Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
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Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#2it incentivizes the cheapest energy source... like every other thing that uses energy...
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#3We will never have an energy surplus, because cheap enough energy will be used for cryptocurrency mining. It's like when we thought that the industrial revolution/productivity boom would lead to a four hour work week.
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#4it incentivizes the cheapest energy source... like every other thing that uses energy...
It's worse than that. Because BTC can be transferred globally, it actually increases demand for the cheapest energy regardless of location.
One could easily imagine it becoming a way for Chinese or Korean coal mines to grow and remain profitable.
Aluminum aka "solid electricity" somewhat fills this role as well, but aluminum certainly doesn't travel as quickly as a coin.
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#5[deleted]
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#6We will never have an energy surplus, because cheap enough energy will be used for cryptocurrency mining. It's like when we thought that the industrial revolution/productivity boom would lead to a four hour work week.
That's not unique to cryptocurrency mining, there are other things that are rate limited by energy costs as well.
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#7+ “Bitcoin is good for environment”
+ YouTube CEO awards herself a Freedom award
It all makes sense now - it is an opposite year from Sponge Bob
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#8it incentivizes the cheapest energy source... like every other thing that uses energy...
You don’t have to be near a civilization to take in energy and mine bitcoin. This way your solar farm can pay for itself and then expand to nearby cities.
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#9An important thing to realize about proof-of-work is that at the moment, it's constrained by availability of hardware: both SHA256² ASICS (Bitcoin) and GPUs (other coins) are in short supply right now. Additionally, the quality of that hardware is still not that good, with frequent failures when used for PoW mining (though that has improved a lot). Historically, that's given miners in low labour cost jurisdictions a surprisingly big advantage. I've personally visited mining in China a few years back: it was amazing the degree to which the place was a death trap. Huge piles of flammable packaging just left in big piles, high voltage bus bars just sitting out in the open with just signs to "protect" workers from being electrocuted, etc.
But as things calm down, PoW mining becomes dominated by the availability of cheap power and cheap cooling. Ideally negative - IE doing something useful with the waste heat (harder than it sounds as you're competing against heat pumps). And when rapid growth isn't as important, you can afford to spend the relatively small amount of time and effort making the equipment last much longer. Like all electronics, there's no fundamental reason why it can't last ~forever, and the extra up-front cost isn't that much if you're using the equipment for a few years.
Finally, because renewables have an enormous range of production capacity between different weather conditions, we can expect a renewable only grid - especially one dominated by solar and wind - to have far more capacity than needed for much of the year unless storage becomes much cheaper than it is. That's why PoW mining using up that excess is plausible. But it remains to be seen if it can compete with stuff like long-term storage in the form of hydroelectric, hydrogen, etc.
Re: Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy
#10it incentivizes the cheapest energy source... like every other thing that uses energy...
It's worse than that. Because BTC can be transferred globally, it actually increases demand for the cheapest energy regardless of location . One could easily imagine it becoming a way for Chinese or Korean coal mines to grow and remain profitable. Aluminum aka "solid electricity" somewhat fills this role as well, but aluminum certainly doesn't travel as quickly as a coin.
You realize that's already happening on a much bigger scale. Most of our solar panels - whose manufacturing process is extremely energy intensive - come from China, a country with about 70% of its electricity coming from coal. And of course, the inputs to that manufacturing process are themselves mainly made in China, again with cheap highly polluting coal power.