Australia's coal power plant is being reopened for bitcoin mining - Sensationalist Headlines

This coal power plant is being reopened for blockchain mining Sure, you could mine bitcoin on that old PC in your garage, or you could use a whole power station to do it. That's the idea behind the Blockchain Application Centre -- an Aussie tech initiative that will see one of the country's now-shuttered coal-fired power plants reopened to provide cheap power for blockchain applications. It's the work of Australian tech company IOT Group, which has partnered with local power company Hunter Energy on the project. According to The Age, Hunter Energy will recommission the Redbank power station in the Hunter Valley, two hours drive north of Sydney. Once the power plant is reopened (expected to be completed within 12 months), it will offer wholesale or "pre-grid" power prices to blockchain companies, allowing them to do things like mining cryptocurrencies, without having to pay retail power prices. Reopening a coal plant that will shit up the environment even more as it is to mine bitcoins, right after their value extremely nosedived is maybe one of the dumbest ideas you could possibly have

Waiting for someone to commission some defunct nuclear power plant in Ukraine for cheap bitcoin mining.

We need a facepalm rating

After I read title at first - I thought some idiot thought Bitcoin mining is literally mining bitcoin with pickaxe so they opened coal plant for it.

Imagine blowing that much dosh on something that will be completely useless a year from now when it's ready to go. Mined coins suffer from all the downsides of regular crypto + people's distain for them drops their speculative value even further, what the fuck are these idiots doing lmao

wont bitcoin be literally un-mineable in a year..? as in just thermodynamically impossible to profit from? it can't be long until etherium and whatever other currencies are hot right now go the same way what do these people view the long term future of crypto as... just constantly jumping on new coins to make a quick buck? I certainly hope there wont still be suckers to profit off of if people are still trying to launch currencies in 2019

Been past Redbank a few times, surprised they managed to allow this.

there's no way they can manage to keep a coal powerplant open for bitcoin

They'll just make up another crypto-currency, even better than the last ones! You'll see!

I hope the powerful dick of capitalism absolutely destroys them when their highly volatile "investment" platform (or do Bitcoin people still try to call it a currency?) crashes and burns causing them to go completely bankrupt.

They couldn't repurpose it or destroy and build other stuff on top for the long-term? Or is this just "hey this is getting lotsa money"? Once the power plant is reopened (expected to be completed within 12 months), it will offer wholesale or "pre-grid" power prices to blockchain companies, allowing them to do things like mining cryptocurrencies, without having to pay retail power prices. IOT Group and Hunter Energy want to get around that, offering cheaper power to companies in the blockchain field and hopefully enticing international operations to base their operations in Australia. I hate how blockchain tech is slowly becoming synonymous with cryptocurrency mining.

no what? they will still be paid transaction fees

If there was an effective way to power cryptocurrency mining by murdering millions of newborn children, we'd see baby murder factories pop up overnight

I don't think you've spent nearly enough time (5 minutes) researching the issue ("bitcoin block reward" on Google) to have a proper opinion on the matter. There's over 2 years until the next block reward halving, and the miners will still be getting transaction fees on top of the block reward. The difficulty will rise, but it's going to take a very long time until it becomes a problem, and you can keep throwing more hardware at the problem for the next several decades. It's not a short term problem, and people involved with Bitcoin are only concerned with the short term.

How much money could you actually mine a day with that amount of power? Does anyone here know?