ConocoPhillips Sells flare gas to mine bitcoin

I first heard of oil companies doing this about a year ago. In lieu of burning waste gas, use the waste gas to power generators that then powers bitcoin miners.

Sounds nice? These generators do not have to meet the same standards that public utilities do because they are not selling the power on the grid. If they had installed these generators and pushed this power onto the grid they would become a public utility. These generators that they are using would likely never meet the standards that public utilities must meet. I would imagine for the bitcoin miners, this is a great source of dirt cheap power. The waste gas was previously flared and and I am sure it is bought cheap. The article talks about Conoco does not directly mine the bitcoins but I am sure it is a related party or minority investment.

I saw something on this, and was wondering why Conoco was involved.
This tells me.
I still don’t understand “bitcoin mining”.

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Nothing to understand, feel like its all fake.

Mining is energy intensive. Couple kids we using the blow off gas in texas and made millions last year.

To mine them, you basically have high power computers that consume a lot of power. I have a co worker that spent about $40K for a few miners. His electric bill is over $500 per month for the bitcoin miners. They produce enough heat to heat his entire home. He claims he is making about $2500 per month net income.

These machines only last about 3 years. I suspect that the vast number of these super computers used for mining are soaking up huge numbers of the microchips.

So I get that, but what are they doing that uses that much power?

Don’t feel alone, most don’t, including – I suspect – many of those risking huge sums in the clambake in hopes of scratching off the winning number.

It feels like this;

I was just thinking that earlier. Even if crypto ends up being legit alternative currencies, some of them are going to fall by the wayside and speculators are going to get burned. And there’s at least some chance the whole thing blows up.

The miners are doing 2 functions. First they are trying to solve an exponentially more difficult formula. The second part is they verify transactions. For example, I sell you my car for .25 BTC (roughly $10K USD). The miners will verify that you own the .25 BTC and can transfer them to me. This process can take minutes or days depending on how much fee you want to pay to the miners for verification.

The high level concept of crypto is appealing. It is a peer to peer banking without the central banks, local banks, or government regulations.

I was about to say most dutch didnt understand tulips either but still went mad for them.

100%. Its a wild west of investing. Some will make million and billions and many will lose millions and billions.

Full disclosure. I have none. Its too damn risky for me.

I like the concept of P2P banking. I love the idea of no banks snooping on your transactions. I hate the risk that you lose everything from hack. I also hate the idea that there is nothing backing up the investment.

I would think that a gold coin would be a decent concept. I think there are some. Basically a hoard of gold that backs up the coin. It would essentially make your gold investment digitally transactable and have infinite divisibility of gold. Basically you could transact in gold dust or gold bars. The currency would also appreciate and depreciate with the value of gold.

I suspect that the bitcoin ATM in my small town grocery store is to accommodate all the medical weed businesses.

The US government can track it, every time a bitcoin ransom is paid out they seem to recover a chunk of it. That couple that stole 4 billion of bitcoin years ago got caught and Feds recovered over 3b of it.

I agree with that in principle, and to be fair, Bitcoin is probably stable. But it is risky if you don’t know what you are doing.

I heard today that there are already 17,000 different crypto-currencies. How many will remain viable after five years?

I’ve been working on JimBucks. Just wait.

or this

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