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The extent to which adding any mining data center is "good", even assuming that Bitcoin is "good" is incredibly abstract. Yes, it may make that one miner more m

by plorg 3y ago

The extent to which adding any mining data center is "good", even assuming that Bitcoin is "good" is incredibly abstract. Yes, it may make that one miner more money, but it creates no new net economic value, its only value is making the blockchain more secure. Is it good to make the security of the blockchain dependent on electricity demand? There are plenty of better ways to increase demand that are more useful than burning it for fungible security. For example you can build datacenters that can shift load by time and location based on the state of the power grid. Google and Facebook already do this. You can build battery plants which address the problem directly. Electric car charging should be incredibly complementary to demand response. Posing Bitcoin as a solution to generation problems assumes that the biggest problem is finding ways to use energy, which is absolutely not the case. It's a solution in search of a problem.

scotty79 3y ago
What bitcoins are good for is funneling money from people who have money and no better ideas what to do with it or incentives to do anything with it, towards people who want to build renewables even though, their output at times already has a negative price in absence of bitcoin mining. Sure, in totalitarian economy there could be a lot of smarter ways to utilize resources and opportunities, but we don't have such economy for very good reasons, so in our economy, bitcoins are the simplest possible mechanism (technologically, politically and economically) that facilitates this funneling and we are lucky it already exists. The only problem is the cost of new mining hardware, but with Moore's law dying out and fabs overbuilt because of the pandemic shortages I think new, more efficient generations of mining hardware should come out at longer intervals and mining with few years old hardware should be feasible if you are powering it with renewables at peak production times.

by plorg 3y ago

scotty79 3y ago

What bitcoins are good for is funneling money from people who have money and no better ideas what to do with it or incentives to do anything with it, towards people who want to build renewables even though, their output at times already has a negative price in absence of bitcoin mining. Sure, in totalitarian economy there could be a lot of smarter ways to utilize resources and opportunities, but we don't have such economy for very good reasons, so in our economy, bitcoins are the simplest possible mechanism (technologically, politically and economically) that facilitates this funneling and we are lucky it already exists. The only problem is the cost of new mining hardware, but with Moore's law dying out and fabs overbuilt because of the pandemic shortages I think new, more efficient generations of mining hardware should come out at longer intervals and mining with few years old hardware should be feasible if you are powering it with renewables at peak production times.