Is there something better than minting new money that we should be using this energy on, and to which we can economically distribute said energy from locations with excess capacity?
That’s an interesting thought experiment but, wrong. Other than utilizing low cost electricity that would otherwise be wasted, there’s no way to transmutate bits into electricity.
There’s a lot of bikeshedding about the wastefulness of minting virtual money with electricity. End of the day, people will do whatever they want to generate profit. Some poor bastard in Africa is toiling away right now in a dangerous mine to extract gold ore for investors. Right now, it makes economic sense to buy Electricity in China to produce internet money and bypass capital controls.
CO2 extraction from our atmosphere for long term storage or creation of CO2-neutral carbon-based fuels for applications that require fuels with high energy density like airplanes.