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Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing gener
by bhawks 5y ago
Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing generation and consumption patterns are problems many intelligent people have spent their careers optimizing the various trade offs.
> Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else
There are numbers of locations that would be great sources of geothermal power that have literally no way of transmitting that power. Build a mining operation there, no one would notice or care.
- IshKebab 5y agoPeople build aluminium plants and data centres in those places, so yes they would care. There really isn't any "spare energy" that can be used for guilt-free bitcoin mining. At least not on an industrial scale. Some countries use resistive electric heating for some domestic heating and you could replace that with mining. That's a small edge case though.
- fsckboy 5y agoanother way to arrive at your same conclusion, top down if you will, is to point out that the whole idea behind Proof Of Work is to perform an expensive operation, "wasting" it so to speak, on the mining of that coin. If BTC costs $40K+ to mine, then till you're (collectively) "wasting" that much work to mine it, more miners will be incented to join in. If you come up with a scheme to make economic dual use of the Work (mine bitcoin and heat houses) then it will no longer cost enough Work and again, more mining will be incented till the price equalizes again.