I'd like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don't get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else. Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-priced during such periods. If bitcoin soaks up that power, it won't be negative-priced, and other loads won't be moved to use it, and they'll use power from non-renewable sources during some other time of day.
There's all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that's one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening), etc.
> that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn't used somewhere else.
This applies to so many things. Snapchat data center? YouTube using gigawatts to process and stream cat videos? On and on. It’s really hard to control what people do with energy. Much better to focus on ensuring its priced correctly and all it’s externalities are properly included in that price. Then we don’t have to involve ourselves in moral debates about what’s a valid or invalid use.
Unlike Bitcoin, the Snapchat data centre isn't designed to waste as much electricity as fast as it possibly can. Bitcoin is designed to be wasteful, so don't be surprised if people takes issue with that.
This is purely subjective. Bitcoin's spent electricity goes to increase security of the network (whether one's care about the network, is the subjective part). But the electricity is not being turned into heat for no purpose and then ejected into the atmosphere.
That's still not the problem: Proof-of-work mining wastes energy purposefully, while any other type of data processing only does so coincidentally.
Data centers would jump at the opportunity of using 50% less electricity due to more efficient processors. Bitcoin miners would just mine twice as fast.
But that’s not what happens. Data centers have been getting bigger and bigger and bigger and now we literally talk about planning gigawatt scale data centers. No “data center” took the efficiencies of Moore’s law and said “we good, we can stop making more complicated uses of computers now and just run what we already have on more efficient hardware”.
So then it comes down to, we’ll is that extra processing these data centers doing useful or wasteful? And that’s all subjective. Some of its more clear cut probably: work that leads to new medicine probably useful. Work that hijacks dopamine processes to addict people. Arguably not useful. But how do we determine that fairly? And where would we draw a line on this kind of moral policing of energy use?
Very good point – arguably many companies also just have a constant budget for their computing expenses and will buy the biggest/most boxes they can get for it.
I still do think that it's an important difference whether becoming more resource efficient is something that could be incentivized/enforced without endangering the underlying business model or whether resource waste is the business model.
No, the amount of energy "wasted" is not measured, the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule.
> the incentive is hashrate, and each generation of hardware is more efficient in terms of hashrate per joule
That only affects who finds the next block. It will always take about 10 minutes, regardless of hashrate, energy usage, hardware efficiency, number of miners, etc. since the difficulty is adjusted to factor all of those out.
For anyone who isn't a miner (and doesn't care to become one), the only variables which matter are energy-usage and difficulty-of-51%-attack (i.e. double spending).
AFAIK the only reasons to advocate for bitcoin mining are:
- A vested interest. Since bitcoin is a zero/negative-sum game, nobody else should care about someone else's vested interest; if anything they should be opposed (in the negative case; e.g. as a waste of shared resources).
- belief that double-spending is currently unacceptably easy, and would become acceptably difficult given the increased hashrate.
Whilst I don't know of an objective 'acceptable optimum' for the difficulty of double-spending, it would take a lot to convince me that (a) there are credible threats given the current hashrate and (b) those threats would be solved by an increased hashrate. The only threats that even come close would be on the scale of nation-states, or perhaps the largest tech multinationals; yet even if we're paranoid enough to believe they could pull off an attack, I fail to see how burning even 10 times as much energy on hashing would disuade such a level of paranoia.
We might be talking past each other, the point I was disputing is that miners are incentivized to expend energy, which is not true. They are incentivized to produce hashes.
If you hold the hardware constant then hashrate correlates to energy usage obviously, but it's not quite the same thing.
Arguably. Hashrate was chosen as a proxy for compute power (which was chosen as a proxy for time). Compute power (or hashing power, now we have ASICs) is effectively a measure of energy, since the hardware cost gets amortised.
It does lead to the same thing though if you think it through: There's always a constant number of transaction space available in a 10 minute window, which is auctioned off to Bitcoin users and yields a certain sum of unclaimed mining fees. This sum is importantly unrelated to either the current hashrate or the energy efficienc in standing up that hashrate.
