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Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

Takeaways:

>"o Bitcoin mining presents an opportunity to accelerate the global energy transition to renewables by serving as a complementary technology for clean energy production and storage.

o Solar and wind are now the least expensive energy sources in the world, but are hitting deployment bottlenecks primarily because of their intermittent power supply and grid congestion.

o Bitcoin miners as a flexible load option could potentially help solve much of these intermittency and congestion problems, allowing grids to deploy substantially more renewable energy.

o By deploying more solar and wind, these generation technologies will likely fall even further down their respective cost curves, bringing them closer to zero marginal cost energy production."

PDS: What a strange, yet interesting, set of ideas!

Before reading this, I had not seen these sets of ideas juxtaposed as they were here.

Interesting!

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well, there's a lie in the middle though:

"Bitcoin miners as a flexible load"

I'm just going to guess that miners will not take seriously the idea of "you just have to mine only during the day"

The return of mining is much higher than the cost of coal, so this theory can only happen when throughout the whole world the average pool return is between the cost of coal energy and the cost of solar energy

At that point, nobody will be mining anymore probably

It's a tradeoff between capex and opex. Right now, the capex costs are so high that you are more or less forced to run miners 24/7, or you never make back the capex costs.

If bitcoin miners were more opex heavy in terms of Total Lifetime Cost, it could make sense to turn them off at night. As Moore's law continues to slow down, miners slowly are becoming more opex heavy.

Overinstallation of renewable production is likely one of the lowest cost ways to hit carbon reduction goals. But costs routinely go negative already, even in the midwest, largely because of the renewable tax production credits where producers still make money even selling at a loss.

This problem will only get worse, so finding productive use cases for this capacity is great.

While I think bitcoin makes some sense, I personally think the new coin Chia could make even more sense. "Farming" (aka mining) chia is very energy lite - but it does require "plotting" which is more energy intensive. If plotters run during the inexpensive energy periods and low cost farming is the only thing that runs during the peak energy cost periods, then the network wouldn't see huge fluctuations in mining and leave more vulnerable during periods of low mining and high energy costs.

Great, the hard disk shortage a few years back was not enough, the current gpu one is not even done, and now we will not be able to buy ssd/hd anymore thanks to proof of space

How is it possible to frame those systems as green?

It's power that goes away to computation

It's hard disks that nobody uses and that sit there, eating power

All those things have not only the energy cost, but also the environmental, production costs associated, and the damage done to countless companies that can't get the hardware anymore

Small drives will probably not see much of a shortage. If you're looking for a 10+tb drive you might run into some issues in the short term.

Things are not either "green" or "not green". Something can be "more green", and just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we shouldn't go down that route instead.

The fact of the matter is that cryptocurrencies are not going away.

You can choose to be angry and resentful of that, or we can try to find ways to minimize the impact they have overall.

Hard drives use a fraction of the power that a CPU/GPU/ASIC uses, and there is just as much production energy and waste involved in those as in hard drives.

The world is not black and white.

cryptocurrencies could easily go away. They have almost no adoption and the US or EU could look at just how much power and wealth is being controlled by Russia and China, how they're used for money laundering, or how Iran and so on use them to work around sanctions and just decide to ban them. It would be trivial.

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