The crux of the issue isn't mentioned until the very last paragraphs of the article:
"One particular concern is cryptocurrency mining—a processor and electricity-intensive computing process for generating currencies such as bitcoin. The process accounts for about 90% of Iceland’s data center industry in terms of electricity consumed"
If these data centers where actually being utilised for something useful then people would be happier about this. But no, it is just some speculators mining for crypto.
Seriously...Not sure why the article is going after the "tech industry" as a whole when the entire article should have been about cryptocurrency mining
If you turned off Iceland's aluminum smelting, it would have an ~35% energy surplus. You can't really send it anywhere though, because undersea power cables have horrible transmission losses. Crypto is as good a use as any for the spare power, and arguably cleaner than importing bauxite on oil-powered ships, smelting it and shipping back the resulting aluminum, which is how the surplus is currently used.
Iceland has big ecological problems, but power usage isn't one of them. If you want to fret about Icelands environment, for gods sake get over here and help us plant trees before the last of the topsoil blows away.
>And the problems with smelting dont negate the idiocy (imho) of mining.
Except that in Iceland, crypto mining could literally, and I use the word literally in the classical and correct sense, actually negate the problems of smelting. If crypto miners out-bid aluminium smelters on power prices, the smelting will leave Iceland and move closer to the source of the ore without any net loss in income to the Icelandic economy.
The economy of aluminium in Iceland /is/ the economy of selling electricity to foreigners. It generates some dock work as well, but the bauxite is here for the power prices, not the light touch of the local forklift drivers. If we can sell that electricity without shipping things, that's obviously better.
You're welcome to think that's idiocy if you like, I guess.
I get the relationship between the smelters and the power industry in Iceland, but despite that industries problems (I am not a fan) at least there is some economic activity going on there.
With mining, essentially we are building damns and steam generators to fuel heat dispensation for the benefit of helping some speculators win bets against other speculators. This is not economic activity imo, but some fancy techno-casino. I feel I am very justified in calling it idiotic.
And lets not ignore the externalities here. Just as miners can server as price competition to the smelters, they also out-price other potential activities. Not just as buyers of electricity, but also as investment for those that are running the datacenters. As long as the mining option is on the table, these operators and investors have no incentive to find other uses for their computer farms. Just buy some ASICs and be done with it.
You're not wrong, but if you're going to put political effort into avoiding collateral damage from bursting bubbles, crypto is not the place to start.
We're currently squeezing residents out of houses to turn them into airbnb's, replacing shops that the locals actually use with dozens of identical puffin stores selling tourist tat and bulldozing sustainable local business so we can replace them with hotels.
All this to service a tourism industry that is actually too large to handle. We've got tourists pooping in fields because no one has organised toilets for them to use. The toilets aren't there because no one is paying for them because the tourism industry is getting massive tax breaks, and yet despite this, Iceland is now so expensive to stay at that people are booking in Norway, because it's actually /cheaper/ to holiday there.
But this is apparently not a bubble and all good investment, just like the banking was I guess.
Seriously, when it comes to problems in Iceland, crypto mining isn't even on the map.
Not sure why this is being downvoted... Cryptocurrency mining seems to be the ideal fit for remote regions with abundance of cheap energy, since transferring data is easier than moving energy somewhere it can be used for other things and also easier than, say, importing bauxite and exporting aluminium.
It's the same reason why miners in China use hydro power.
You are assuming that mining for crypto is a useful thing to begin with. Not everyone agrees with you. And many here in Iceland are not enamoured with the idea that we should build more damns and loose more waterfalls so some people can get rich off speculation. Even if it is more eco friendly than people getting rich off speculation in China.
You are assuming people will stop mining if this is banned in Iceland. That's just not how it works.
Feel free to like or dislike cryptocurrency mining (I too believe it to be a waste of energy -- but that's not the point), but it's likely not going away. So you want the "green" efforts to be as cheap and efficient as possible, if you want to outcompete the less eco friendly alternatives.
Judging from your comment Im assuming you do not live in Iceland, apologies if Im wrong.
The reality is that there are only a handful of energy providers in Iceland capable of providing the energy at this scale, Landsvirkjun being the largest (by far).