As long as the total hashrate is "cheaper" than that, in terms of hardware and electricity costs, there is an economic incentive for somebody to start mining (more) – so somebody will.
Literally every joule that goes into snapchat datacenters is wasted. It's not necessary, it doesn't make anything happy and it's primarily a way for a large company to harvest a lot of data on young people. Nobody wins with the way this power is used.
Bitcoin isn't designed to waste energy. It's designed to auto regulate an increasingly more difficult mathamatical formula which is itself entirely separate from energy. It's humans that are essentially throwing electricity at it due to the high reward for doing so. Once equilibrium is reached there is no reason to throw more energy at it.
The equilibrium is based on the hash rate difficulty which increases as more miners are added to the system. Miners can choose to jump into the system at any time with no restrictions. If a hash block is mined 'too fast' then the difficulty is increased proportionally. Of course as miners leave the network the difficulty also occasionally drops. The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary. Just like how an old computer used more power for less computation so too is it possible for asics to get more efficient and there's ultimately a huge financial incentive to do so.
You can't block it or ban it. Like bittorrent it's nature is essentially to be free. Eventually someone somewhere will obfuscate the traffic just enough to get through any firewall or detection system. Ultimately the bitcoin network is actually low bandwidth so sending results from a miner is possibly even with garbage internet.
Even if you 'ban' it all you've done is banned exchanges from converting to and from fiat but anyone who already had bitcoin can go somewhere else in the world to trade it or simply trade it for cash in person. Any jurisdiction that does that will be just sitting out while the rest of the world moves on with the new world economy.
Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud". Blocking or destroying the network is literally impossible short of destroying the whole Internet.
> The power needed to run these miners is entirely arbitrary.
No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
> Complaining about bitcoin is peak "old man yells at cloud".
I propose "person yells at cloud" (of CO2 emissions) as a realistic alternative.
> No, the power is precisely equal to the value of being able to transact on the network to all participants, as determined in an auction roughly every ten minutes (in addition to block rewards for now).
I think you need to run a miner for a few days to learn the technology before making wildly inaccurate statements.
You claim that it's possible to tell how much energy was used to produce a block minting solution given the difficulty. It is not.
If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate and also you would know that it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck and therefore you can't directly estimate how much energy was used to produce a result. All estimates of how much energy the bitcoin network uses are completely made up and should not be trusted.
> If you actually mined you would know that no two miners use the same amount of energy for a given hash rate
True but irrelevant: The upper bound for rentability is the cost of electricity plus the capital cost of the mining equipment.
As soon as the sum of these two exceeds the expected mining reward, rational miners stop mining.
I don't doubt that there are inefficient miners out there, but I strongly suspect the majority to act according to their rational economic self-interest and not as players in an expensive technological lottery.
> it's possible to come up with the solution too early or too late entirely through luck
Yes, but not consistently and therefore also not profitably so. The law of large numbers [1] applies.
It's true you can't predict exactly the energy used in a given block, but you can predict the energy use of blocks on average: this is not very difficult because the energy efficiency of state of the art mining hardware is known, and the difficulty is known.
You have not shown a real scenario how bitcoin could work without an energy armes race.
The power consumption is NOT arbitrary: Everyone who owns bitcoins has to be motivated to keep bitcoin alive. More people having bitcoin means more people need to make sure that mining is happening.
The second point is, bitcoin mining requires a certain amount of distribution to work as intended which leads to: you need a critical mass of people doing the mining as you can't just trust 3 people mining it for you and you trusting them. Especially as bitcoin is often mentioned as being 'free'. Therefore you can't just go to a bank or country and let them mine it with nearly no power consumption.
The third point is: Mining has to be motivational enough and therefore it will hover between being worth to do so in countries like USA (for distribution reasons) and gambling (gambling provides high margin with high risks and i think that could be a good UPPER resource consumption limit).
Forth: Bitcoin mining always needs an incentive which makes it competitive: If everyone can mine unlimited and there is no factor to determine who can mine more, than it just doesn't work anymore.
