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Maybe SpaceX will soon launch bitcoin mining satellites which will make bitcoin clean
by jack_pp 6y ago
Maybe SpaceX will soon launch bitcoin mining satellites which will make bitcoin clean
- DennisP 6y agoSolar power satellites without all that tedious beaming of microwaves back to Earth. It might actually work. The book The Case for Space Solar Power runs through detailed engineering costs for modern solar power sats, and came up with a cost of $15/kWh at scale. That was before SpaceX. I plugged in Starship costs and it came to 4 cents/kWh. Of that, the ground station was 0.7 cents/kWh, and of course another big chunk was the microwave emitter. Remove both and you're at least down to 3 cents/kWh for 24/7 power, which is pretty competitive with anything on Earth. However, if Bitcoin ASICs continue to improve, this wouldn't work, since you'd have to keep replacing the sats' mining equipment. Also, while it might be possible for SpaceX to make money this way, just being competitive wouldn't make Bitcoin clean; they'd have to decisively outcompete all the other miners, and if Bitcoin is all run by a single miner then we might as well replace it with a SQL database and be done with it.
- RIMR 6y agoWouldn't the mining hardware become obsolete in like a year or two max?