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> In that sense, the coin would create an economic incentive to pollute I think if anything it creates an incentive to use renewable energy. If miners are able

> In that sense, the coin would create an economic incentive to pollute I think if anything it creates an incentive to use renewable energy. If miners are able to pay less for power, they make more money. As the cost of renewables continue to drop, more miners will move to it.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago
Irrelevant. Renewable energy could be used to replace other sources, instead of peed away on this. A larger demand for energy likely means more polluting forms of energy will come back into service/stay in service to meet the demand.
- sparkie 8y ago
  Energy is created to meet demand. It is not consumed to meet supply. The exception to the latter is where excess energy is created because a method of energy production is created to meet peak demand, but generates more energy than is needed off-peak. While some of it could be stored, storage is inefficient and it is better to sell the excess energy cheap, so that you can continue to expand your energy production capabilities. Miners take advantage of off-peak energy excess, whilst at the same time, increasing the on-peak demand. This means that the provider of the cheap renewable energy source needs to invest in producing more, and cheaper energy to meet the higher peak demand.
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Nothing is created to meet demand. Goods are consumed based on supply, demand, and other factors.
    - sparkie 8y ago
      I work in the FMCG industry, and we treat supply is effectively unlimited. You will constantly have suppliers begging you to buy more, and to buy new products as they expand their range. However, as a trader, you will only ever buy what you expect to be able to sell. It would be pointless stocking up on goods which you aren't going to sell, especially in FMCG where you need to sell them before they go out of date, else you lose all of the money on your purchase. Sales are almost always the constraint under normal operation. Suppliers are attempting to create new demand by creating new markets. They usually offer freebies or discounts for new products in order to gain penetration, but it is then up to the market to decide whether that demand warrants them to continue producing the good. Without demand, they cannot continue to produce, because it would be a loss making endeavour. Electricity can be seen under the same lens. Like FMCG, it loses value with time rapidly, because it gets lost as heat through storage, and it also costs to store. An electricity producer is never going to create more than they expect that they can sell. They might produce a bit more than actual demand as the means to try and capture new markets for greater long-term profits. Mining is part of this - if they can capture a new market for bitcoin mining, they will generate profit in the long term by continuing to supply that demand.
- seanyesmunt 8y ago
  It's not being "peed away". It is being used to help people send money to each other. That's like saying the energy used to run the security system in a bank is being peed away.
  - Aelius 8y ago
    And coal power shouldn't be replaced as long as it helps people have electricity. /s Your comment misses the point that it is still a monumental and needless waste.
  - Scarblac 8y ago
    If it uses many orders of magnitudes more energy per transaction than all the existing ways of people sending money to each other, it's being peed away.
    - root_axis 8y ago
      It's worse than that; there is essentially no relationship between the amount of transactions processed and the total amount of actual energy burned so the system is obviously wasteful (compared to other systems where e.g. less transactions = less energy spent)
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    > It is being used to help people send money to each other. Probably 95% of it is being used for speculation/gambling and scamming the uninformed. 4% on drugs, and 1% on anything else. I'm being generous here. Bitcoin advocates are pool sharks, they want the rest of the world to be their marks. Who the hell pays rent with bitcoin? Who buys groceries with bitcoin? Bitcoin could drop off the face of the earth this instant and I wouldn't shed a tear.
  - dralley 8y ago
    It's being used to help people send money to each other very very very inefficiently. As someone else in this thread pointed out, there's only 500,000 active Bitcoin addresses, and yet the Bitcoin network consumes the same amount of electricity as the entire country of Denmark
- stale2002 8y ago
  It is not irrelevant. Crypto mining provides a very nice energy sink for inconsistent renewables to put their energy into, when that energy would have gone completely to waste. It is a subside to renewables, where they can make money on energy that would have been thrown away. It allows better managements of the peaks and troughs that commonly plague reneweable energy sources.
  - ForHackernews 8y ago
    It's not a subsidy to renewables. Bitcoin miners don't give two shits about whether their energy is green or not. You want to help level out peaks and troughs of electricty production: Improve battery technology, don't just waste the energy generating sha256 over and over.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      It is a subsidy, in that this was free energy that renewables were unable to profit from, previously. Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time. After: Now they get money. The hydro plant is now making money on something that they were just throwing away, previously, and thus it is a subsidy.
      - foxrob92 8y ago
        >Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time. Hydro plants can usually turn off relatively quickly. They can be used as pump storage, which is an incredibly efficient way of storing energy - >70% efficiency [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
  - root_axis 8y ago
    This perfectly encapsulates exactly how wasteful and backwards PoW cryptocurrencies are. In a system that wasn't wasteful, adding in huge amounts of otherwise unused renewable energy would be a great thing because it'd mean more energy for doing useful work (i.e. processing transactions), instead, adding in all that extra energy actually decreases efficiency because everyone else must now work harder to process the same amount of transactions because of the increased difficulty rate caused by more people competing for block rewards. These new competitors don't actually add value to the network, they just make useful work more expensive from an energy perspective.
- prostoalex 8y ago
  Larger demand, especially backed by pre-purchase contracts, also increases incentives for large scale solar projects e.g. https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-... They generally have high capex and low opex, having a strong outstanding demand by a centralized consumer willing to build a data center nearby makes the business case for a solar farm more attractive.