These companies are either government owned or very sensitive to political realities, and will stop selling energy to mining centers if the pressure becomes strong enough.
Why would bitcoin be harder to ban than filamentary lightbulbs? You think they can lobby harder than the transport industry that would gain from the distraction?
Why do I keep on hearing this fallacious argument? The existence, or even the inevitability of something, does not only this something should be legalized.
Following you argument, whether you like it or not, people will commit homicide. Let’s regulate it!
How do you feel about other energy intensive industries, e.g. aluminium smelting? Does Iceland not profit from selling energy to industrial customers? Why would you assume they are not doing the same with miners?
When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead. How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?
> But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.
I'm hoping this is sarcasm, but in case it's not the cost of opportunity here is the main issue. Imagine all that computer power applied to protein folding simulation, to name a simple, useful-for-everyone task.
The comment seemed pragmatic. Coins will be mined regardless of whether it makes sense: it's better if it's done more ecologically as long as coins will be mined.
If individuals rather spend their money on mining coins that's fine, but building an entire industry spending the finite resources of the Earth dedicated to breaking pointless hashes seems pretty idiotic from a pure survival standpoint.
Sadly, the reason PoW works as a way to provide a trustless system that functions as long as 51% of the power is neutral, the solution has to be completely random and unpredictable. Otherwise the operator with the most powerful rig would outperform everyone else often enough for the system to be susceptible to bad actors.
It is not sufficient for the PoW just to be extremely hard.
Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone? I'm assuming the results of protein folding are eventually used in the cure of disease or improvements in agriculture or something similar. At some level just the academic insights gained can be considered useful for society (which is why most countries have public funding for purely academic research, typically through Universities).
I think in this context "everyone" would mean "society" or "community", not "every individual". The original proposition was that crypto-mining could be done with the proof-of-work (or whatever the logic is) having some general benefit to society beyond the pure profit motive of the individual doing the mining.
Assuming that higher supply of Bitcoin means lower price (a dangerous assumption for anything with such a heavily speculation-driven price, I know) then that lower price should presumably mean lower production of Bitcoin in China, maybe only modestly lower.
What happens is the difficulity rate increases and the power required to mine the next coin increases and China's miners requires more coal. Iceland's clean energy has a dirty by-product.
Maybe this is why we haven’t heard from advanced alien civilisations: they’ve all extinguished their suns in an effort to mine the next block, thereby rapidly rendering their whole civilisation extinguished.
Of course, any sufficiently advanced civilisation that can build a Contraption to extract all the energy from s star should also be advanced enough to build a computer model complex enough to reveal the secrets of warp drive, but didn’t because they were too busy mining crypto.
Not necessarily. If clean energy in Iceland is cheaper than coal in China and can grow indefinitely, increasing the difficulty may push the Chinese miners out of the market, stopping all coal-using crypto-currency mining.
Clean energy can not grow indefinitely in Iceland, there is only so much water falling so many meters. There may be other methods involving steam and earth warmth that Iceland may be uniquely competitive in, but that is going to require the invention of new technologies and processes.
It's accurate if both of its big assumptions are true, which seems unlikely given how inexpensive coal is and the relative levels of corruption and tolerance for environmental damage between China and Iceland.
YOU think that, not Icelanders. Hydropower has its major issues and thermal also has its own. So this is the classic "not in my backyard." Also, what good is it if an industry builds up, cities spring up as a results...and then it collapses?
In this particular case, Iceland is concerned about their domestic DC market supply flooding local demand if the BTC mining dries up.
There are still good reasons to host in Iceland — geothermal power, no or less need to run expensive AC units, maybe low enough latency to European sites — but 90% of their current consumption is BTC miners.
Yes and no :-). Ignoring other factors, a DC's services are on average less valuable the higher the latency. That restricts Iceland's primary market to Europe (and maybe east-coast North America).
Certainly, not hosting but plenty of applications that can tolerate physical moving of data in an out.(rendering, protein folding,some big data stuff (store the petabyte locally and have people come visit) All ASIC is going to be a problem though.
They do need a stable internet connection though that can't be super slow, so I'd assume it could always be upgraded with fiber. The stable and plentiful power on it's own will be very interesting.
