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Comment by fiddlerwoaroof | Hacker News Reader

One random idea I had was to use cryptomining to “soak up” excess power: so, for example, you could build nuclear out to meet peak load and then set up mining rigs to use the difference between peak and the current load, subsidizing the cost of power production.

It’s probably a bad idea for other reasons, but it’s one way to reduce the environmental impact of PoW

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It's a bad idea because the energy used is worse than wasted since all it does is contribute to an increase in the mining difficulty for the entire network, thus worsening the environmental impact. It's actually better for the environment to leave that energy completely unused rather than use it for mining bitcoins.

This isn’t necessarily true: if the subsidies spread clean power generation then the percentage of miners that have bad environmental impacts will decrease over time. Also, since this would make relatively clean power sources cheaper, it would help phase out fossil generation capacity.

They're not "subsidies", they're just profits earned from selling what was mined, nothing useful happened, it simply makes the blockchain needlessly more expensive for everyone because a nuclear power plant is dumping hashing power into the network. Green energy doesn't change the fundamental nature of PoW, it inevitably expands to consume all available energy because the more energy you can burn the more money you can make.

The important part is that the profits from mining are used to reduce rates: so it’s subsidizing the power costs for the customers as well as offsetting the capital investment into the powerplant.

Any reduction in rates would drive up the costs for everyone else. The capital investment required to construct a nuclear plant utterly dwarfs anything that could possibly be earned by mining.

I disagree with the last part about direct proportionality between energy and money. But my real wonder is if we can use this hashed/mined out coins for something that is actually useful socially.(even if it is a transaction of services anonymously.) I keep wondering if we can create a crypto currency + IOT devices + energy tracking system that can value the coins you have based on the energy sources that fed into mining it. But it feels so complex that I am not optimistic about creating such a thing..

Why do you disagree? If I profit X per kWh why wouldn't I burn as many kWhs as I can?

Because not everyone is the "economically rational agent" that just wants to maximize profits as much as they can. May be you disagree, and think most people are and it's strong enough to be a normal distribution. (I am not sure it is, but i sure hope it is not a normal distribution and there are enough people outside).

It doesn't matter that not everyone is a "economically rational agent". What matters is that there are some of them. People who will reinvest their profit into more mining, to profit more and reinvest it further. The people who are currently fabbing their own ASICs and setting up mining farms in places where electricity is cheap. These people left unchecked will, over time, suck up all spare electricity generation capacity and eventually outbid quite a lot of normal electricity use.

Once again I disagree.. these "some people" need to be the majority(of anyone participating in these currencies) for this mining to stay profitable.. Of course i may be mistaken about that part of the reasoning, but I'm fairly confident about it. Please let me know if you think it is an unfair assumption.

Majority is counted by hashing capability, not by head count. Is it not?

Ah... I am talking about who gets to determine the cost of the coins.. So I assumed it's majority of the people who use it as a currency or exchange. But then that's my default assumption about crypto currencies in general and not sure that applies to NFTs..

You can reduce the energy output of a nuclear reactor both through the moderation of the fission reaction (via control rods, coolant temperature variation, neutron poisoning, etc), and through moderation of the electrical generator turbine (slowing down the turbine speed, venting steam, etc).

There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining. Even if there was then that energy could just be stored using batteries or gravity storage or something, or it could be sold to neighbouring energy users, or it could be used in the grid and other more polluting sources could be scaled down instead.

> There is no such thing as "excess power" for crytomining.

I was thinking the idea seemed to have some validity.. For ex: storage of solar/wind-powered is critical and the current inefficiencies and batteries rely on lithium and alternatives are still in research.(http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage) ..

so in theory there's a system that can be built around the excess energy(of renewable systems) + crypto mining as a incentive for taking up renewable energy setups.(Of course this cannot convert the mined stuff back to energy so it's a one-way stuff at best and has it's own cons and pros).

What I’ve generally heard about nuclear and the grid in general is that it’s cost-ineffective to build out generation capacity to meet peak demand and that nuclear power is relatively bad at meeting fluctuations in demand. Sure, you could use batteries or whatever to store/use the power that the grid currently doesn’t need. You could also build aluminum processing plants or arc furnaces or whatever. Cryptocurrencies would be interesting because the mined cryptocurrency could used to reduce rates to consumers.

This is called "Demand Response" and it's an important part of grid management. For example a factory will agree to decrease consumption when asked in exchange for lower rates.

Too much power is usually handled in the generation side by incentivize producers to scale back generation or even paying to have them take a plant offline.

For a bitcoin mining operation, I suspect it would not be profitable to have all that equipment sit idle except when there is an oversupply of electricity.

I was thinking that if you built for peak load, you could reduce the idle time to four hours or so a day.

Another way to change this : Could crypto not make useful calculations instead of useless calculations? Like protein folding for example?

Like Folding@home? No crypto needed.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/20879/why-cant-w...

Yup, this idea has already been explored, eg. here is an example of environmentally net-positive way of mining: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-06/why-bitco...

I don't see it as a net positive unless you believe high energy cost crypto is of high value to society. You have a large environmental impact in building out and maintaining a mining facility and transport infrastructure thereto, as well as the ongoing waste all the way down to the food put into the pieholes of the humans running the facility.

Net positive means the benefits, ie. eliminating huge amounts of CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, outweighs the costs, ie. your list of capex+opex. Turning gas flares into miners is both ingenious and objectively net positive.

You could use mining to incentivize the build out of remote energy generation before transmission infrastructure is ready.

For example, drop some solar panels and miners in the middle of the desert and immediately start generating profit. Use the profit to deploy more solar panels and build out transmission lines. You can do this piecemeal at low initial investment to feel out an energy source without committing billions of dollars to build out.

I'm not aware of anyone who's done major operations like this, but with the profitability of mining so absurdly high right now plus scrutiny on using dirty energy sources, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts. Access to mining ASICs is likely the key bottleneck.

This is the story used to explain part of the reason so much mining is in China. They built out a ton of hydroelectric dams over the decades that have been underutilized due to lack of infrastructure. Miners came in for the unused electricity and brought in a ton of money to the area.

Or just stop the proof of work stuff. Just an idea.

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