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These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there

These are interesting ideas. I like the idea that coin mining's so-called waste of electricity is creating demand for geothermal energy plants that wasn't there previously. There is an argument to be made that the reason we don't have pervasive green energy is that a) we don't need (demand) enough of power to force investment in renewables, and b) energy prices are too low to drive green tech innovation in the sector. These two points are essentially the same argument, but nobody is building geothermal plants on volcanos in El Salvador to run smelters, so you need real demand to make those plants happen. Cryptocurrencies create demand for cost efficient power generation that just wasn't there before. Environmentalists should be happy about the increased demand for electricity instead of complaining about its carbon and climate effects, as the only thing that is going to drive the real technological change and the innovation required to reduce carbon is demand for existing resources at higher levels and prices. Cryptocurrencies are a big part of solving the environmental problems activists identify. People for whom climate is really just a proxy for arbitrary narrative and for progress toward total centralization probably aren't happy about having the problem they're leveraging solved, but making geothermal and renewables viable by connecting their production directly to infinite demand from the velocity of money itself is how we can drive technology changes that shift us to renewables in a single lifetime. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if I had to bet on people responding to a crisis narrative vs. having clear incentives to innovate on renewables, I would bet huge on the latter.

acdha 5y ago
> Cryptocurrencies are a big part of solving the environmental problems activists identify No, they’re not and it’s shameful to try to promote proof-of-waste under the guise of environmentalism rather than just acknowledging that you are trying to find buyers. There’s no shortage of useful applications for green power. Having constant competition to waste that power has incentivized keeping dirty power online and delays conversion by keeping the prices artificially high. Cryptocurrency mining operations can move quickly so they’ll soak up the cheapest green power which might otherwise encourage industrial users to relocate or accelerate personal electrification by people in the area. Since cryptocurrency expensively doesn’t solve any real problems, that’s pure waste and obstruction at a time we cannot afford it.
- hdjdjdnbehsh 5y ago
  Kys
- motohagiography 5y ago
  You can't afford not to. The only way we reduce our impact on the planet is by managing its resources effectively, and genuine incentives that drive that efficiency are the only way to achieve that. Poverty is what you get when you don't value what you have, and it's practically the definition of inefficient use of resources. Making geothermal plants economical by leveraging demand from crypto mining that scales directly in real time to respond to real economic transactions is probably the most elegant and efficient economic system ever conceived of. The challenge with energy is economic transmission and storage, but by tying currency to it, you don't store or transmit energy, you store and transmit demand for energy in the currency, and this facilitates efficient economic energy production on demand at the time of a transaction for any business conducted in it. If the ideas in these comments are indeed new, someone should inform the Nobel committee. I don't think they are, but a geothermal energy currency solves a lot of problems.
  - acdha 5y ago
    That doesn’t make any sense — a carbon tax has the positive feedback cycle you’re describing. Cryptocurrency doesn’t have that effect because it doesn’t care about the source of the power it’s wasting — as we’ve seen with coal plants coming online — and the waste has no connection to benefits so the demand is insatiable, and miners will use whatever source is cheapest after exhausting surplus renewables no matter its pollution profile.
    - motohagiography 5y ago
      I will restate that the incentives of making a geothermal cryptocurrency may be the highest positive impact we can have on the planet in our lifetimes. How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down. So you don't exhaust it. Carbon taxes were a farce invented and promoted by academic managerialists with no understanding of human desire, as a way to sell their managerialism, and by politicians too meek to stand on their own and so they deferred to con artist experts. The only reason miners are using coal and nuclear is because it is available, subsidized, and it scales. It's a legacy tech of the past. Geothermal technology isn't available as widely yet, and it requires demand to scale. Miners are that demand. I wonder what The Boring Company is doing these days, as I think I might have a project.
md_ 5y ago
Hmm. By this logic, aren't power-efficient appliances a bad thing because they reduce demand for energy and thus reduce incentives to generate greener power? It's not clear to me that this is how supply and demand work. While increasing demand may increase investment in new capacity, it also should drive up the price of electricity. And since in some markets renewables are cheaper than carbon sources, one would expect that increasing the price per KWH will increase the production of the costlier, more polluting carbon sources. More speculatively, due to the high volatility of cryptocurrency, I'm skeptical that major power infrastructure investments would be driven by the (presumably) extremely elastic demand of cryptocurrency mining. If I'm investing in energy infra, I'm going to invest in markets of increased consumer and industrial demand, which have fairly inelastic demand curves. Investing more to supply electricity to Bitcoin miners requires me to effectively take a bet on the future price of Bitcoin. I think there is a solid argument that cryptocurrency mining provides high demand for excess capacity, and thus might provide a sort of credible floor for infrastructure investment returns, but that only makes sense if traditional demand are unreliable.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  I'm saying that power-efficient appliances were an innovation that responded to high energy prices, and with the reduced rate of growth in energy demand has come reduced innovation, which has had the effect of enabling the economics of dirty and inefficient energy generation. Energy production plants aren't public infrastructure, they're productive capital that has been mismanaged as infrastructure for the last 100 years. When you build a geothermal plant to mine coins, you are making it economically viable at every price, and you can collect or divert surplus electricity to use it to power a city. Governments could even compel power generators mining coins to send a percentage of their electricity usage into the grid as a "tax." I'm suddenly optimistic about this.
  - md_ 5y ago
    Right. I get what you're saying, and I think there's probably some validity to the idea that increasing demand drives innovation and (eventually) a reduced unit cost. Ultimately, though, the goal from a climate change perspective isn't "lower unit cost" or "energy innovation" per se; it's "reduced GHG emissions." If Bitcoin mining were, say, +50% net demand, I could buy the argument that it will lead to innovations in supply. But it's more like +0.5% demand, so it seems much more likely that it's just driving up prices a small amount, keeping some production sources alive which would otherwise not be. And in at least some cases, those sources are going to be high carbon impact.
nicbou 5y ago
That's a very interesting variation of the broken window fallacy