I don't think this really matters, it's not the computers that would be reused but the infrastructure. These are essentially buildings with good ventilation and plenty of power and an internet connection that can likely be upgraded too. That's already quite useful
Ventilated buildings with power, but no networking gear or servers can surely be converted. But it's hardly a slam dunk. A lot of other buildings could be converted to that level too. So I think the other factors in choosing a data center location may dominate the decision.
The previous link I read from HN talked about how Pulitzer prize winners left journalism, and people speculating it's due to low revenue in journalism due to....tada, people not paying for quality journalism.
It reminds me how we were told in the 2000' there will soon be no quality music anymore because of bittorrent.
If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).
Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.
Which browser payment API are you referring to? And at least one major browser already autofills your payment info (heuristically identifying form fields; essentially zero sites actually mark up their form fields with identifying attributes) such that I pretty much never type my credit card number these days.
Credit card autofill never really worked for me (either on chrome or firefox). It happens on rare occasion that my credit card is pre-filled, but most of the time, it's not (not sure why). And you still have to get your phone and copy the 3d secure code from it (although, 3d secure is only used in europe, if I got it correctly). So yeah, credit card is good, but not enough, especially if we want to perform a big amount of microtransactions like the "pay to expand" example I was talking about.
Linking non-finance audiences to paywalled WSJ stories is kind of annoying. I might snobbishly say that every intellectually engaged citizen should be subscribed to their city paper, The New York Times, and The Economist, but it's hard to justify WSJ's prices if you're not in the industry and are only going to read casually/intermittently. A-la-carte purchase options would be nice.
I'm waiting for the poster to complain in an interview thread about how take-home problems/on site interviews are free work and the company should compensate candidates for it.
Personal attacks aren't ok on HN, and we ban accounts that post them. Unsubstantive comments aren't good either. Could you please not do those things when posting to HN, even when another comment is annoying?
Also the average salary in [Western European country] is $6,600 a year? I'm not sure I believe you...
Either I did my math wrong or you're looking at the promotional price, only valid for six months. The WSJ costs $37/month, so 37x3x10 = $1110, or about 901€/month. Our average base salary in 2016 was 925€/month.
A digital subscription is half that, and the salary you're quoting is well below the poverty line which makes me suspicious it's not really an average or it's a cherry picked example.
Clearly the WSJ must be A/B testing, because the price I quote is what it shows to me: http://sufi.andreparames.com/wsj.png Are you sure you're not just looking at the promotional time-limited discount? Because yes, that's half that. But it only lasts a few months.
As for the average salary, I do have to say it's after taxes (I didn't write "gross", but "base" might have been misleading, though it's how it's called here). The gross is 1154€/month. Yes, it's fucking low. This is why we emigrate a lot.
All these trades incur fees. Why would someone pay those fees without getting anything useful in exchange?
I took the numbers from coinmarketcap, which lists the flow within exchanges actually, which are off chain. I am sure the numbers for on chain transactions can also be found.
The crux of the issue isn't mentioned until the very last paragraphs of the article:
"One particular concern is cryptocurrency mining—a processor and electricity-intensive computing process for generating currencies such as bitcoin. The process accounts for about 90% of Iceland’s data center industry in terms of electricity consumed"
If these data centers where actually being utilised for something useful then people would be happier about this. But no, it is just some speculators mining for crypto.
Seriously...Not sure why the article is going after the "tech industry" as a whole when the entire article should have been about cryptocurrency mining
If you turned off Iceland's aluminum smelting, it would have an ~35% energy surplus. You can't really send it anywhere though, because undersea power cables have horrible transmission losses. Crypto is as good a use as any for the spare power, and arguably cleaner than importing bauxite on oil-powered ships, smelting it and shipping back the resulting aluminum, which is how the surplus is currently used.
Iceland has big ecological problems, but power usage isn't one of them. If you want to fret about Icelands environment, for gods sake get over here and help us plant trees before the last of the topsoil blows away.
Im already here. And the problems with smelting dont negate the idiocy (imho) of mining.
>And the problems with smelting dont negate the idiocy (imho) of mining.
Except that in Iceland, crypto mining could literally, and I use the word literally in the classical and correct sense, actually negate the problems of smelting. If crypto miners out-bid aluminium smelters on power prices, the smelting will leave Iceland and move closer to the source of the ore without any net loss in income to the Icelandic economy.
