Bitcoin miners revived a dying fossil fuel plant – then CO2 emissions soared

Any or all of these things can be true! But you're going to need to show that Bitcoin satisfies each of these conditions.

Last time I checked, it's a public, immutable ledger that anybody (not just officials with warrants) can track. The senses in which the Bitcoin network is "permissionless," "pseudonymous," etc. are all adaptive (and mostly non-formalized!) properties of behavior on the Bitcoin network, each of which has spectacularly failed in well-publicized ways.

> I think understanding central banking and monetary policy and history of money are not strong points on HN. Everyone here understands that a memory leak causes your app to crash given enough cycles. Being able to print unlimited currency is a memory leak.

I think I understand both central banking and monetary policy well enough (as a non-CS-but-educated layperson) to not require silly computer analogies. Conspicuously absent from this analogy are deflationary spirals, one of which Bitcoin currently is in. You don't need to be an economist to understand that the defining property of currency is its ability to provide liquidity to transactions (i.e., serve as a medium of exchange); deflationary assets are famously poor mediums of exchange.

Let’s say you live in a house in a place where the sun never shines and have ten dollars. One electricity costs one dollar. But you spend your ten dollars on a wireless solar mining rig that lives in the desert ten thousand miles away. Now you’re using this power, that previously only cactuses could use, to generate Bitcoin. You take the Bitcoin via the net, and buy electricity with it in your home town, which you can do as long as the sun is shining in the desert. Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.

Now generalize this principle to millions of people, and you get the idea.

Using your example, you live in a place without sunlight and you buy a solar mining rig far away. You then use that power to do literally anything that generates money, including just straight selling it to someone or feeding it back into the grid.

Then you use that money to buy electricity in your home. Boom! You've "move[d] energy around the world wirelessly" without bitcoin.

I'll leave out the part about building a "renewable geothermal power plant under your house" because I'm guessing it's a joke.

If everyone does what you do, then you get one of two effects depending on which unwritten assumption you prefer:

1) if the conversion rate from joules of sunlight to number of bitcoin remains constant, then (first 1 then 1 million) people have more bitcoin than they did before, but the immediate actual production of electricity in your local area is exactly the same as it was before any of you scenario happened, and therefore the local market price for electricity goes up because that’s how supply and demand works

2) if the supply of bitcoin continues to follow the existing rules, then going from one person to one million people has exactly zero impact on the supply of bitcoin, so instead of 1 BTC/unit of time/person, you get… 1 BTC/unit of time/million people (and likewise for your $ investment, 1 BTC/unit of time/$ becomes 1 BTC/unit of time/million $); in this case you still don’t have any more power being produced locally, but nobody notices the local price per unit of electricity changing because the BTC itself is too dilute to do anything

> Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.

If money is the limiting factor, you can apply for a loan to install a renewable power source. As a bonus, you get the money sooner and therefore the power sooner. Economically speaking, this is in fact such a great idea that at least one solar company announced free-at-the-point-of-installation PV systems funded by their potential future earnings.