JoeAltmaier 8y ago

Irrelevant. Renewable energy could be used to replace other sources, instead of peed away on this. A larger demand for energy likely means more polluting forms of energy will come back into service/stay in service to meet the demand.

sparkie 8y ago
Energy is created to meet demand. It is not consumed to meet supply. The exception to the latter is where excess energy is created because a method of energy production is created to meet peak demand, but generates more energy than is needed off-peak. While some of it could be stored, storage is inefficient and it is better to sell the excess energy cheap, so that you can continue to expand your energy production capabilities. Miners take advantage of off-peak energy excess, whilst at the same time, increasing the on-peak demand. This means that the provider of the cheap renewable energy source needs to invest in producing more, and cheaper energy to meet the higher peak demand.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Nothing is created to meet demand. Goods are consumed based on supply, demand, and other factors.
  - sparkie 8y ago
    I work in the FMCG industry, and we treat supply is effectively unlimited. You will constantly have suppliers begging you to buy more, and to buy new products as they expand their range. However, as a trader, you will only ever buy what you expect to be able to sell. It would be pointless stocking up on goods which you aren't going to sell, especially in FMCG where you need to sell them before they go out of date, else you lose all of the money on your purchase. Sales are almost always the constraint under normal operation. Suppliers are attempting to create new demand by creating new markets. They usually offer freebies or discounts for new products in order to gain penetration, but it is then up to the market to decide whether that demand warrants them to continue producing the good. Without demand, they cannot continue to produce, because it would be a loss making endeavour. Electricity can be seen under the same lens. Like FMCG, it loses value with time rapidly, because it gets lost as heat through storage, and it also costs to store. An electricity producer is never going to create more than they expect that they can sell. They might produce a bit more than actual demand as the means to try and capture new markets for greater long-term profits. Mining is part of this - if they can capture a new market for bitcoin mining, they will generate profit in the long term by continuing to supply that demand.
seanyesmunt 8y ago
It's not being "peed away". It is being used to help people send money to each other. That's like saying the energy used to run the security system in a bank is being peed away.
- Aelius 8y ago
  And coal power shouldn't be replaced as long as it helps people have electricity. /s Your comment misses the point that it is still a monumental and needless waste.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  If it uses many orders of magnitudes more energy per transaction than all the existing ways of people sending money to each other, it's being peed away.
  - root_axis 8y ago
    It's worse than that; there is essentially no relationship between the amount of transactions processed and the total amount of actual energy burned so the system is obviously wasteful (compared to other systems where e.g. less transactions = less energy spent)
- darkpuma 8y ago
  > It is being used to help people send money to each other. Probably 95% of it is being used for speculation/gambling and scamming the uninformed. 4% on drugs, and 1% on anything else. I'm being generous here. Bitcoin advocates are pool sharks, they want the rest of the world to be their marks. Who the hell pays rent with bitcoin? Who buys groceries with bitcoin? Bitcoin could drop off the face of the earth this instant and I wouldn't shed a tear.
- dralley 8y ago
  It's being used to help people send money to each other very very very inefficiently. As someone else in this thread pointed out, there's only 500,000 active Bitcoin addresses, and yet the Bitcoin network consumes the same amount of electricity as the entire country of Denmark
stale2002 8y ago
It is not irrelevant. Crypto mining provides a very nice energy sink for inconsistent renewables to put their energy into, when that energy would have gone completely to waste. It is a subside to renewables, where they can make money on energy that would have been thrown away. It allows better managements of the peaks and troughs that commonly plague reneweable energy sources.
- ForHackernews 8y ago
  It's not a subsidy to renewables. Bitcoin miners don't give two shits about whether their energy is green or not. You want to help level out peaks and troughs of electricty production: Improve battery technology, don't just waste the energy generating sha256 over and over.
  - stale2002 8y ago
    It is a subsidy, in that this was free energy that renewables were unable to profit from, previously. Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time. After: Now they get money. The hydro plant is now making money on something that they were just throwing away, previously, and thus it is a subsidy.
    - foxrob92 8y ago
      >Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time. Hydro plants can usually turn off relatively quickly. They can be used as pump storage, which is an incredibly efficient way of storing energy - >70% efficiency [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- root_axis 8y ago
  This perfectly encapsulates exactly how wasteful and backwards PoW cryptocurrencies are. In a system that wasn't wasteful, adding in huge amounts of otherwise unused renewable energy would be a great thing because it'd mean more energy for doing useful work (i.e. processing transactions), instead, adding in all that extra energy actually decreases efficiency because everyone else must now work harder to process the same amount of transactions because of the increased difficulty rate caused by more people competing for block rewards. These new competitors don't actually add value to the network, they just make useful work more expensive from an energy perspective.
prostoalex 8y ago
Larger demand, especially backed by pre-purchase contracts, also increases incentives for large scale solar projects e.g. https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-usa https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-... They generally have high capex and low opex, having a strong outstanding demand by a centralized consumer willing to build a data center nearby makes the business case for a solar farm more attractive.