The economy of aluminium in Iceland /is/ the economy of selling electricity to foreigners. It generates some dock work as well, but the bauxite is here for the power prices, not the light touch of the local forklift drivers. If we can sell that electricity without shipping things, that's obviously better.
You're welcome to think that's idiocy if you like, I guess.
I get the relationship between the smelters and the power industry in Iceland, but despite that industries problems (I am not a fan) at least there is some economic activity going on there.
With mining, essentially we are building damns and steam generators to fuel heat dispensation for the benefit of helping some speculators win bets against other speculators. This is not economic activity imo, but some fancy techno-casino. I feel I am very justified in calling it idiotic.
And lets not ignore the externalities here. Just as miners can server as price competition to the smelters, they also out-price other potential activities. Not just as buyers of electricity, but also as investment for those that are running the datacenters. As long as the mining option is on the table, these operators and investors have no incentive to find other uses for their computer farms. Just buy some ASICs and be done with it.
It can be a net loss to the Icelandic economy if the crypto bubble bursts and Iceland is left with no miners and no smelters
You're not wrong, but if you're going to put political effort into avoiding collateral damage from bursting bubbles, crypto is not the place to start.
We're currently squeezing residents out of houses to turn them into airbnb's, replacing shops that the locals actually use with dozens of identical puffin stores selling tourist tat and bulldozing sustainable local business so we can replace them with hotels.
All this to service a tourism industry that is actually too large to handle. We've got tourists pooping in fields because no one has organised toilets for them to use. The toilets aren't there because no one is paying for them because the tourism industry is getting massive tax breaks, and yet despite this, Iceland is now so expensive to stay at that people are booking in Norway, because it's actually /cheaper/ to holiday there.
But this is apparently not a bubble and all good investment, just like the banking was I guess.
Seriously, when it comes to problems in Iceland, crypto mining isn't even on the map.
Not sure why this is being downvoted... Cryptocurrency mining seems to be the ideal fit for remote regions with abundance of cheap energy, since transferring data is easier than moving energy somewhere it can be used for other things and also easier than, say, importing bauxite and exporting aluminium.
It's the same reason why miners in China use hydro power.
Fucking bitcoin. Do something useful with your computing power.
But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.
You are assuming that mining for crypto is a useful thing to begin with. Not everyone agrees with you. And many here in Iceland are not enamoured with the idea that we should build more damns and loose more waterfalls so some people can get rich off speculation. Even if it is more eco friendly than people getting rich off speculation in China.
You are assuming people will stop mining if this is banned in Iceland. That's just not how it works.
Feel free to like or dislike cryptocurrency mining (I too believe it to be a waste of energy -- but that's not the point), but it's likely not going away. So you want the "green" efforts to be as cheap and efficient as possible, if you want to outcompete the less eco friendly alternatives.
Judging from your comment Im assuming you do not live in Iceland, apologies if Im wrong.
The reality is that there are only a handful of energy providers in Iceland capable of providing the energy at this scale, Landsvirkjun being the largest (by far).
These companies are either government owned or very sensitive to political realities, and will stop selling energy to mining centers if the pressure becomes strong enough.
You're right, I do not. Sure, but these companies would just relocate again?
I don't see how that fixes things at the global level (aside from them leaving Iceland and relocating somewhere else, of course).
Now they might at least be paying taxes and generating some jobs.
If it wasn't used for mining, where would the excess power go?
Why would bitcoin be harder to ban than filamentary lightbulbs? You think they can lobby harder than the transport industry that would gain from the distraction?
Whether you like crypto or not, other people will mine it.
Don’t the miners pay tax in your country?
Why do I keep on hearing this fallacious argument? The existence, or even the inevitability of something, does not only this something should be legalized.
Following you argument, whether you like it or not, people will commit homicide. Let’s regulate it!
How do you feel about other energy intensive industries, e.g. aluminium smelting? Does Iceland not profit from selling energy to industrial customers? Why would you assume they are not doing the same with miners?
When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead. How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?
> How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?
How much banker do you need per transaction? With modern banking, most everything uses as few humans as possible (if not simply because they're slow).
> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead.
Do you happen to have any sources for this? I wasn't able to find much after a quick google search.
Is this true? If so let's see some evidence. Common sense tells me it won't be true, by some orders of magnitude.
> When compared to the enormous inefficiency of the global banking system, the energy consumed per transaction for crypto comes out far, far ahead
Visa: 3.1 billion cards; $8.9 trillion in transactions in 2016; 65,000 transactions per second capacity.
Bitcoin is a very sad joke compared to just Visa. The global banking system is a marvel of efficiency by comparison.
Bitcoin is consuming as much electricity as the Czech Republic or Switzerland and half as much as the Netherlands.
Dollar for dollar, the global banking system is using less than 1% of the electricity that Bitcoin is.
> How much beef do you have to feed the average banker per transaction?
If we had more automation and fewer banking jobs, beef consumption would go down because the former bankers would vanish into thin air?
Crypto can't even do a single transaction using beef for energy.
Citation needed.
Banking provides a number of services and employs a bunch of other peoples. Sending money from a to be is just one of the things it does.
> But these are eco-friendly bitcoins. In china they burn coal for this. So I think this is definitely a good thing.
I'm hoping this is sarcasm, but in case it's not the cost of opportunity here is the main issue. Imagine all that computer power applied to protein folding simulation, to name a simple, useful-for-everyone task.
The comment seemed pragmatic. Coins will be mined regardless of whether it makes sense: it's better if it's done more ecologically as long as coins will be mined.
If individuals rather spend their money on mining coins that's fine, but building an entire industry spending the finite resources of the Earth dedicated to breaking pointless hashes seems pretty idiotic from a pure survival standpoint.
You have a confused view of the realities of "individuals" vs "industry".
You would think someone would have by now invented a crypto currency who’s token is a correctly folded protein.
There’s probably a rule, or law, or some such, that predicts if I do an internet search for this I will find it is already a thing.
Sadly, the reason PoW works as a way to provide a trustless system that functions as long as 51% of the power is neutral, the solution has to be completely random and unpredictable. Otherwise the operator with the most powerful rig would outperform everyone else often enough for the system to be susceptible to bad actors.
It is not sufficient for the PoW just to be extremely hard.
I saw a talk by researcher in the UK who has been toying around with the concept of cryptocurrencies with useful proof-of-work schemes.
Mirror of Faye's talk slides here: https://yadi.sk/d/8ezgDZvO3PLZ6C
Yeah, and imagine if all that GPU power used by gamers was used for protein-folding.......yeah, this was sarcasm.
> a simple, useful-for-everyone task.
... but not a profitable one, thus few will do it. Bitcoin incentivises "useful-for-everyone" tasks (mining), which makes people do it.
If you give people as much or more money for protein folding as for mining bitcoin they'll probably do that.
How is protein folding useful for everyone?
Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone? I'm assuming the results of protein folding are eventually used in the cure of disease or improvements in agriculture or something similar. At some level just the academic insights gained can be considered useful for society (which is why most countries have public funding for purely academic research, typically through Universities).
>Wouldn't the science being done with the results eventually benefit everyone?
Answer is clearly no. Nothing benefits everyone.
I think in this context "everyone" would mean "society" or "community", not "every individual". The original proposition was that crypto-mining could be done with the proof-of-work (or whatever the logic is) having some general benefit to society beyond the pure profit motive of the individual doing the mining.
Mining bitcoin in Iceland hasn't stopped bitcoin mining in China with coal though, has it? So what does that matter?
Assuming that higher supply of Bitcoin means lower price (a dangerous assumption for anything with such a heavily speculation-driven price, I know) then that lower price should presumably mean lower production of Bitcoin in China, maybe only modestly lower.
What happens is the difficulity rate increases and the power required to mine the next coin increases and China's miners requires more coal. Iceland's clean energy has a dirty by-product.
Maybe this is why we haven’t heard from advanced alien civilisations: they’ve all extinguished their suns in an effort to mine the next block, thereby rapidly rendering their whole civilisation extinguished.
Of course, any sufficiently advanced civilisation that can build a Contraption to extract all the energy from s star should also be advanced enough to build a computer model complex enough to reveal the secrets of warp drive, but didn’t because they were too busy mining crypto.
