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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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