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Comment by jude- | Hacker News Reader

This really is the right idea. Making it profitable for PoW to consume excess solar energy has the downstream effect of spinning up more demand for solar energy in general.

You can hate Bitcoin and PoW all you want, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Even if you banned mining rigs (good luck with that), people would just mine it at home on their spare computers or use botnets. Either way, the only way we'll ever succeed in making PoW green is to make energy production itself green. And that's a problem we'd have to solve even if Bitcoin was never invented!

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Doesn't this line of thinking incentivise any form of energy production that is above breakeven at whatever the current return on mining is?

If so, then as the price of bitcoin goes up, increasing the returns to mining, we would expect to see people generating energy for mining in whatever ways they can, with no view to green credentials.

It seems exciting because it could incentivise some beneficial behaviour given current market conditions, but it isn't obvious to me why it isn't just a transient phenomenon.

Separately, aren't batteries still preferable, at least in principle, as a form of managing excess supply, because they do not throw the energy away? If so, then supporting the price of bitcoin on the basis that it provides the social good of allowing us to have expanded energy infrastructure only works until battery technology is sufficiently advanced, at which point the price would crash (to the level supported by whatever other components make bitcoin valuable), correct?

I didn't mean to suggest that PoW is sufficient to drive 100% green energy adoption. Your point about it driving any/all energy consumption is well taken. You'd need to have regulations that prohibit using non-green energy, but my point there was you'd need these regulations anyway even if Bitcoin was never invented.

>downstream effect of spinning up more demand for solar energy in general.

But we don't just need more solar. We need less non-renewable energy to be consumed.

Solar may replace it but adding tones of solar to retire polluting sources is not directly addressing the issue at stake but just want more solar.

The nice thing about having more solar capacity available is that you can direct it towards other uses if it's more profitable to do so (or if regulations are changed to require it). Neither is possible, though, if we don't build it out in the first place.

If the only good thing Bitcoin succeeds in doing is accelerating solar capacity rollout, I'd call the tech as a whole a win.

Cancer is still cancer whether you're eating oatmeal or candy all day. Either way, nobody wants cancer except for those who mistake an all-consuming greed inducing thing as a benign superpower.

> the only way we'll ever succeed in making PoW green is to make energy production itself green

Proof-of-work is an energy sink. Its existence is counter-productive for energy, green or not.

If all energy produced is green, then it doesn't matter anymore how much PoW consumes.

Of course it does. Even green/renewable energy has costs. Solar farms take up a lot of land, which competes with farming, puts pressure on ecosytems, etc. Wind turbines also require land, they make noise, disrupt views and kill birds. Man-made hydro requires flooding large areas; even tapping hydro on to existing lakes creates a flooding risk downstream. Hydro also has severe geopolitical implicications (e.g. Egypt's reaction to Ethiopia damming the Nile).

The first principle of green energy is to reduce consumption as much as possible; renewable generation is a 'fallback' for unavoidable power consumption. It's similar to dealing with waste: recycling is a fallback, a far better solution is to reduce consumption.

Really? I thought the first principle of green energy was to stop polluting. There's no need to reduce consumption unless green energy tech can't meet the demand (and given advances in battery tech, I have no reason to believe it can't)

> I thought the first principle of green energy was to stop polluting

Even with such a laughably limited definition, "pollution" would include:

- Noise pollution, e.g. from wind farms, construction, etc.

- Chemical pollution, e.g. from batteries, photovoltaics, mining, etc.

- Non-recyclable waste, e.g. many wind turbine blades, structural elements, etc.

- Airbourne particulates, e.g. from transport and construction (tyres, road wear, brake wear, etc.)

These are certainly less bad than "pollution" from fossil fuels; but it would be stupid to increase them for the sake of partially-inverting SHA256 on a few inputs.

That PoW contributes to pollution is because society allows it to, not because the protocol intrinsically requires it. You can call it "stupid" all you want, but Mother Nature doesn't give two sh*ts about anyone's moralizing. Fossil fuels are bad no matter what the purpose for consuming them is (even if it's making shoes for orphans, or giving everyone free healthcare).

It's possible (and desirable!) to pass sensible regulations to require that PoW mining rigs to use only excess renewable energy, and it's possible (and desirable!) to require PoW mining to contribute taxes towards green energy roll-outs. But per my original point, trying to make it go away is a fool's errand -- that's at least as difficult as trying to ban general-purpose computing, and would cause far more problems than it would solve.

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