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Bitcoin mostly reuses wasted energy where there is no other better paying customer. Even if we would stop all Bitcoin mining on the planet, it wouldn't make any

• skybrian 5y ago
  That’s not what this news story is about, though.
• pchristensen 5y ago
  Wouldn't utilities just generate less energy, if a significant consumer of energy vanished?
  • wyager 5y ago
    Utilities are incredibly constrained in how much power they can generate, where they can send it to, at what times, and how quickly they can adjust these parameters. Bitcoin mining, as a reliable but highly flexible consumer at a reasonable price, actually makes operating a grid way easier and makes the use of slow-to-react (like nuclear) or unreliable (solar, wind) power generation much more feasible.
    • XMPPwocky 5y ago
      Except that: 1. difficulty calculations only happen every 2 weeks - so this would result in a comically bad UX where your transactions confirm dramatically faster or slower depending on the weather 2. the network security provided from mining using electricity is directly related to the opportunity cost of using that electricity for mining. If energy was otherwise going to be thrown away, the security provided from mining using that energy is zero.
• betterunix2 5y ago
  ...except that people are bringing new carbon-emitting power plants online to power their mining rigs. Really though, this argument is utter nonsense. Solar/wind/etc. power being dumped into Bitcoin mining means carbon-emitting power is being used elsewhere instead of being shut down. Bitcoin is an environmental disaster that consumes massive amounts of energy just to process a tiny number of transactions.
  • fallenspec 5y ago
    Have you thought though that if more money goes into Solar, Wind/etc (via BTC, Eth mining and similar) that more money goes into renewable energy and thus more money can be spent by those companies improving their existing offerings or researching new tech? A lot of the time Early adopters end up essentially funding technology that would have investment otherwise.
    • betterunix2 5y ago
      With Bitcoin mining, that money comes with the massive carbon emissions driven by the huge energy demand. The alternative, governments subsidizing solar/wind/etc. deployments, comes without the massive energy demand and lets grid operators shut down their carbon-emitting plants. Like I said, the fact that people are bringing carbon-emitting power plants online to power Bitcoin rigs speaks volumes about this line of thinking.
      • fallenspec 5y ago
        The problem is with many with your attitude is that everything must be done perfectly now. This is the attitude of an abolitionist. It isn't perfect therefore it must be banned. There is money to be made mining Bitcoin and people will mine it (illegally if need be). It is better that if this funds renewables (they claim to be paying for offsets according to the clip and investing in Solar) now even if it isn't perfect (The plant itself seems to be better than the Coal powered plants in China).
    • SantalBlush 5y ago
• CJefferson 5y ago
  What do you think would happen? Electricity doesn't just get "vented", and grids can't generate too much above usage without serious damage. If it wasn't being used it wouldn't be generated.
• XMPPwocky 5y ago
  This is untrue, of course. 51% attack resistance requires that mining be resource-intensive and have significant opportunity costs. Otherwise - if mining is not costly and wasteful- it's not costly for an attacker. If electricity prices went down to 1% of their current value tomorrow, miners would need to increase their electricity consumption by approximately 100x, or network security would suffer. To the extent that energy or resources used for mining are free, or surplus (would otherwise be wasted)... that mining activity provides no security to the network. This is the same reason advances in miner performance (e.g. better ASICs) don't provide more network security. Miners mine faster, but any attacker would have access to the same technology. The only thing that can actually make the network more secure is using more scarce resources - whether directly, .eg. via energy usage, or indirectly, by manufacturing ASICs, etc. Bitcoin mining is not resource-intensive in the sense that, say, aluminum smelting is. The thing about aluminum smelting is that if there's efficiency improvements, that's good! That means more aluminum from the same limited supply of free/low-cost/surplus energy. I like aluminum! But when somebody finds a way to, say, double the hashrate-per-watt you can get mining Bitcoin... the hashrate increases, but the network-security-per-watt stays the same. It has to. It's not resource-intensive in the sense that automobile transportation is. If cars get more gas-efficient (or energy-efficient in general), awesome! Everybody's life gets better. If Bitcoin mining gets more efficient... miners just mine more. No extra security. No actual reduction in resource usage. Assuming that miners mine when it's profitable (+EV) and don't mine when it's not profitable, Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment system implies the following: "The sum of all transaction fees and the coinbase reward for each block equals, on average, the cost of the resources used by all miners during that block period plus a small profit." In other words, with a 6.25BTC block reward at current prices, every Bitcoin block requires burning about $250,000 in resources- or about $1.5 million an hour. Now, that doesn't have to be electricity. If we discover free energy tomorrow and electricity prices go to zero, the resources used would likely switch to be those used in miner ASIC manufacturing- since every ASIC made would be a literal free money printer. But you'd still need to (amortized across the ASIC's life, of course) use resources worth about $1.5 million an hour on network security - or accept that network security is weaker. And to be clear, that's "worth" including things like transportation costs- natural gas may be worth $X per BTU, but natural gas out in the middle of nowhere where it'd otherwise be flared is worth far, far less, and using it thus provides far less security. So, Bitcoin is either insecure or wasteful on an almost unimaginable scale - and probably isn't even wasteful enough today. (And no, that's not an XOR.) The only way I can see not to wind up at this conclusion is to argue that markets aren't even weakly efficient.