Well, it’s not completely unrelated: bitcoin drives energy consumption, which in turn drives demand for batteries of all shapes, which are a massive part of Tesla’s business plan.
IMHO rising energy price is totally not good for Tesla's and other electric car manufacturers. It increases TCO of electric vehicles and companies' cost of support for premium models with free charging access.
Energy-prices fluctuations are relatively irrelevant in the long run. Oil will run out, and renewables are the only hope to address energy needs without killing the planet. This message is well-understood by now, the transition has started, it’s just a matter of how fast (or slow) we get to the new normal.
What are you, Apple? That gives no charger for "environmental reasons" while packaging its wireless headphones in a crapload of unnecessary plastics.
If you are so energy consciousness then go bark at US military, those are the biggest polluters and energy hungry of the world.
Isn't a rebuttal different than a deflection?
Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else, or a sustainability solution for energy that was going to be used as pollution.
While the clean energy claim may be true, why do you claim it wouldn't have been used for anything else?
The answer to your question depends on which power source we are referring to. Where Bitcoin is a sustainability solution, it is reducing waste by products which were already being produced and now are not being produced because they are used for energy.
Bitcoin is a multi-billion industry whether you respect its existence or not, your arguments will simply have to get more nuanced to have a real conversation about what's happening.
Organizations that know better are intentionally omitting the source of energy, in their discussion about the amount of energy. Don't fall for it.
Or with electrolysis or storage you need to generate it and transport it to where it can be used, getting you back to square one because nobody is doing that because it is uneconomical. Whereas mining is not because it can be all done on site in remote locations and doesn't even need great internet. High latency, spotty internet is good enough for crypto mining.
We know what the ideals are: no pollution and infinite energy, or no pollution and less energy use. Thats not going to happen, and crypto wasn’t part of those 50 year old models, yet it is accomplishing a lot of those ideals and people choose not to respect its existence as it alters their worldview.
If miners could burn cyanide to mine, they would. They don't give a single shit about clean energy, just cheap energy
2/ Bitcoin is causing _more_ energy consumption. It's not curbing pollution, in any way. It's just grafting itself where the energy is cheap. Noone's building wind farms for bitcoin.
3/ If I cut off 36% (which is a low bound, other countries are not clean either) of your salary, go ahead and tell me it's okay because you still have the supermajority of it.
3/ I’m not sure what you are saying here? Is this supposed to be an analogy to something? What happens if you get rid of that energy use? The bitcoin network will adapt to a lower difficulty rate... not sure what you think you’re saying here.
That's not how bitcoin works. The price of bitcoin is the budget you can spend on mining a single coin. If the price is higher, you can afford to run more miners. If the cost of electricity goes down, you can afford to run more miners. If the efficiency goes up, you can afford to run more miners. Running more miners increases the mining difficulty and you are back where you started.
If Bitcoin is worth $50k people will destroy $50k of energy to acquire Bitcoin.
If Bitcoin price goes up, then the return on energy gets greater. Therefore, it's worth it to spend more energy mining. Then difficulty rises and takes this incentive away, reaching a new equilibrium with more energy spent.