> why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Well, why aren't you do

> why wouldn't we use that same excess energy to run a giant tesla coil? At least that makes some pretty arcs while wasting the energy. Well, why aren't you doing it? Let me guess. You don't have enough money to waste to just build a "giant tesla coil .. to make some pretty arcs", just for the sake of it. Let me guess further. If you actually were to build such a coil, you'd want a return on your investment, you'd want to make money. As do many (which is a huge understatement here) people who invest in some material stuff. Some investments are simply not financially feasible, because not enough people are willing to pay enough money for the resulting product/service. That's the reasons you're not building your tesla coil. And it's also the reason why we don't see people stacking so many massive batteries at the GWh scale (and try to make profit), so that grid operators can put a check mark on that "balance the grid at all times" task. It's not happening because it doesn't pay for itself. "Store the energy" sounds easy but is everything but that. So when Bitcoin miners come along and set up their gear in some grid where the price of electricity regularly goes low/negative .. which happens because noone else is able to use the amount of electricity available at that moment to do something useful with it .. then they're actually doing something useful. They're preventing the price from going even lower, they're making the power generation more profitable. If you can come up with some process to make use of the fluctuating excess electricity and at the same time, make money from it, congrats, you have an excellent business case and only need some investors to throw money at it to get filthy rich. Until then, you could try to acknowledge that somehow through means of money/prices, (parts of) society has attributed some value to running sha256 perpetually, enough so that the process can use quite a bit of electricity and move money to electriticy producers.