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I'm not sure which energy intensive industries you're thinking of, but bitcoin mining has the potential advantage that it can be turned on and off at a moment's
by dane-pgp 6y ago
I'm not sure which energy intensive industries you're thinking of, but bitcoin mining has the potential advantage that it can be turned on and off at a moment's notice, and doesn't require constant human supervision. That's not true of a lot of industrial processes.
- dvh 6y agoAluminium smelting.
- beaner 6y agoSo, trying in good faith to understand, isn't the problem that the output in this case is physical, while Bitcoin's energy-to-money output is digital?
- adrianN 6y agoWhy is that a problem? The price for Aluminium is more stable than the price of bitcoin.
- beaner 6y agoI mean, you tell me. I don't mean to sound snarky. But it seemed to be your point that existing processes which turn energy into money are a hindrance to clean energy investments. The previous commenter offered an example of aluminum smelting. Which is not exactly what I meant, because I was being more literal when I was talking about an energy-into-money process, and that example appears to really mean energy-to-aluminum-to-money. I understood this example to mean that the reason other existing "energy-to-money" processes have been a hindrance to clean energy investments is that they have byproducts which negate clean efforts. In contrast to this, renewable crypto mining has no physical byproducts. Dunno if I misunderstood something.
- danw1979 6y agoIt can’t be turned off at will if you’ve got a huge investment in mining infrastructure that needs to pay for itself and the margins are so thin you can’t afford downtime.