Well, read through this 1001st version of the argument, and finally you'll understand why it's not bogus! It's really terrible that you've been arguing with such stupid people, because it's not really that complicated to explain why bitcoin mining is a renewable energy subsidy. It's really very simple, although it involves a lot of facts you aren't acquainted with.
> But that's true for renewable energy too. Nothing about the two energy sources are different.
There is one crucial difference: renewable energy is much cheaper. In the quaint units used for electricity trading, solar energy is being typically sold (in PPAs) for US$20–40/MWh in China and India, and every few months there's a new record low price; the latest is US$10.40/MWh in Saudi Arabia this April, but there have been solar PPAs signed for under US$20/MWh all over the world:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/25/insan...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/solar-cheap-energy-co...
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/merchant-income...
https://balkangreenenergynews.com/saudi-arabia-to-add-3-7-gw...
By contrast, continuing to run existing coal plants costs around US$40/MWh, and US$50/MWh is a more typical wholesale price.
> Please tell me why mining does not incentivize cheaper fossil fuel energy technology in the same way it supposedly incentivizes cheaper renewable energy technology.
Oh, it totally would! If it existed.
We could imagine a disaster scenario in which someone figured out how to turn coal into electricity at US$1/MWh, and also found a hitherto unsuspected giant coal deposit that can be strip-mined, so the cost of mining is similarly low. Massive power plants would immediately be built, heedless of the vehement protests from other countries as well as the hapless villagers living atop the coal, and bitcoin miners would flock to the province just as they now flock to hydroelectric regions, and just as aluminum smelters have always clustered around hydroelectric dams and geothermal regions. The planet would warm up even more rapidly.
But that isn't the world we live in. With the exception of marginal cases like flaring of oilfield gas† and subsidized pricing, fossil fuel energy isn't cheaper. It's more expensive, and not just by a few percent—100%–400% more expensive. That's a contingent fact—it could certainly have happened differently, just as we could happen to live on a planet with abundant platinum in the crust, and fossil fuel used to be cheaper before we extracted all the easily accessible deposits like sea-coal—but it's still a fact. And it seems unlikely to change rapidly, since the bottleneck in exploiting fossil fuels is the cost of industrial-scale heat engines, which are 250 years old and consequently improving fairly slowly. The Parsons turbine, the mainstay of fossil-fuel electricity generation, hasn't changed fundamentally since 01884, although innumerable incremental improvements have raised its efficiency. By contrast, PV's getting cheaper at a double-digit percentage per year.
So, for bitcoin purposes, renewable energy is interchangeable with fossil-fuel energy, just cheaper. But from the standpoint of renewable energy, bitcoin mining has several unique factors to recommend it:
· It's perfectly portable. Portland cement kilns use a lot of energy too, but we don't see renewable-powered cement kilns in Saudi Arabia bankrupting fossil-fuel-powered cement companies in Mexico, Germany, and Akron, because cement is too heavy (per dollar of value) to be economically transported long distances, and so are the raw materials that make it up. Bitcoin, by contrast, can be sent anywhere in the world in under a second, so the new utility-scale solar plants in Chile and Huanghe are competing directly with the dirty old coal plants in Akron. Guess who wins?
· It's perfectly fungible and not subject to import tariffs. A car factory in Bangalore might survive competition from a more efficient solar-powered auto plant in Shanghai by virtue of making cars that are better adapted to local Karnatakan needs, but there's no such thing as a "bitcoin better adapted to local Karnatakan needs". The UK isn't switching to solar energy anytime soon (its average PV capacity factor is 10%, making local PV uncompetitive there) but people in the UK can easily trade using bitcoin mined in China or Portugal.
· It's very elastic: you can turn a bitcoin farm off in under a second if the price of power goes high, and turn it back on again in a few minutes when the price goes back down. (Try that with a steel mill, or even an aluminum smelting pot.) Moreover, you can load it onto the back of a truck and drive it to a different province if power is going to be expensive for a long time—an ability that has sometimes been abused by hydroelectric miners who drive their farms to regions with underutilized coal plants in the dry season, although that alternative seems to be, if you'll pardon the pun, drying up.
· It doesn't produce pollution of its own, the way cement kilns and paper mills do.
· It's very energy-intensive; the cost of energy is typically about half the total cost of bitcoin mining. An average product of the economy is about 11% energy, so a 20% increase in the cost of energy raises the price of the product by 2.2%. But a 20% increase in the cost of energy raises the price of bitcoin mining by about 10%, which is easily more than your entire profit margin. This means that bitcoin experiences much stronger pressures to seek out cheaper energy than most other industries.
Now, obviously the whole zero-sum competition aspect of bitcoin mining is bad and wasteful, benefiting nobody, and I hope we find a workable alternative soon; but it's fortunate that, at least at the moment, that wasteful competition is subsidizing renewable energy.
Does that help?
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† Mining bitcoin from oilfield gas that would have been flared anyway doesn't promote global warming, it just makes the gas less likely to accidentally get vented without burning, which has even worse global-warming effects.