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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how you can have this conversation without talking what the marginal utilization of that energy is - do I care if crypto miners want to mine at night in west Texas when wind is generating energy and the wholesale cost is negative (I.e. there is really no marginal productive use for that generation)? Absolutely not.

It’s a trickier question when that mining activity is competing with generation assets that could be charging a car or powering a manufacturing facility…

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> do I care if crypto miners want to mine at night in west Texas when wind is generating energy and the wholesale cost is negative (I.e. there is really no marginal productive use for that generation)? Absolutely not.

This is complicated though because power grids can resell that slack capacity further away if there’s a persistent surplus and other users will notice (e.g. cheap power really incentivizes overnight EV charging or even industrial users expanding). If all of the slack is being used for unproductive purposes, those positive feedback cycles will be delayed – unlike useful work, there’s no end of cycles which bitcoin mining can use so the potential power consumption is effectively infinite.

Aren't resistive losses pretty significant for long distance transmission?

HVDC is something like 3% per 1000km, so not really that bad. Price of solar is dropping by more than that per year.

That’s like saying meat is not bad per se, because there are happy cows raised on green pastures getting petted by children all day. Yea, those cows do exist - the three of them are just outnumbered by the billions of animals kept in killing factories. The amount of bitcoin mined exclusively in west Texas when the energy is at a net negative is negligible compared to the rest of the mining activity, by people who couldn’t care less about anything other than their profits. There is NOTHING charming about that technology.

The fact that they care about nothing other than profit is exactly why they're attracted to places where energy costs are a net negative. Lower energy cost = more profit. Higher energy cost = less profit.

There's also stuff like Folding@Home which would be a better use for that energy.

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