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Mining is actually good for stabilizing grid, which is very important for accommodating renewables. Yes, mining is "wasting" electricity, but it's not a full p

Mining is actually good for stabilizing grid, which is very important for accommodating renewables. Yes, mining is "wasting" electricity, but it's not a full picture. Sometimes being able to "waste" electricity is actually very useful. Mining is a immediately reactive and flexible load on the grid, and in a free market , at the near-perfect competition, mining naturally gravitates to places where electricity is abundant and can benefit from doing something productive (burning off methane, capture over-production). People who wish to ban or "harm" mining have no idea what they are talking about. Electricity is not something that can sit in a basement and wait to be used indefinitely if someone doesn't just "waste" it. That's just not how things work. From the perspective of cryptocurrency users banning also completely doesn't matter. If you ban mining in place X, then too bad for the miners in X, mining will just move to a different location, where possibly electricity might be less clean (not from renewables), and on the global scale things just get worse.

novia 3y ago
We can use the excess production to do other things, like desalinate water.
- yrral 3y ago
  That is very location dependent as you need to transport water to where it's needed. Mining can happen almost anywhere.
  - dpc_01234 3y ago
    And there needs to be someone willing to pay for the water more than the electricity used, transport and capital and operational cost. And such price needs to be lower than alternatives. No one is going to build such an infrastructure for charity, or overpay for water "because it helps balance the grid". The thing with miners is also that they are highly portable. The moment it's banned, heavily taxed or simply better uses for electricity out-competed it, they will pack them on shipping containers and off they go, so capital risk is lower. The fact that cryptocurrency users are willing to subsidize production and deployment of such a flexible and portable load balancers is an opportunity, irrespective what one thinks of cryptocurrencies, but most minds are too narrow to go over "uses electricity == bad" narrative.

novia 3y ago

We can use the excess production to do other things, like desalinate water.

yrral 3y ago
That is very location dependent as you need to transport water to where it's needed. Mining can happen almost anywhere.
- dpc_01234 3y ago
  And there needs to be someone willing to pay for the water more than the electricity used, transport and capital and operational cost. And such price needs to be lower than alternatives. No one is going to build such an infrastructure for charity, or overpay for water "because it helps balance the grid". The thing with miners is also that they are highly portable. The moment it's banned, heavily taxed or simply better uses for electricity out-competed it, they will pack them on shipping containers and off they go, so capital risk is lower. The fact that cryptocurrency users are willing to subsidize production and deployment of such a flexible and portable load balancers is an opportunity, irrespective what one thinks of cryptocurrencies, but most minds are too narrow to go over "uses electricity == bad" narrative.