We now have a system which ALWAYS consumes resources and its critical to understand 'consume'. That resources is gone. Otherwise your proof of work wouldn't work anymore.
A global economy is easy able to destroy something like bitcoin: China can just ban it, countries can put pressure on other countries like USA and partners do with North Korea. No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin. A country has control over their currency and they like to keep the control.
"the new world economy" what? Do you think we have our current financial system just for fun and we all move to bitcoin? Our current financial system is build and has grown over a long period. We all LIKE that current system. I like to be able to go to my bank and show my passport and get my money. I like to know that untaxed money is harder to hide. I like the knowlwedge that you can't transfer high amount of money from left to right without an external party looking over it for money laundring. Those systems are beneficial for every normal human being.
Don't throw in garbage statements like "old man yells at cloud". Either argue or don't.
Who is the "we all" you speak of? Its certainly not me (I've had far too many frustrating, expensive, time-consuming problems with the legacy banking/financial system), and I have lots of friends and acquaintances who are not at all content with the tyrannical "know your customer" regulations. Banks have been deputized to act as police, and at least in the EU, laws were passed protecting banks that legally allow banks to skim off their clients funds if the banks face serious crises (and that's even discounting what they steal from folks via designing for inflation)---thanks, but no thanks. That's legalized theft!
Beyond that, our mainstream debt-based monetary systems encourage and pressure everyone to spend more than they earn, funded by debt, chasing ever-cheaper consumer goods. This growth at all costs trashes the environment far more that a sound monetary system would.
So, perhaps the wider long-term effects of bitcoin existing as the worlds hardest money yet[0] would be production of higher quality long-term goods rather that cheap environmentally costly debt-funded junk. That possibility is independent of a bitcoin/solar/battery synergy such as suggested in the article's model.
I find the idea that sound money may result in more economically competitive renewable energy fascinating. I wonder if a similar model could apply to other intermittent renewable energy sources?
"we all" references here my parents, my siblings and probably all people around me. I don't mean to use like as love, but no one complains about it.
When i talk about crypto, people do prefer to have their money at the bank where they can use it versus in bitcoin where it could just disappear by loosing their wallet.
I have never heard of banks stealing money. Do you have a src for this? I'm aware that there is a bank insurance for your money as long as you are in the EU (around 100.000,- Euros protected by the central bank) but in Germany i never heard of money gotten stolen from banks?
I personally don't have debt and i do think its a good think to be able to get debt when investing it in something like a house. But i can't follow your argument here again, how would that be gone with bitcoin? People would just start borrowing bitcoin, or not?
The big issue still is here: for Bitcoin we produce currently co2 from producing and consuming over 100twh. Bitcoin has a higher energy consumption than googles datacenter. We are now trying to get our co2 output to zero 2050 or so which we have to do. Everthing which produces more co2 adds to the issue. We have to invest in renewable energy without bitcoin and germany did this a few years back. Right now solar energy is the cheapest energy you can produce and on the other side, there is now a power plant in NY which runs 24/7 because it can mine for bitcoins and before that it was not feasable and no one is forcing those people doing this to reinvest their earnings in removing that additional co2 again. They probably consume more as they just spend it
None of this matters. The system is unblock able and your opinion doesn't matter. It will go on without me or you. That is how it is. You can complain all you want.
This is a remarkable regressive perspective. Nothing is 'unblockable'. If global powers decided tomorrow that bitcoin was a blight on humanity, they could effectively wipe out the network in a variety of ways; it wouldn't take very much coordinated regulation to deflate the hype to a point where the utility of crypto basically tanks for the average user (who are mostly speculators at this point). Just because a system _could_ theoretically replace fiat currencies doesn't mean it will; there's a reason fiat powers are fiat.
Moreover, the parent comment isn't simply complaining, and isn't even necessarily interested in presenting an opinion. You made a very strong claim about the lack of a necessary resource expenditure race in bitcoin mining (a point which I think is laughable from a thermodynamic/economic perspective) and this comment is presenting a counterargument; If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
> If none of this matters, why did you even bring it up?