Not necessarily. If clean energy in Iceland is cheaper than coal in China and can grow indefinitely, increasing the difficulty may push the Chinese miners out of the market, stopping all coal-using crypto-currency mining.
Clean energy can not grow indefinitely in Iceland, there is only so much water falling so many meters. There may be other methods involving steam and earth warmth that Iceland may be uniquely competitive in, but that is going to require the invention of new technologies and processes.
Not sure why they downvoted this. This is an accurate comment.
It's accurate if both of its big assumptions are true, which seems unlikely given how inexpensive coal is and the relative levels of corruption and tolerance for environmental damage between China and Iceland.
"and can grow indefinitely" It's accurate only given this flawed assumption.
Presuming the antecedant.
Well at the same time it out competes other miners, so may reduce greenhouse gas emissions on net.
But it's not higher supply, since the network enforces a limit of 1 block every 10 min.
Bitcoin does not scale, it's just people reaching for a smaller part of the pie that, for pretty purely speculative reasons, still cost a lot.
It is like people around the world paying for steam in Iceland.
YOU think that, not Icelanders. Hydropower has its major issues and thermal also has its own. So this is the classic "not in my backyard." Also, what good is it if an industry builds up, cities spring up as a results...and then it collapses?
All their eggs in one basket. That is potentially a recipe for a sudden disaster.
If bitcoin dies, I imagine all that datacenter capacity can easily be reapplied to future AI and other needs though.
Are you familiar with what happens to prices when supply floods the market? :-)
I doubt Iceland can "flood" the DC market.
In this particular case, Iceland is concerned about their domestic DC market supply flooding local demand if the BTC mining dries up.
There are still good reasons to host in Iceland — geothermal power, no or less need to run expensive AC units, maybe low enough latency to European sites — but 90% of their current consumption is BTC miners.
Right, but I don't see why local demand is so important, a DC can sell its services globally.
> globally
Yes and no :-). Ignoring other factors, a DC's services are on average less valuable the higher the latency. That restricts Iceland's primary market to Europe (and maybe east-coast North America).
Bitcoin mining centers aren't really setup for hosting, they don't need the bandwidth.
Certainly, not hosting but plenty of applications that can tolerate physical moving of data in an out.(rendering, protein folding,some big data stuff (store the petabyte locally and have people come visit) All ASIC is going to be a problem though.
They do need a stable internet connection though that can't be super slow, so I'd assume it could always be upgraded with fiber. The stable and plentiful power on it's own will be very interesting.
They're all Asics, they are only useful for computing hashes.
I don't think this really matters, it's not the computers that would be reused but the infrastructure. These are essentially buildings with good ventilation and plenty of power and an internet connection that can likely be upgraded too. That's already quite useful
Ventilated buildings with power, but no networking gear or servers can surely be converted. But it's hardly a slam dunk. A lot of other buildings could be converted to that level too. So I think the other factors in choosing a data center location may dominate the decision.
http://archive.is/UrC65
A quick Google check of dedicated server offerings in Iceland from various vendors reveals ridiculously high prices, so what gives?
Bandwidth prices? Iceland is pretty isolated.
High demand, presumably?
Thank you, rbanffy, for submitting such consistently interesting stories. When I see your name, it's a recommendation.
The article is behind a paywall, I think that makes this a pretty bad submission.
Try archive.is.
The "web" link at the top bypasses the paywall. Accessing the article from Google also bypasses the paywall.
Paying for interesting articles is a real bummer in the age of Facebook when everyone loves being the product instead. /s
The previous link I read from HN talked about how Pulitzer prize winners left journalism, and people speculating it's due to low revenue in journalism due to....tada, people not paying for quality journalism.
It reminds me how we were told in the 2000' there will soon be no quality music anymore because of bittorrent.
If journalism business model is not working anymore, it's journalists' fault, not readers' one : they are the ones who must adapt and find new ideas to make money. Allowing to buy article per article instead of requiring year long subscription would be a good start (I've already seen that, although I don't remember which title it was). Making it easy to buy an article would help too : using cryptocurrency, browser payment api, whatever, provided we don't have to go fetch our credit card, type a long sequence of numbers, and possibly wait for a 3d secure text message and still have to type an other code. Providing paypal as a payment option already helps a lot in that regard, for people who are logged into it (you basically just have to hit the "pay" button, no further step).