acdha 5y ago

> Cryptocurrencies are a big part of solving the environmental problems activists identify No, they’re not and it’s shameful to try to promote proof-of-waste under the guise of environmentalism rather than just acknowledging that you are trying to find buyers. There’s no shortage of useful applications for green power. Having constant competition to waste that power has incentivized keeping dirty power online and delays conversion by keeping the prices artificially high. Cryptocurrency mining operations can move quickly so they’ll soak up the cheapest green power which might otherwise encourage industrial users to relocate or accelerate personal electrification by people in the area. Since cryptocurrency expensively doesn’t solve any real problems, that’s pure waste and obstruction at a time we cannot afford it.

hdjdjdnbehsh 5y ago
Kys
motohagiography 5y ago
You can't afford not to. The only way we reduce our impact on the planet is by managing its resources effectively, and genuine incentives that drive that efficiency are the only way to achieve that. Poverty is what you get when you don't value what you have, and it's practically the definition of inefficient use of resources. Making geothermal plants economical by leveraging demand from crypto mining that scales directly in real time to respond to real economic transactions is probably the most elegant and efficient economic system ever conceived of. The challenge with energy is economic transmission and storage, but by tying currency to it, you don't store or transmit energy, you store and transmit demand for energy in the currency, and this facilitates efficient economic energy production on demand at the time of a transaction for any business conducted in it. If the ideas in these comments are indeed new, someone should inform the Nobel committee. I don't think they are, but a geothermal energy currency solves a lot of problems.
- acdha 5y ago
  That doesn’t make any sense — a carbon tax has the positive feedback cycle you’re describing. Cryptocurrency doesn’t have that effect because it doesn’t care about the source of the power it’s wasting — as we’ve seen with coal plants coming online — and the waste has no connection to benefits so the demand is insatiable, and miners will use whatever source is cheapest after exhausting surplus renewables no matter its pollution profile.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    I will restate that the incentives of making a geothermal cryptocurrency may be the highest positive impact we can have on the planet in our lifetimes. How do you exhaust a renewable? By driving up its price, which creates higher rewards on innovation that brings it down. So you don't exhaust it. Carbon taxes were a farce invented and promoted by academic managerialists with no understanding of human desire, as a way to sell their managerialism, and by politicians too meek to stand on their own and so they deferred to con artist experts. The only reason miners are using coal and nuclear is because it is available, subsidized, and it scales. It's a legacy tech of the past. Geothermal technology isn't available as widely yet, and it requires demand to scale. Miners are that demand. I wonder what The Boring Company is doing these days, as I think I might have a project.

md_ 5y ago

Hmm. By this logic, aren't power-efficient appliances a bad thing because they reduce demand for energy and thus reduce incentives to generate greener power? It's not clear to me that this is how supply and demand work. While increasing demand may increase investment in new capacity, it also should drive up the price of electricity. And since in some markets renewables are cheaper than carbon sources, one would expect that increasing the price per KWH will increase the production of the costlier, more polluting carbon sources. More speculatively, due to the high volatility of cryptocurrency, I'm skeptical that major power infrastructure investments would be driven by the (presumably) extremely elastic demand of cryptocurrency mining. If I'm investing in energy infra, I'm going to invest in markets of increased consumer and industrial demand, which have fairly inelastic demand curves. Investing more to supply electricity to Bitcoin miners requires me to effectively take a bet on the future price of Bitcoin. I think there is a solid argument that cryptocurrency mining provides high demand for excess capacity, and thus might provide a sort of credible floor for infrastructure investment returns, but that only makes sense if traditional demand are unreliable.

motohagiography 5y ago
I'm saying that power-efficient appliances were an innovation that responded to high energy prices, and with the reduced rate of growth in energy demand has come reduced innovation, which has had the effect of enabling the economics of dirty and inefficient energy generation. Energy production plants aren't public infrastructure, they're productive capital that has been mismanaged as infrastructure for the last 100 years. When you build a geothermal plant to mine coins, you are making it economically viable at every price, and you can collect or divert surplus electricity to use it to power a city. Governments could even compel power generators mining coins to send a percentage of their electricity usage into the grid as a "tax." I'm suddenly optimistic about this.
- md_ 5y ago
  Right. I get what you're saying, and I think there's probably some validity to the idea that increasing demand drives innovation and (eventually) a reduced unit cost. Ultimately, though, the goal from a climate change perspective isn't "lower unit cost" or "energy innovation" per se; it's "reduced GHG emissions." If Bitcoin mining were, say, +50% net demand, I could buy the argument that it will lead to innovations in supply. But it's more like +0.5% demand, so it seems much more likely that it's just driving up prices a small amount, keeping some production sources alive which would otherwise not be. And in at least some cases, those sources are going to be high carbon impact.

nicbou 5y ago

That's a very interesting variation of the broken window fallacy