• 2 Posts
  • 1.4K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle







  • Even so, a very good election night for Democrats in the upper chamber would only bring the Senate to 50-50, with a Republican VP serving as the tie-breaker,” he said.

    If I were writing the script, I would have the Democrats win that 50/50 split in the Senate, then have the President eat his final cheeseburger. Then, Schumer will invoke the “McConnell” doctrine to sit on the VP appointment and not bring it to a vote at all. We lived without a SC Justice for nearly a year, and they are much more important than the VP.



  • dhork@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.worldAI Electric Bills
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    edit-2
    4 days ago

    Or is it building the infrastructure to accommodate them the issue?

    It’s this, but that’s only part of the story.

    Datacenter companies are very efficient at building new ones now, once they have all the proper permits and can start building it can go from an empty lot to fully functional in a year or two. Maybe longer for the huge hyperscalar ones.

    Once they are online, their power demand is comparable to a small city, coming online all at once. But the local utility never had this demand in its plan, so they have to build more capacity to service it, and building a new power plant takes much longer. In the meantime, the demand will outstrip their capacity and the utility will have to buy more power on the open market. This drives up costs for all their customers unless the utility is allowed to charge these customers (whose existence has blown up all their capacity planning) more.

    As a side note, they often get advantages and tax breaks because they promise to bring jobs to the area. And the initial construction jobs usually are significant. But once the place is built, it’s ongoing operations only requires a few dozen positions, many of them low-tech and outsourced like site security. The higher-tech jobs (like the network engineering) is often not on-site anyway. A shopping plaza would generate more jobs than a datacenter.







  • No, that’s not quite how it works.

    Calling the newly minted coins a transaction fee “paid from the pool of unmined coins” isn’t really accurate, as those coins didn’t exist until they were mined. The algorithm carefully controls how many new coins are made.

    But miners do not set fees at all. Users set their fee when they make their transactions, and miners pick which transactions they want to attempt to validate. We expect miners will pick the transactions with the highest fee per byte, because they want to increase their reward if they manage to find a block. But they don’t have to, and they may have reasons to pick other transactions.

    The whole point of it being trustless is that no party needs to coordinate. Users create transactions, miners validate them.


  • Bitcoin was extremely successful at making what it set out to do in the first place: make a fully distributed, peer-to-peer, trustless currency. Anyone who has ever been forced to pay bogus transaction fees ought to be able to appreciate paying for things without needing a bank, or any intermediary at all. It’s like cash you can e-mail.

    But, most people into crypto now don’t care about this utility, they just want Number Go Up. So they don’t transact with it anymore, they just hold it (or actively trade with it). Which makes the whole ecosystem not useful for anything except feeding itself.

    I still think that, in theory, there are areas where cryptocutrency can be used for real innovative purposes. But these will never actually be done, because the people in a position to do those things would rather make quick money selling shit tokens to unsuspecting people.

    Do you want to learn how it all works? Feel free to do so, it’s all Open Source. But if your goal is to invest… Well… You still need to learn about and understand it first. This will help you differentiate the good ideas from the scams. (And there are a lot of scams!)