Cryptomining Impact -- NY Times -- July 17, 2022

Lots of talk this past week about ERCOT, the Texas electricity grid. 

The New York Times had an excellent article to help explain what's going on. Link here. Likely a paywall.

Reporter: Hiroko Tabuchi, an investigative reporter on the Climate desk. She was part of the Times team that received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

When I first saw the headline I thought it was a two-year old story; how wrong I was. Published July 15, 2022. Absolutely amazing. Five words: everything in Texas is bigger. Archived.

Archived here.  

Data points from the article:

• Congressional democrats funded an investigation into cryptomining's impact on US energy;
• seven of the largest Bitcoin (sic) -- brand or generic use of the word? -- mining companies in the US are "set up" to use as much electricity as the homes in Houston (all seven companies combined)
• Bitcoin used more electricity than many countries (more data points here)
• Bitcoin uses more electricity than the entire country of Argentina, population 45 million
• Bitcoin located in no less than eighteen states, including North Dakota
• if I'm reading the map correctly, by state, percent of Bitcoin's energy consumption (e.g., twelve percent of Bitcoin's energy consumption comes from mines in Kentucky):
• Georgia: 34%
• Kentucky: 12%
• New York: 10%
• Texas: 8%
• first question: why Georgia, Kentucky, New York?
• Marathon Digital Holdings: one of the largest cryptominers in the US
• currently has 33,000 highly specialized, power-intensive computers ("mining rigs")
• up from just 2,000 one year earlier;
• by early 2023, next year: will have 199,000 "rigs"
• overall, the biggest seven cryptomining operations will increase their mining capacity by at least 2,399 megawatts "in the coming years"
• an increase of nearly 230% from current levels
• enough energy to power 1.9 million homes