Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future

That really isn't how most grids work. There are large times where prices are now negative because of oversupply of renewables.

Mining by it's nature has energy as its largest input cost, so it chases lower and more efficient sources of energy which are largely renewable energy

Further, good renewable sources are often poorly located for electricity distribution. You have situations where the power wouldn't otherwise be used, so it is being tapped into Bitcoin.

Iceland has a pretty much infinite supply of clean energy with geothermal. They're not interconnected to the grid so previously they would export that energy via aluminum, today they can export it with bitcoin and other processing (colo compute)

Georgia has also become a destination for bitcoin mining and it is largely hydro power

The reports on what bitcoin's proportion of renewable sources vary very widely from ~75%[0] and ~25%[1]

You can debate the methodologies of these estimates all day - but one thing to note is that the worst case estimates take an emissions factor which is average _for an entire country_ - while large scale mining operations (which account for the vast majority of mining) are often colocated in specific cheaper regions, usually around hydro/renewable power

The only X factor is that a lot of energy for bitcoin is sourced corruptly. The Chinese are already some way towards resolving that (they have an incentive to!) and shut down the heavily subsidized dirty mining that was happening[2]

My main takeaway is that the trends points to bitcoin eventually becoming a lot more efficient, and potentially can be used as a regulating mechanism on grids or as a way to export energy from renewable sources that aren't well interconnected

[0] https://coinshares.com/research/bitcoin-mining-network-decem...

[1] https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(19)30255-7

[2] https://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-ebang-bitcoin-mining-energy...

That's a terrible analogy! Bitcoin is a runaway feedback loop where scarcity drives rising price, which drives increasing energy usage. The equilibrium it maintains is the natural profit equilibrium where it makes sense to spend enough energy (money) to "mine" a bitcoin for anything less than the current price. But due to the built in supply decreases, that price rises, so the energy use continually increases, because there's always someone willing to spend $9 to make $10.

It doesn't have a stopping point, or brakes, and at each point, it is in the interest of the frog to raise the temperature of its water by one more degree.

If I was a hostile AI and wanted universe-scale civilization destruction at near zero-cost, I'd send each civilization the bitcoin "thought-bomb." All the AI has to do is share the bitcoin discovery, perhaps anonymously. Once that is done, it puts it in the short term interest of the metaphorical frogs to boil themselves, and speed along the inevitable natural tragedy of the commons outcome.

Right now, bitcoin is like a program with bad big O math, and we are looking at it while x=2 and concluding everything is great.

One can hope that it does.

Gold stores value but it hasn’t really appreciated. Whereas the claim for bitcoin is that it will soar in value. Why?

Warren Buffett said it best on gold. It just sits there. Here’s one quote I found. In another he compared buying gold in 1900 vs us stocks.

“ I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion dollars…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.” I

Interesting. Assuming he wants to see the finance industry burn, what might his next step be?