Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be cool if you could short Bitcoin and have it reverse the environmental consequences?

People have talked about Bitcoin as a "battery", where you can use it to absorb excess electricity and then use the Bitcoin you earn to pay for the electricity elsewhere, but that's super dumb because then the energy is being used twice.

Etherium might be a better match for that one, since you could use "gas" to do computations at times when "gas" is cheap.

(Except even when "gas" is cheap it's expensive compared to, say, renting machines at AWS or Azure to get computations done.)

Ethereum gas is just a measurement of blockspace demand on a specific difficulty epoch, has nothing to do with real gas or energy

Not all energy is equal. Consider gas flaring in remote areas, which companies like UpstreamDataInc are tackling. Transporting the energy is impractical. Normally it costs a company to flare gas, but is a necessity because the methane that would otherwise be emitted into the environment is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

Using excess methane power bitcoin miners puts an economic incentive on flaring gas and reducing the amount going into the atmosphere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com