Because it's pretty funny everytime I come on here and people are bringing up lot's of weird theories, speculations, and just outright falsehoods but fail to acknowledge the elephant in the room: the pandora's box is open and that's that.
You can try to make bitcoin illegal but you will find it's like making drugs illegal. All you will do is lose further control over it while not actually addressing any of the downsides of having the system running. There's always another jurisdiction that doesn't care and will perpetuate the blockchain
If what you say is true then what is the logical outcome? As you become more economically powerful due to the price of bitcoing going up, but you need to defend ever larger investment in mining and power generation infrastructure, you will either need to capture government and become the government, or go to war with government, or mobs of starving people, or militias of other bitcoin cartels.
That means your best skillet is that of warlord / military strategist.
I see you stoped caring about real arguments because its to much effort for you to read through them and trying to argue against them.
Sure, lucky enough, i'm arguing on hn also to make sure that comments and articles dont' scew the image of bitcoins being bad for the environment and happy enough, you stop arguing about it, does exactly this.
Your arguments also seem deliberately wordy and full of minor inaccuracies or things that look inaccurate but are simply your opinions; you give the impression of someone who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him, then claims victory when they let him have the last word.
I brought arguments. It should be easy for you to take part in this discussion by using my arguments and showing they are wrong.
I have no clue why you would see my writing as 'deliberately wordy' if you could just counterargue them? I'm also not a native speaker, not sure if my style of writing is just different.
"who crafts his arguments not to inform but to waste the time of people engaging him"
I'm lost. You make it really easy to do the same as the other commentor. You don't reference anything i wrote, you don't bring any examples or showing any issues in my argumentation.
Ah well, if English is not your primary language I suppose I could have been a bit harsh. I'll give one example and expand. You wrote:
>No country has a benefit of allowing bitcoin.
which is absurd to anyone who's heard the first argument in favour of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that. As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available. These are very basic arguments in favour of crypto. You seem highly informed on the subject by how much you have to say, but it's unlikely a highly informed person would have never encountered them. Therefore, you give the impression of being dishonest or at least uninterested in the other side's arguments.
Just a note in general, there are various manuals online about how to control the narrative around contentious topics. One method commonly outlined is to provide lengthy, slightly rambling opinions for one side. The lengthy nature of these replies makes them difficult to thoroughly argue against, if they're copy and pasted it actually takes more effort to read them than to write them. This causes many people who could argue against them to decide it's not worth the trouble. Neutral or uninformed parties then see a large amount of intelligent-seeming text in favour of one side of the argument with no responses, and conclude that the side posting these large text blocks is correct without themselves evaluating the content.
Now, brevity is obviously more difficult in a non-native language and I have sympathy for that. You might have noticed my own writing has a similarly wordy tone, and most people struggle with saying a lot with few words. I just hope it's worth knowing there's a pattern of malicious action that your comment resembled.
I want to clarify, that i argue against Bitcoin and not against cryptocurrency. I can imagine a world with a Crypto-Euro which doesn't has any gold equivilent anymore and works on some blockchain technology but is controlled / signed through central banks (like every central bank of every european country) which would also solve the energy issue.
Your transparency argument, while flaws have been shown from the other person commenting on it, is too much transparency. No one wants to have all transactions publicly available. It could make sense to use it for public funds.
I argue against Bitcoin itself as an independent tool and the power consumption of bitcoin and i don't think we need to spend that much Energy on Bitcoin right now to do further research on blockchain and crypto currencies.
I have never thought about how to write my arguments shorter as no-one every brought it up. But online also makes it quite hard to have a common ground. I will try to be more aware of this.
> Cryptocurrency allows reliable recordkeeping of transactions without a bribe-able human in the loop. Therefore, it allows default transparency and reduces corruption. Every government gains a benefit from allowing that.
