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Bitcoin as a Battery

nickgrossman.xyz

101–110 of 319 posts

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#101
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, why do you store energy at all. It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later. If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be. Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that w…

It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later. This gets the cause and effect completely wrong. The only reason you can sell it later is because someone will need it later. As a society you store energy precisely because you will need it later. Whether you do this by creating a market for it or not is purely an implementation detail.

Yes. But as an energy storage company you don't care whether anyone will be needing it later. Only thing what matters is if and for how much you'll be able to sell it.

If you have no way of selling it it doesn't matter how much it is needed.

So you will set up energy storage company only if you know you'll be able to sell energy you store later at high enough price.

Form the point of view of the economy it doesn't matter what will happen to energy. And economy is not just direct effect of physical causes. It's separate system that to some degree is synced with physical world. But not all that much. Much of our wealth is locked up into capital that is being gambled to get more capital without any connection to physical world. And when those connections occasionally crop up it might even be dangerous like in the case of global food prices recently when investors figured out a new game using food prices for them to gamble. You probably think that crypto is one such dangerous connection, but I believe it might be a beneficial one.

Crypto is not an electrical battery. It's economical battery. It turns energy, potentially any amount of it, into value. Even the worthless energy, that is produced when conditions are excessively good for energy production.

The beneficial effect of crypto is that it is variable load that can turn any amount of nearly worthless localized energy into globally transferable value.

You can use the value later to purchase energy (and energy generation equipment) anywhere else.

As such it incentivises building energy sources that might generate a lot of excess energy on peak production, like windmills or solar panels, or that are too remote to transfer their excess energy to places where it could be utilized.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#102
post #75

I am a cryptocurrency enthusiast (disclaimer: I even own some). But I find this article fallacious. > if we think of Bitcoin as a battery, what can we do with it? The key properties of Bitcoin’s battery are: 1) always on and permissionless (no need to find customers, just plug and go) I think it is a very wasteful transformation of the power put in. You can get it to be always on and "permissionless" without burning…

My metaphor: Just like governments mint currency from bullion, miners mint bitcoin from electricity. While I think it's weird to consume so much energy to create something so ephemeral, I'm still unclear about the externalities, eg negative ecological impact, driving electricity prices up. Is all this effort worthwhile? Maybe? It feels like a tulip bulb craze, south sea bubble. But I've been so wrong so many times, I…

At least long-term holders believe it's worth it.

You can judge that there exist such people by the fact that the bottom of crashes (at the maximum fear), do not continue until zero.

I suspect cryptocurrency fills a need for hard money - not like fiat, that loses purchasing power at the whim of unelected central or commercial bankers.

Of course, there's lots of volatility, but I suspect that's normal for an asset class this new. Do you research, discount its future value to you, try to come up with true and relevant inflation rates, and only buy when the market is in a fear cycle.

About the externalities, they are the same as with any other human endeavour. Government should help internalize environmental costs.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#104

I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic. Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage? The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed…

It's not because we consume too little electricity: it's because it's not convenient just yet (but we're getting there thanks to tech advance). The less energy we use the better for now, given that part of that energy will be "dirty".

Main reason we don't develop renewables faster is storage capacity.

And storage capacity technologies we can create are oscillating around break even point economically.

There's no gold rush to place energy storage system everywhere and it's not obviously economically profitable.

However variable load such as crypto mining provides similar incentives as energy storage. And there is a crypto gold rush.

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#105

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.

This is an excellent take on why the Grossman's idea is plainly idiotic [0]. You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity, you just get more security. The system itself can reach a state when you need 51% of whole planet electricity and computation devices locked into it to be perfectly secure. Thats frankly scary. [0] https://elad-verbin.medium.com/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-it-i...

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#107
post #18

I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…

Well said. Also purely from the point of view of physics: no energy is stored, you would simply be buying energy _produced_ elsewhere with the intrinsic value you created... in other words you are double spending energy!

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#109
post #60
post #18

I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…

Interesting, TIL: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa... . This reminds me of another interesting point I recently saw raised regarding WWII. WWII is often credited with ending the Great Depression, but in reality was primarily helpful insofar as it made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy far eclipsing the New Deal (and other governments…

> made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy

Well, Britain transferred all its money to the US for arms, so that would help the US economy. (Churchill spent the last year of the war concerned with how to pay for it.) Also, there were wage and price controls to control speculation (and inflation.)

Re: Bitcoin as a Battery

#110

This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart. Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.

Bitcoin’s price is backed by the sunk cost of energy used to mine it. If any critical mass of miners began using cheap or free renewable energy, the price of BTC would fall precipitously.

Miners have, in the past, resisted improvements to the network that would reduce their profits so this all seems pretty unlikely as well.

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