So, thanks to cheap renewables, now, instead of a dying planet and an expensive BTC, we'll have a dying planet and a cheap BTC?
Or will we be smart enough to chose to what use we put our energy?
Or will we be smart enough to chose to what use we put our energy?
The mechanism we use is markets: the energy is put for sale, and bought by those who have some use for it.
High-carbon energy comes with an externality, CO2 emission, which doesn't depend on the use to which this energy is put.
There is an obvious solution to this: make high-carbon energy expensive, and use the Pigovian tax to subsidize installation of more renewable energy. The coal plants can pay for their own obsolescence, win-win.
Bitcoin is a complete distraction from this goal. If the price of energy doubled everywhere, overnight, and the market price of Bitcoin stayed perfectly level, Bitcoin's energy use would halve also.
So if you make high-carbon energy expensive, and renewable energy cheap, Bitcoin miners will use the renewable stuff instead. Indeed, to a significant degree this is already what happens.
Now it's still 0.5% of the world's electricity production. What would prevent it for jumping to 30% in a few years?
In your assumption, the bitcoin market price stays level. But it can double or triple quickly, and peak for short intervals of time, or stay high. All because of the belief of bitcoiners. That's all just a huge socio-psychological problem.
Only, it's the complete opposite of the story told to us, in the internet media, about a bitcoin that will always eventually climb yet another order of magnitude...
This is just the 'lump of labor' fallacy applied to energy. Any demand induces more supply, and since Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap this new supply will mostly be renewable energy.
Again, this isn't about Bitcoin, it applies to any economic growth which consumes energy. Right now it's good, because, quite aside from the fact that useful and valuable things are done with that energy, it induces the market to supply more renewable energy, which further drives down the price of solar panels and windmills, in a virtuous cycle.
We're in no danger of running out of economically valuable wind and solar sites, any time soon. The only limiting factor is customers with money in their pocket and the desire to buy electricity with it.
There are only two things we can do to make this process faster: buy more electricity, and tax polluting power plants. Bitcoin can only do one of these things.
As an aside: if Bitcoin was 60 times as valuable (the implication of your jump from 0.5% to 30%), it would have a market cap of 44 trillion dollars. That's simply not possible as an act of religious faith; that would conclusively prove Bitcoin's value as sound money.
If I create a religion saying that the only worth purpose in life is to own one of my drawings, and then I make 10 of them, and then I get the whole Earth population to believe this religion, my drawings will have an unbounded market cap too.
That does not make them "proving value as sound money", only it shows that they are very desirable, but what it does not reveal is that the reasons behind it are irrational.
About the bitcoin as an "incentive for more renewable", wouldn't all the catastrophes present and future provoked by the global warming be a sufficient incentive? Why would adding random usages of energy change anything?
Boom, analysis complete.
You point out other ways to improve our energy consumption to avoid touching to your beloved crypto mining. While it could be both.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fu...
The emissions add up: Ammonia production consumes about 2% of the world's energy and generates 1% of its CO2.
2% not 20%
Source: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...