Why would you think a cryptocurrency allows "reliable recordkeeping"? We can put anything we like in a blockchain, including fraudulent records, false provenance chains dating back however long we like, etc. There's nothing to prevent us making multiple blockchains, asserting various conflicting histories, so we can later point to whichever one we find most convenient. It's so easy to make blockchains that there have even been Web sites which will do it for us, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20140228160536/http://coingen.io
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we should only talk about 'established' cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum? It's certainly much harder to spoof or duplicate their blockchains (that's their key feature, after all!); yet they're still awful for recordkeeping, since they're publically-writable and general-purpose. For example, any time a record needs to be published to the Bitcoin blockchain, there's nothing to stop us publishing multiple records, with all sorts of inconsistent contents; we can do this from multiple pseudonymous wallets, and we can even build up meta-merkle-trees between them over time, to weave a bunch of complicated, entirely-fictional narratives. Again, we can point out whichever of these we find most convenient at a later date. If these records are encrypted, then all of the 'backup' histories we created are indistinguishable from day-to-day bitcoin traffic. If the records aren't encrypted, we can blame their existence on impersonators (we can always prove the 'proper' records came from us; and nobody else can prove we also made the 'backups').
Perhaps that's 'cheating', and we need to tie all of the records to a single wallet, to avoid such 'retroactive construction'? That would require some sort of trust/consensus/distribution mechanism so all parties can verify that they'll be using the same wallet ID. Blockchains don't help us with that (the same problem would arise with that blockchain, and so on); but thankfully it's pretty easy to solve in a trustless way: we make lots of copies of the ID, spread out in multiple locations, including public archives.
However, if multiple parties are able to agree on a wallet ID, then they don't need a blockchain in the first place! The records can just be signed and appended to a merkle database, with no need for proof-of-anything. The consensus mechanism is used to agree on a public key, database location and initial hash. After that, each party is free to check at any time whether the database has been tampered with (i.e. whether their hash is still an ancestor of the latest record). They can also replace their remembered hash with the latest one at any point.
People are doing this all over the world every day. For example, that's exactly how git works (+ commit signing).
> As for Bitcoin specifically, in multi-country deals it offers a neutral currency that neither party has more control over. Among other things this allows loans to be brokered without a risk of either party manipulating the supply of currency in which the loan must be repaid. It's a huge benefit to most countries to have a tool like that available.
Lol; there's no need to manipulate the supply if we can manipulate the price. If a multi-country loan required a country to pay a certain number of bitcoins, that country would be incentivised to affect bitcoin's price by enacting laws, spreading propaganda, and generally trying to spook speculators. It's a laughably bad use-case.
Snapchat data center uses as much energy as needed to extract value from Snapchat-the-product. Same goes for employee's time invested in support, development and research. If Snapchat makes money, it attracts investing resources into it until marginal cost equals marginal revenue.
Same for Bitcoin or literally any other human activity. Miners are not going to consume more energy than mined bitcoins are worth.
It seems that you're confusing allocative efficiency with cost efficiency.
Anyway, the production costs of "a Snapchat" depend on the costs of inputs and the current state of technology. Specifically they are not a function of how much a Snapchat is worth in the market. Snapchat can increase the production costs arbitrarily, for instance, by wasting energy, and they could totally decide to waste as much energy as the market price of a Snapchat would allow. How moronic would that be? This is what Bitcoin does. It's important that people understand how Bitcoin works, because once they know how stupid it is a lot of them don't want to have anything to do with it. This has been my experience so far.
I would like to add to your comment that the stupid algorithm called "mathematical puzzle" is just a brute force loop in order to find the nonce => nonsense waste of energy
This really is just your moral judgement not a fact. You think Bitcoin is wasteful. Others think it’s useful. And the debate has raged for a decade.
I think Snapchat is wasteful. It clearly has no beneficial use to society. But you think it is beneficial somehow.
Enumerating every use of electricity like this, and convening some panel to judge and decide if they should be allowed or not will never get us anywhere good. Meanwhile you and I if we are both reasonable can agree that both services should pay the full cost of their energy use.
Edit: I see by the downvotes that people disagree. So how is it a settled fact that Bitcoin is more wasteful than e.g. Snapchat? Yes I know Bitcoin burns electricity to secure its network. But clearly people find that useful and value that enough to actually spend the money to do that. What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
> What should be the rules for deciding what should and shouldn’t be allowed?
