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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

Isn't a lot of mining done in places where electricity is cheap and/or clean, such as hydroelectric in China and geothermal in Scandinavia?

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57.2% of Chinese energy is from coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

Also it doesn't seem to me that Scandinavian countries are particularly active in mining. Understandably, since electric energy there isn't cheap.

It displaces other uses of the energy that could also be moved to the same location. My thought is to first make sure the coin mining isn't subsidized, and perhaps to tax it.

>>Isn't a lot of mining done in places where electricity is cheap

I think the argument is you can put that energy to better use than mining bitcoins.

Yes it is. Chinese mines are mostly hydro powered. On iceland is running huge mining operarion on thermals.

No, more than half of Chinese energy is produced from coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

I did some research, and it doesn't seem that the mining farm in Iceland is even comparable to Chinese ones in terms of hashrate. Do you have any source?

Many od the mines in china are placed directly near the hydro poweplants.. not becauss any environmental factors but because hydro pw is cheaper for them.

It still seems a quite a stretch to say that "Chinese mines are mostly hydro powered", when the country runs mostly on fossile fuels and the three biggest mining pools (accounting for 46% of total world hashrate) don't seem to be anywhere near a hydro powerplants.

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