Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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(1) They literally reopened a natural gas plant in New York, where were you? [1] the broader point is this fossil capacity can just be turned off if we stopped wasting it on a bitmask lottery. You don’t have to bring on new capacity to cause harm (although they are doing that too).

(2) burning flared methane is better than not but not flaring at all is best? There’s no such thing as stranded power, there’s only missing transmission infrastructure which is being incentivized not to come online through profitable waste at point of generation.

(3) raising the baseline usage level through waste then turning it off when there’s a brownout level crisis is just an asinine plan to manage load that costs everyone money. Active demand management is an actual solution. So is grid storage. Also, “some states” is Texas, famously the worst energy grid in the US, home of the blackout. Meanwhile New York is banning wasting fossil fuel energy on miners.

Anyways you seem to bring no data to the table other than a “nuh uh” and some obviously flawed apologism.

No word on the ewaste?

It appears to me you’re using the “facts u dislike” acronym expansion for FUD.

[1] https://grist.org/technology/bitcoin-greenidge-seneca-lake-c...

If the cost of the transmission infrastructure costs more than the economic value of the energy it would transport, then you have stranded power.

Fine, I disagree but even if I were to concede surely there’s a better solution we can think of than looking up a big resistor.

The question is how much so called stranded power is there, what percent of Bitcoin energy usage does this account for and is there really nothing useful we could do with it? Finally with “stranded coal” is it better to just not use it?

This is just a talking point used to distract from the actual issues. In reality the percentage of renewables wasted on bitcoin mining is at an all time low. The question at issue was whether all this is carbon neutral, and no, it’s definitely not.

The original comment that bitcoin is carbon negative is ridiculous, I agree. But you are posting empty/wrong rebuttals as well.

In the case of flare gas, it is a byproduct of gathering oil that is unavoidable. The oil is economically worth collecting, but the extra gas is not. I think this can be more finely split into natural gas vs methane-- sometimes the natural gas is worth collecting, but the methane never is.

You could argue that there should be laws to force the methane to be collected and used elsewhere as a condition of accessing the oil. That might be overall better. But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.

Note that the argument is not just that economic value is created by mining bitcoin, but that running the gas through a generator leads to cleaner combustion and thus less greenhouse gas emission than simply lighting the gas on fire. In this sense, the bitcoin flare gas mining operation by itself could be considered carbon negative (again, surely all bitcoin mining is not). The bitcoin mining pays for the generator. So bitcoin mining is giving the industry a subsidy that enables reduction of environmental harm. It is not perfect, but it is an improvement.

> But prior to bitcoin, that perfect solution was not really implemented. In this sense, bitcoin mining of flare gas is a step forward.

Prior to bitcoin they flared it - or didn't. Now there's an economic incentive not to find another solution. Now the oil and gas companies are incentivized to prevent that better solution because there's something in it for them not to. So we make it harder to solve 100% of the problem because this gets us 5% of the way there and pays us not to.

Cool, so you moved the goal posts from saying "there is no such thing as stranded energy", to saying "yes, bitcoin is reducing the environmental impact of flare gas burning, but we should be doing something else instead (no concrete ideas) that can solve this problem even better". I have explained to you how bitcoin can have a net positive impact on the environment, given existing practices. You now say that since this is not a perfect solution, we should go back to harming the environment more, presumably since you have already made up your mind that bitcoin is evil?

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