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Yep. At best, it's a black hole that pays money to the people lucky enough to have spare renewable capacity. But the extra money is of no help to the climate.
by notahacker 5y ago
Yep. At best, it's a black hole that pays money to the people lucky enough to have spare renewable capacity.
But the extra money is of no help to the climate. From an Iceland's point of view, the alternative to using excess geothermal to Bitcoin mine is (i) build smaller geothermal power plants which have even smaller carbon footprints to build/maintain or (ii) reduce the carbon footprint of other countries by courting their energy-intensive industries with low cost renewable electricity.
- woodruffw 5y agoNot just a black hole, but a black hole that rewards people for using spare renewable capacity in a profoundly wasteful way. The bitcoin network (and all PoS) schemes incentivize waste beyond merely throwing away power: they incentivize e-waste, frivolous cooling and refrigerant use, &c. It's strictly better to just dump excess capacity than it is to use it on PoS schemes.