Then, there is obviously the attention span problem. Is there still a market for long articles? I often tell myself press kind of missed the hyperlink train. It would be so great to have a concise form of article, then you can expand a part of its content through hyperlink (or javascript) to learn more about it. This would make a good business model, by the way : cheap for short content, then the more someone wants to see (thus, the more that person is interested in the subject), the more they pay. There was something alike in the movie "Starship Trooper", where each video news sequence was short and there was multiple "learn more about" at the end of each sequence. With text, this would allow for even way more exploration possibilities. Of course, this would be a major shift in the way of writing an article, where journalists are currently basically writing essays in one block.
Which browser payment API are you referring to? And at least one major browser already autofills your payment info (heuristically identifying form fields; essentially zero sites actually mark up their form fields with identifying attributes) such that I pretty much never type my credit card number these days.
Regarding browser payment API, I had this in mind : https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/payments/
Credit card autofill never really worked for me (either on chrome or firefox). It happens on rare occasion that my credit card is pre-filled, but most of the time, it's not (not sure why). And you still have to get your phone and copy the 3d secure code from it (although, 3d secure is only used in europe, if I got it correctly). So yeah, credit card is good, but not enough, especially if we want to perform a big amount of microtransactions like the "pay to expand" example I was talking about.
Linking non-finance audiences to paywalled WSJ stories is kind of annoying. I might snobbishly say that every intellectually engaged citizen should be subscribed to their city paper, The New York Times, and The Economist, but it's hard to justify WSJ's prices if you're not in the industry and are only going to read casually/intermittently. A-la-carte purchase options would be nice.
I'm waiting for the poster to complain in an interview thread about how take-home problems/on site interviews are free work and the company should compensate candidates for it.
I've done a couple of interviews where they've paid me for the take home portion....
There was even one company that offered to pay me to complete an open feature request on an open source project of my choice.
Good for you, you must be special!
Personal attacks aren't ok on HN, and we ban accounts that post them. Unsubstantive comments aren't good either. Could you please not do those things when posting to HN, even when another comment is annoying?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Paying for interesting articles would be fine, but I don't see that option, all I see is an annual subscription, of which I can only afford so many.
Subscribing to just three newspapers at those prices would represent 10% of the average salary in my Western European country.
Get onboard with the BAT project[1]! I think it perfectly fills this role.
Also the average salary in [Western European country] is $6,600 a year? I'm not sure I believe you...
1: https://basicattentiontoken.org/
Also the average salary in [Western European country] is $6,600 a year? I'm not sure I believe you...
Either I did my math wrong or you're looking at the promotional price, only valid for six months. The WSJ costs $37/month, so 37x3x10 = $1110, or about 901€/month. Our average base salary in 2016 was 925€/month.
A digital subscription is half that, and the salary you're quoting is well below the poverty line which makes me suspicious it's not really an average or it's a cherry picked example.
Clearly the WSJ must be A/B testing, because the price I quote is what it shows to me: http://sufi.andreparames.com/wsj.png Are you sure you're not just looking at the promotional time-limited discount? Because yes, that's half that. But it only lasts a few months.
As for the average salary, I do have to say it's after taxes (I didn't write "gross", but "base" might have been misleading, though it's how it's called here). The gross is 1154€/month. Yes, it's fucking low. This is why we emigrate a lot.
Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... See the orange bit in the western part?
By the way, "the poverty line" doesn't exist, each country has its own. Which are you referring to?
The +$10bn transferred daily through the Bitcoin network seems to contradict individuals who say Bitcoin is useless.
$10 billion including transactions to and from exchanges or $10 billion excluding exchanges? Where did you get the numbers from?
I could trade a broken bicycle with my friends all day long, that doesn't make it useful.
All these trades incur fees. Why would someone pay those fees without getting anything useful in exchange?
I took the numbers from coinmarketcap, which lists the flow within exchanges actually, which are off chain. I am sure the numbers for on chain transactions can also be found.
Edit: the chart with the daily on-chain transferred bitcoins https://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume
Ever heard of the Tulip Mania?