Can you not smelt aluminium in remote areas? Can you not perform hydrolysis to generate hydrogen?
There are plenty of other good uses for electricity besides bitcoin or powering a city directly.
> There are plenty of other good uses for electricity besides bitcoin or powering a city directly.
The argument "uses lots of energy = bad" is a fallacy. You have to take into account what the alternatives are. You know what uses a lot of energy? Public transit systems. But nobody is arguing that public transit systems are bad because the alternatives are a lot worse.
It's disingenuous to pretend (without any sourcing) that bitcoin is only mined using electricity that would otherwise have been wasted.
If this were really true, then bitcoin miners should all be getting paid to act as load banks[0] for their local electrical grid and soak up that excess power. Since they are instead paying for electricity, they are using valuable electricity, not spare/waste power.
And it's useless until you spend more energy to move it to where people want it.
> It's disingenuous to pretend (without any sourcing) that bitcoin is only mined using electricity that would otherwise have been wasted.
It doesn't have to be only mined that way. You're being absolutist. Competition has resulted in bitcoin mining being very sensitive to energy costs. It stands to reason that miners--especially the ones operating at large scale--will move to places where there is cheap energy.
https://www.publish0x.com/muchograph/top-5-biggest-bitcoin-m...
Several of the big mining operations mentioned there are located in places known for cheap electricity. Genesis mining relocated to Canada and Iceland specifically for cheaper power. Gigawatt is located in Washington State which has some of the cheapest electricity in the U.S. (part of the reason Google chose The Dalles, OR for one of their data centers).