While I mostly agree, there are subtleties here. Due to transmission capacity inefficiencies there are places in the grid where generation exceeds available load and power pricing drops very low or runs negative in price. For example, there are areas in California where a combination of physics and politics causes generation to have nowhere to go. Under these conditions I dontnhave much issue with people mining bitcoin. If there were more productive loads that could be utilizing that power, they would be.

> Under these conditions I dontnhave much issue with people mining bitcoin

At a penalty rate, sure. The problem is those negative rates invite productive power users. If you immediately balance them with useless crap, you never get the productive stuff.

There is an analogy to Dutch disease, except with power prices: crypto and its ilk are the disease.

Can you provide examples of productive stuff

- Water desalination

- CO2 scrubbing

- Making synthetic fuel out of CO2, or any kind of "storage fuel".

Aluminium smelting.

- pumping water uphill

- splitting water for fuel

And those locations should either attract good use cases like data centers or should be incentive to solve this issue in a way that we can use it.

Like building more power lines or converting it into transportable energy like H2.

Bitcoin plays in a different market and does the opposite to this .

Should? So why don't they?