向其他地区出售电力。"该地区的五个巨大的水电大坝，全部由公共事业区拥有，其发电量是该地区居民和企业所能使用的电力的近六倍，"罗伯茨写道。"大部分剩余的电力以高价出口到西雅图或洛杉矶等市场，这使得公用事业部门能够以远低于其生产成本的价格在当地出售电力。"


这种受补贴的电力是比特币矿工们所抓住的。这是一个成功的套利。"根据一些估计，到2018年底，这里的矿工可能占世界上所有比特币开采量的15%到30%，"罗伯茨写道，"以及其他加密货币的惊人份额，如以太坊和莱特币。"

五年前，这可能会在电力消耗方面产生一个体面的冲击，但请记住，随着时间的推移，比特币开采的目的是使用更多资源。为了跟上时代，比特币矿工不得不在规模上实现巨大的飞跃。在2012年，一个比特币挖矿公司可能以千瓦为单位来衡量其消耗。

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现在，这些站点的规模正在迅速扩大，我们正在谈论千兆瓦，也就是成千上万的兆瓦，这些兆瓦本身就是成千上万的千瓦。

"在过去的12个月左右，据说这三家公共事业单位已经收到了关于未来电力合同的申请和询问，如果这些合同都被批准，可能接近2000兆瓦--足以消耗该流域三分之二的电力输出，"罗伯茨写道。

一个关于比特币网络总能耗的估计，即比特币能源消耗指数，高达55兆瓦时。一个太瓦特小时就是1000吉瓦特小时。这个数量级一直在堆积。

而这是在考虑到矿工所做的大量能源效率改进之后。

在东韦纳奇，将需要新的基础设施来继续为采矿机提供能源。当然，这些变电站和配电线路的费用将部分地落在公共事业部门身上。这是一个了不起的喧嚣。如果这个行业倒闭了呢？那么，当地人就会留下一个过度建设（因此更昂贵）的电力基础设施和一堆空仓库。

关键还在于，扩大规模的过程不能停止。这就是这个系统的建立方式。即使比特币挖矿的电力需求，在全球能源方面，仍然可以忽略不计。为了实现该技术支持者的愿景，电力消耗将不得不以这种惊人的速度持续增长。在气候变化要求能源需求下降的时候，比特币矿工吸食城市规模的廉价和无碳水电供应是一个巨大的问题。而在中国，大多数矿工是用燃煤电厂生产的补贴电力来完成的，这是个更大的问题。


仅仅是这种外在因素就会使比特币倡导者所想象的使用加密货币所带来的一系列好处消失殆尽。让我们假设区块链是有用和有趣的。但是，他们是否值得花费精力去做这些计算？

比特币是在自由主义圈子里孵化出来的，但它部分取决于政府的慷慨。就像在华盛顿，电力生产通常涉及政府的这种或那种补贴。这是有道理的。获得电力是经济发展和几乎所有美好生活定义的关键之一。但这也是比特币应该被监管的另一个原因，就像银行业的其他行业一样。

Alexis C. Madrigal是《大西洋》杂志的特约撰稿人，COVID追踪项目的联合创始人，也是《为梦想加油》的作者。绿色技术的历史和承诺》一书的作者。他也是KQED的论坛的共同主持人。