Venezuela's crackdown on crypto mining

Is it possible to mine Bitcoin and other cryptos effectively using solar energy? If it works well, that would be awesome. This decision comes after the government seized around 2,000 mining rigs as part of their anti-corruption efforts.

they confiscated 2000 mining devices. i have a feeling they are going to be using those devices soon to mine BTC for themselves lol they should be making a lot of money since they have the gas to power up those 2000 devices. for a country governed by one man, it would make sense to nationalize every resource they could have from energy, gas, water, and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is becoming a currency for politicians.

Oh my god! Venezuela, a country that ranked 177th among the 180 countries (Corruption Index), confiscated 2000 mining device as the part of an anti-corruption plan (perfect excuse). Does anyone really believe that? Like @electronicash posted, I also have a feeling that they are going to use those miners themselves. It offers a great ROI when you get mining equipment for free and doesn't pay a single cent in electricity. I could never imagine if 2000 miners were deciding the fate of 30 million people. Do Venezuelans really believe that now they will have a reliable electrical service and these miners were a problem?

No, solar is useless for mining crypto. The batteries are the main problem. They cost a lot and they go bad after a few thousand full cycles and bitcoin miners are power hungry which means the batteries will get killed very fast. Another problem is that you should always keep the batteries full and that means you have to pump lots of solar power into them all the time and that's also not possible because the sun isn't always up. The batteries will go low quickly the moment you stop getting solar power from the panels. When you do the math, you'll see that a solar mining setup would make you lose a lot of money. Solar is only good for your daily activities like charging phone/laptop, watch tv etc. Many solar systems struggle to keep a basic fridge on.

Who knows which asics were confiscated? S9 or S19?

Corrupt commie government? No way! To bad they don't teach history in schools anymore.

Venezuela of all countries lol, that isn't a country anymore, it is like a no man's land to me, where laws are useless, I wouldn't believe this news if I were you, each man for himself is what Venezuela is all about now. Those confiscated miners will be put to good use by the ruler himself, that's a lot of extra money for them why would they dump all these miners into the bin? Hell no, there is no way it will happen, unless the miners are no more profitable. OP, forget solar mining, if you really want to mine as a profitable miner you should stay away from solar mining, or wait for new ASIC miners to come out first, then maybe it will be good, the problem I have with solar mining is after the sunset, you can't run a single ASIC miner for hours using a battery bank, it will cost too much of money, the type you may never get back. If you can set up graphic cards then solar mining is possible, because GPu takes less power than ASIC miner, they are also doable with battery back up, mine some coins and convert them back to Bitcoin, this is the only thing you can do, meaning you won't be mining Bitcoin directly.

So a country that is having problems getting power to it's people asked large miners to stop mining because it was hurting it's citizens and when they did not they shut down the company and took it's assets. Good for them. Can you picture the backlash that would happen in Texas with their poor electrical grid, if one of their large miners that was supposed to shut down during high power use days and didn't wand wound up causing a blackout. -Dave

Maybe I'm stupid but given that Texas has access to much larger finances than Venezuela, why don't their politicians just lobby Congress and Biden's administration to get money to upgrade their grid? Surely if it's costing them money in lost productivity, they'll do something about it I think.

Off-grid with no batteries? NO! The cost of solar panels and batteries that need to offer you at least a day of power to avoid bad weather on top of normal dai/bight circles is just too much, and mining with gear only during peak sun times means you're going to have to double or triple your ROI period (at least), plus you're ging to face every day problems with load balancing, so you either overbuild so more investment or our risk shutting down at the smallest variation 11 000! The numbers keep growing   Also, how much electricity does your house burn a month? An s19 is doing 2100kwh/month let's multiply that by 11 000, and taking into account average per household in Venezuela is 1280 a year,  it stops becoming so trivial, isn't it?

Because unlike the other 48 connected states (Alaska & Hawaii are on their own) Texas want's to have their power grid separate from the rest of the US so they can do what they want. Which is why their grid is in such bad shape. They have had issues during bad weather where people died https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis and yet they still refuse to upgrade or even think about raising their prices to cover the cost to drag their power situation into this century. In 2012 when NY got hit with super storm Sandy after finding out how fucked the grid was billions of dollars were spent to fix it. -Dave

Are you sure that Venezuela government isn't going to use these devices to mine bitcoin for themselves? The possibility is very strong because this country is struggling with hyperinflation since a long time now and they must find new sources of income as US barred them from selling oil. It's quite unfortunate to see such a crackdown! But I believe if the miners can find an alternate source of electricity through solar panels or hydro powers, the environmental impact will be greatly reduced and the dependency on the national power grid will be zeroed down. But it's easier said than done!

There certainly doesn't seem to be any noticeable drop in network hashrate no matter the case

Solar with Batteries would only be good as a form of back up in case of power interruption but anything a side from that, makes the cost of mining so high. The solar equipment is not cheap, this will make the ROI go much longer. It would make sense if the use of the solar panels was maximized in areas where the there is very strong Sunshine from week to week and month to month without weather interruptions. This would however mean that one would have to mine only during the daytime. Again, longer ROI time.

Honest question, how much financial impact will these devices make when we are talking something on the scale of a country? And do you think the electrical shortage was just a pretext for confiscating the equipment for their own use? Evidently it is clear that the country has an electrical shortage problem, we know crypto mining uses massive amount of electricity. When you have these many devices it can create a significant impact on a nationwide scale. These statements are already proven. And just by that, it does appear to me that it could be a plausible reason to shut it down. I don't see evidence for any kind of surreptitious intent.