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Comment by Melingo | Hacker News Reader

No. It incentives two things:

1. Consuming as much renewable/ cheap energy possible because of how mining works and consumed energy might heat houses but I have seen only ACs in this mining farms.

2. It decentivie energy usage for real use cases like humans who can't afford to compete with the GDP from some us dude who wants to get rich.

3. It also doesn't add any motivation to try to make this energy more accessible because mining will just eat it up anyway.

We don't need to burn of gas. We can regulate it and don't allow to just reap in profits without also taking care of the rest gas

It's the industry which is fucking with us.

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> Consume as much renewable cheap energy as possible ..

I agree that this is true. However you may have missed the nuance of my argument. Apologies if I wasn’t clearer. Let me explain:

Not all elecricity is the same. For most industries or residential uses, electricity only has value if there is demand for it in real-time. Energy storage technologies are neither mature nor economically viable, with the exception of Hydro dams which depend on supporting geography.

Bitcoin creates a market for this intermittent excess electricity in real time. There is no other market demand for intermittent electricity and therefore no market price.

Were it not for Bitcoin mining the variability of wind and solar would make their energy available when not needed by the grid and the excess load would simply be shed. As a result the cost of these renewables would be higher since they would no longer be subsidized by mining.

Miners are unique in that the capital cost of a miner is dwarfed by the energy cost. So turning off a miner when demand (and therefore price) of electricity is high makes perfect sense economically.

No other industry has a similar use case for stranded or highly variable electricity.

That's the problem not a solution.

This should incentive people to build energy storage not burn through it...

I would be all for innovating new grid scale energy storage technologies.

Until we have those, Bitcoin mining results in more renewable energy investment, not less.

In the meantime are you arguing we should ban Bitcoin mining and eliminate the subsidy that enables us to build out renewables?

How is the world better off with less renewable energy investment?

It blocks renewables.

It consumes them.

Show me a real project which actually had a energy net positive and don't show me all those garbage green washing papers from Bitcoin companies which do not proof any of this.

Here is an example from the Guardian explaining how the contracts are designed between Bitcoin mining companies and Texas power companies.

It describes exactly the scenario I described where miners negotiate long-term contracts at low electricity rates in exchange for miners agreeing to turn off on short notice during periods of high demand.

As a result, energy companies are able to justify investing in highly variable wind and solar power, knowing that they have long-term commitments for this wind power even during periods of low demand.

The wind often blows hardest at night when there isn’t sufficient demand to justify the investment otherwise.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/17/bitcoin-c...

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