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Comment by triyambakam | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the rebuttals to "Bitcoin is wasteful" in terms of energy and the environment. Bitcoin isn't taking power away from anyone who needs it. It's very often stranded power, like you said, that is too far from a city to be useful efficiently.

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Sometimes it is waste energy. Sometimes it's useful energy that the local market cannot afford but could easily use it to make everyone's lives better. Sometimes it's just a random quirk of markets that they get first dibs on the electricity. And in at least one case, a decommissioned coal plant was purchased to be restarted just to mine bitcoin.

Bitcoin makes people's lives better. A lot of people use it as a savings account. That's really great, especially for people living with a hyperinflationary currency.

It's actually good to have as an alternative to any centralized, government-backed currency.

We need an economy that isn't denoted on dollars or euros or similar. Bitcoin is a step towards that. And all the PoW "waste" is worth it. (Though I wish there was a better alternative that's more environmentally friendly while still decentralized like PoW so PoS isn't a good candidate)

Or they could put the money in stocks or gold or other assets.

But note "assets" and "savings accounts" are not the same thing, and confusing the two is pretty bad.

Stocks -> can be seized by governments where the exchanges or actual companies are based.

Gold -> Good, and Bitcoin is like Gold in many aspects. While it doesn't have Gold's history yet, it has a few other qualities like easy transferrability and divisibility.

Other assets -> Like? ForEx is at the mercy of issuing government (just ask Russia who lost ~300B$). Land can be seized if it's outside one's jurisdiction.

In general, Bitcoin (like Gold) is a great asset to park some fraction of your wealth as a hedge against geopolitical risks.

Bitcoin is not like gold in one important aspect that chiefly matters for a long-term store of value: it's much more volatile.

It's difficult to buy stocks if you don't even have a bank account. Why wouldn't Bitcoin be a "savings account"? I use it as a savings account, it's really great. I put money that I don't need today there so I can have the same or higher buying power in the long term, regardless of inflation.

BTC is an asset that moves around a lot.

If I put money in my savings account, I can use it tomorrow. If you put money in your BTC savings account a year ago, your BTC is worth less than money under a mattress (or in a modest yield savings account).

You may want to invest in BTC, and that's absolutely fine! But it's not a savings account.

And it's very often _not_ stranded power, too. And there's no way to ensure it's _only_ stranded power being used. If it's more efficient to turn power into Bitcoin than to sell it to your neighbour, well, the fuel gets burned and turned into CO2 and Bitcoin instead.

It’s usually not though. It’s the exception to the rule. Often it’s subsidized or fossil fuel power.

Energy use for cryptocoin mining on average drives up the cost of energy for everyone. Maybe not a lot, and maybe the production side expands. But if it is using fossil fuel to generating electricity, it is also harming the planet via climate change and pollution.

What happens when costs get high? People innovate! When demand for bitcoin increases, more money will be invested in cheaper and more abundant power sources.

Alas, that can also mean innovation in lobbying and corruption to get even more subsidised coal.

Market forces don't really discriminate one innovation over another by whether it's socially desirable to you or me.

Following this logic, our current period of inflation must be a real boon for innovation then?

Isn't it? I see a lot of investment in decoupling supply chains from China which was a single point of failure and contributed to inflation when it closed down. Also a lot of investment in renewables or alt-energy sources after Russia decided to use NatGas as a tool in its current war.

Whether power is stranded or not is not a binary classification. It's a gradual thing.

Using power for bitcoin means it's not available for the next best use. It's all about opportunity costs.

Stranded power means power with a very low opportunity cost. But not necessarily zero (or negative).

As a thought experiment: think about what would happen, if bitcoin moved to a proof-of-stake system tomorrow.

It's not like city or bitcoin are the two options. They could be processing bauxite, or something like that. I guess they'd need to invest in some rail first, but building up their industrial capacity should benefit their country more in the long run than printing funny money.

Assuming they have excess energy now, 'printing funny money' now might give them the funds they need to invest in their economy for the future.

It's not an either/or thing.

There's better uses of excess energy. For example desalination or hydrogen production.

Which would also, presumably be stranded at above baseline rate. Infrastructure like roads and pipelines is much more expensive than a starlink box which can move BTC.

Better in what sense? And why aren't they doing it, if it's better?

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