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Comment by mr_woozy | Hacker News Reader

sure if you're suddenly not counting China's hydropower as renewables suddenly.

- Unless I seriously misinterpreted the news, the significant chunk of hash rate cut due to this blackout is all coal.

- Until hydro and other renewables cover all electricity needs, crypto mining hogging hydro just pushes other non-crypto power demands to fossil fuel.

Technically speaking, western China has a lot of renewable power and not as much demand for it as eastern China. If they were mining in western China to take advantage of lower rates, and that energy can’t be transmitted East anyways, then it might make sense (or they could just move some industry from eastern China to western China to take advantage of renewables, or get that UHV grid working so they can move renewable electricity East to where it’s needed).

The government has put out policies to encourage industry to move to western China. It is not so much about energy, it is mainly to deal with the imbalance of development between western China and eastern China (more so Northern China and Southern China).

As far as I can recall, there was power shortage a few months ago, and I have suspected bitcoin mining would contributed to some of it.

It doesn’t matter where it is used up, the point is that it is unnecessary work taking a huge amount of energy, that could be used for better things. Even using up purely renewable energy makes every other industry rely more on non-renewables, so it is a lose-lose either way.

Maybe with the simplistic perspective that Bitcoin has a value that you can calculate.

Energy usecases are worth what energy they use. Energy exists in a mostly free market and that's the best way to determine value. Everything else is conjecture.

Or, we don’t live in a fictional world where infinite growth exists.

Useless energy expenditure is useless and objectively bad.

>we don’t live in a fictional world where infinite growth exists.

we do. One just need to see the world beyond their own planet.

>Useless energy expenditure is useless and objectively bad.

your comment cost some energy to be expended. Basically most of computer use by humans is a useless energy expenditure, yet somehow some people single out crypto.

> we do. One just need to see the world beyond their own planet.

Heat death of the universe would like a world with you. And before you say that it is so damn far we should not care about it, meaningful space travel is similarly so. We should save our own planet because a goddamn apocalyptic Earth after ww3 is still a more livable place then any planet in the Solar system.

Also, is being globally connected to each other with comparatively less energy expenditure bad? How about hosting free educational resources, but even just fun things? It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

>meaningful space travel is similarly so

as i already said - that is mainly because we fail to see the world beyond our planet.

>It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

you find something not important to you and declare it useless. Other people do seems to value the planetary-scale decentralized consensus at like a $1T.

> as i already said - that is mainly because we fail to see the world beyond our planet.

Well, closer to the Sun it is way too hot, further away it is way too cold. There are also tiny problems like not having an atmosphere, too great or too small gravity, or small details like not having a solid surface, but sure, which planet would you like to travel to?

> It is not comparable to hashing random numbers for proof of work levels of useless.

Bitcoin exists because there is no alternative decentralised, self sovereign currency. PoW exists because there is no other method to achieve that. It is by no means useless. You are not the user.

> Bitcoin exists because there is no alternative decentralised, self sovereign currency.

I do question whether we need one. We choose our governments to create laws protecting our values. I do agree that they are pretty far from perfect, but I don’t see why should we circumvent said laws. If I got a failed product, how will I get it replaced, when the seller could have disappeared? Yeah, there are smart contracts, but it’s not like our entire financial system was made up on the spot. It has many many warts, but it does solve real world problems.

> PoW exists because there is no other method to achieve that.

And as others mentioned in the thread, there are cryptos not dependent on PoW

Bitcoin, nor how it's implemented is useless. You just don't understand it. And it doesn't matter, you don't have to. People value and understand the world differently.

Is there really an objective definition of useless? Media consumption, games and movies are pretty close to useless in my opinion. That does not however give them any less of a right to consume energy.

I sure hope the free energy market doesn’t respond to Bitcoin mining like the free graphics card market does. Thankfully, the energy market is heavily regulated in many parts of the world, so something can be done.

If energy is portable, sure. If not, then it might make sense to mine where energy is abundant and not put to better use. Eg plant a satellite with solar cells close to the sun just to do crypto currency mining? Maybe not crypto, but perhaps some other computations that don’t require too much bandwidth to transmit results.

Depending on what's flooded Hydro can actually be the dirtest power out there. There's a hydro plant in brazil that contributes 3 times the number of ghg emissions as it's equivalent coal plant.

Belo Monte?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belo_Monte_Dam

That is due to the construction? Just wondering nif there are any hidden runtime emissions you are refering to.

The vegetation now covered by water will start to rot and release lots of methane and other goodies. Unless it is cleared away first. This is only practical with trees though.

Even of you clear it away, you can still get plant matter from upstream.

It is due to the decomposing vegetation under the water. However, it depends on what is under the water. Some hydro reservoirs actually are carbon sinks while others are worse than coal plants. You also have to take time of operation into account. Hydro becomes cleaner as time passes. A 50 year old hydro plant will have had a lot of the vegetation decomposed already vs a 5 year old one.

Not really. It's from rotting trees, and when they decompose in an anaerobic environment they take 3-5 times long to decompose. Most trees will take well over a hundred years to fully decompose.

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