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Comment by PakG1 | Hacker News Reader

Mining bitcoin in Iceland hasn't stopped bitcoin mining in China with coal though, has it? So what does that matter?

Assuming that higher supply of Bitcoin means lower price (a dangerous assumption for anything with such a heavily speculation-driven price, I know) then that lower price should presumably mean lower production of Bitcoin in China, maybe only modestly lower.

What happens is the difficulity rate increases and the power required to mine the next coin increases and China's miners requires more coal. Iceland's clean energy has a dirty by-product.

Not necessarily. If clean energy in Iceland is cheaper than coal in China and can grow indefinitely, increasing the difficulty may push the Chinese miners out of the market, stopping all coal-using crypto-currency mining.

Not sure why they downvoted this. This is an accurate comment.

"and can grow indefinitely" It's accurate only given this flawed assumption.

It's accurate if both of its big assumptions are true, which seems unlikely given how inexpensive coal is and the relative levels of corruption and tolerance for environmental damage between China and Iceland.

Presuming the antecedant.

Clean energy can not grow indefinitely in Iceland, there is only so much water falling so many meters. There may be other methods involving steam and earth warmth that Iceland may be uniquely competitive in, but that is going to require the invention of new technologies and processes.

Well at the same time it out competes other miners, so may reduce greenhouse gas emissions on net.

Maybe this is why we haven’t heard from advanced alien civilisations: they’ve all extinguished their suns in an effort to mine the next block, thereby rapidly rendering their whole civilisation extinguished.

Of course, any sufficiently advanced civilisation that can build a Contraption to extract all the energy from s star should also be advanced enough to build a computer model complex enough to reveal the secrets of warp drive, but didn’t because they were too busy mining crypto.

But it's not higher supply, since the network enforces a limit of 1 block every 10 min.

Bitcoin does not scale, it's just people reaching for a smaller part of the pie that, for pretty purely speculative reasons, still cost a lot.

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