You wanna burn your own house to the ground, your problem. You live in a flat? Now it’s bigger than you.
I’m optimistic about future tech and green energy and expect PV to solve greenhouse emissions. BTC is, by design, such that allowing it to succeed would lead to an arms race that has no upper bound — build a Dyson swarm, and the entire output of Sol gets spent fighting over who can find the right random numbers that hash in the right way, and it still doesn’t end.
(Of course, civilization doesn’t last that long, because the moment energy is priced in BTC it becomes worthwhile doing anything physically possible to get a 51% double-spend attack).
I completely agree, trying to solve these kind of issues with morals really doesn't scale well at all. It's much better to just let people be greedy but put in place a system of taxation and economic incentives to guide the desired outcomes.
But does banning something do anything different? Say the USA bans Bitcoin mining due to concerns about its energy use. That doesn’t stop mining in China or elsewhere. On top of that the US now needs to set up an invasive investigation system for enforcing the ban within its own borders.
Applies just as well to YouTube cat videos or any other poor use of energy in the digital realm. Banning YouTube in the USA doesn’t mean that China won’t have data centers streaming cat videos to the USA.
Instead if the USA really was concerned about efficient use of energy and capturing the externalities it could extremely easily (in the scheme of things) work out a better pricing mechanism such as a CO2 tax, and implement it. If it were serious it would also be able to find many willing allies in Europe and elsewhere that would sign up to a multilateral treaty.
> Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it's negative-priced during such periods.
Clearly there aren't such worthwhile loads available, which is why the rates go negative in the first place.
>pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening),
Isn't this counter-productive? The middle of the day is also when the temperature is the hottest, so running AC full blast is also the most wasteful since it generates the biggest temperature gradient (and thus cooling loss).
In terms of physics, no it doesn't make sense, it would consume less energy to turn it on when you get home (or set a timer for 30 mins before you get home). However electricity is usually the most expensive during the evening, and in places that have abundant solar, the cheapest during the day.
Yes let's ignore that I'm living on the same planet as you do and it doesn't affect myself and my family.
Right?
And no we don't live in a society where this doesn't matter. You are not allowed to do with your money whatever you want.
Buying a hitman: illegal in most of the world.
And you do understand that it is hypocritical to create a ton of co2 and making farming in other countries really hard and complaining later about immigrants. Just putting it in perspective
How on Earth is comparing this to hiring a hitman reasonable?
If your point is that you can't spend money on illegal things, bitcoin is not illegal.
Also, who complained about immigrants? Where did this come from. And even if immigrants/farming had any relevance to the discussion co2 is likely to increase crop yields.
On boats with extra solar, running a dump load when batteries are full often happens by producing fresh water (desalination) or heating up water. If useful dump loads are available (pumped water?) then it's a good idea but bitcoin mining is better than nothing I guess.
However having bitcoin mining as defacto dump load would probably demotivate work needed toward creating useful dump loads. I'm also wondering what incentives bitcoin as dump load would have in less wealthy regions where purchase power is no match to compete with BTC mining.
Think of a world where most electricity is unaffordable to people, being wasted to hash some coins instead, because it's more "efficient" from a monetary standpoint.
Bitcoin mining becomes less profitable the more people do it.
At some point it gives you exactly as much as you pay for energy to mine.
So if you can store electricity in the batteries for long enough to sell it for more than pruce of purchase then you are better off investing in the battery.
But since batteries are expensive and inefficient, you might be better off investing in the wind turbine or solar panel and mine with it if you can't sell energy to the grid for more money.
It's better than battery because when demand is high it gives energy, but it doesn't have to take energy when demand is low and it keeps itself financially afloat even when there's no high demand for a long time which might kill your battery energy storage enterprise.
I know about at least one pumped storage facility that died because of that.
There are some situations where mining Bitcoin is a very good application of energy that will otherwise be wasted. Here are two that come to mind:
1. Flared gas from oil wells. Natural gas is a byproduct of extracting oil from the Earth. In the past this was vented straight to the atmosphere, which is a huge waste of energy and causes horrible air pollution. Capturing this gas isn’t useful for many applications because it happens in remote areas, but if there’s a network connection it can be harnessed for mining Bitcoin.
2. Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
Neither of these is specific to Bitcoin, because the general concept is running a computer at full load for an extended duration. Bitcoin mining just happens to be the most logical (and profitable) application of that concept at present.
I don’t mean to direct this at you individually (the sentiment is throughout these threads) - I can’t help but despair when a community of engineers lack the ability to come up with creative solutions for using surplus energy. There is always a better use of those energy sources than Bitcoin mining. Some ideas: Extracting co2 from air, electrolysis, desalination, etc.
Nobody is desalinating their own water at home using waste heat. Oil wells are often located in an area where it would make no sense to transport a bunch of water to desalinate (perhaps that's a good idea for sea-based wells though).
I don't know enough about co2 extraction or electrolysis, only that those also don't sound like things people are likely to do at home.
I have no cogent argument with your first situation (there are some subtleties there that you omit, but it's basically correct modulo other uses for the energy). The second, however, is fundamentally inaccurate:
> Heat production for buildings and water. Most space and water heaters produce heat directly from their energy source (electricity or gas) without producing anything else of value. The primary byproduct of Bitcoin mining is heat, so it’s relatively straightforward to use mining hardware to produce, or at least augment, traditional heating elements. A company called Wisemining has a product called the Sato Boiler that does this now.
This is incorrect because a mining-based heater will be new and use electricity as its fuel source. You can't compare with an old electric heater because a replacement will obviously be new. You can't compare with hydrocarbon heaters, because you need to convert to electricity to run a computer. That means meaning we need to compare with a new electric heater. That comparison is unfavorable, however, because it will probably be based on a heat pump. Heat pumps have efficiency much greater than 100% (usually around 200%) by takng heat from the outside air or ground.
A better example would be something like an electric oven, which typically does just use resistive heating. However, this sort of undermines the argument, since the energy spent on heating food isn't that much compared to things like residential and commercial heating.
Heat pumps are great! Unfortunately they can't be used everywhere. Check out the Wisemining Sato Boiler, it's an interesting way to augment an existing heater.
There's nothing that makes the idea specific to Bitcoin mining. That's just the implementation they chose for their first product. The idea is to recapture heat generated by computation and use it for another purpose.
Besides personal profit, using excess energy to mine for bitcoin is worse than letting it be wasted since the increased hash rate contributes to the increased difficulty which drives the cost of mining up for the entire network.
We don't have a problem that we lack Joules. What we lack is the reason for the rich to buy Joule generating capacity beyond what's absolutely necessary. And Bitcoin could provide that reason.
Negative priced power is a problem for the people who own the solar panels. They want to make a return on their investment. If the business case improves, renewable capacity will build out faster.
Adding an elastic demand sink to a peaky supply in a way that is profitable is quite interesting. Joules that are not used at all are wasted. This converts that wasted generation into cash allowing expansion of the facilities and more Joules overall.
But it's not elastic. Or rather - it can be elastic theoretically but it will never be. If you have a cheap or even negative energy generation during peak generation hours and decide, hmm, I can run some hashing meanwhile without affecting demand. Ok, but then why would you turn off during peak demand hours? Why would you turn it off at any time? Why would anyone? It's still profitable, so everyone will run hashing 24/7. Just like today.
I think a more important objection is that increased demand for solar panels and batteries for bitcoin mining pushes up prices for those (edit: if bitcoin prices are above market price for electricity).
I joke, but I also do not. The inevitable conclusion of this path with bitcoin mining is the fastest path towards creating a black hole. It's the exactly perfect incentive structure to maximize speed towards a blackhole ecological disaster.
Caveat on disaster: Unless blackholes aren't real, or they are something else entirely.
I consider a spending all these joules of energy on securing the bitcoin blockchain to be one of the most important things we can do to ensure the prosperity of the people of Earth - in the face of tyrants, fraudsters and central bankers.
There's all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that's one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there's no need to run it in the early evening), etc.