I’ll take “dumb enough headlines where I won’t read the article” for $100 Alex.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps you don't owe this article or its headline better, but you owe this community better if you're participating here.
Bitcoin's borderline-fraudulent use of energy will be able to /fix/ the energy that was spent in mining new coins, and the dirty deed can be forgotten.
Except you can't so easily forget damage to the environment!!
Cargo ships cause more pollution than all the cars on earth, yet we are told to drive less but the cargo ships keep coming, keep getting bigger and keep polluting. Stopping/Reducing them would mean we can't consume cheap goods so a blind eye is turned, to an easier target, Bitcoin.
If everyone who I heard complain about the inefficency of bitcoin were also protesting Mcdonalds, Shell, Texaco, Amazon etc it might actually have some merit but until then I feel free to ignore the green virtue signalling.
But when investing how much an investment makes absolutely isn't very interesting. All that matters is opportunity cost, or how one investment compares to all of the others. You want to make the best investment for the right amount of risk - and this is going to always be a gamble because it is highly uncertain.
I have enough time and energy to criticize both mega cargo ships and Bitcoin for their unnecessary pollution.
Also, if we banned Bitcoin tomorrow, the only people who would really notice are those who have bet their shirts on a risky investment. If we banned large cargo ships tomorrow, everyone would feel it as delivery times (and possibly prices) for things increased. Personally, I'd be willing to pay those higher prices in exchange for less pollution.
Probably because, as you point out, there’s a lot of money and companies in those other industries. And those industries would rather not make headlines for negative environmental, or other, reasons. (Legal apparatus, lobbyists, etc etc)
> In this memo, we aim to explain how the Bitcoin network functions as a unique energy buyer that could enable society to deploy substantially more solar and wind generation capacity. This deployment, along with energy storage, aims to facilitate the transition to a cleaner and more resilient electricity grid. We believe that the energy asset owners of today can become the essential bitcoin miners of tomorrow.
"You know the problem with electricity? People don't buy enough of it! If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels. And more solar panels are good, right?"
Personally, I want humanity to climb the kardashev scale. Bitcoin reduces petrodollar seigniorage profits and turns them into subsidies on power infrastructure.
So please don't get all disgusted when you didn't actually read through what's going on. Your biases are blinding you.
Higher demand will decrease prices for renewable sources, because of bitcoin mining, and such feedback eventually will lead to decrease prices in supply of renewable sources material.
I see a few false assumption, to say the least:
1. Material for renewable sources are not scares and there's production is cheap.
2. It is cheaper to mine from renewables sources then from non-renewable sources. (infrastructure cost)
3. There is no trend in replacing existing energy sources with renewables sources, without bitcoin.
What I'm saying is that bitcoin can use energy that would otherwise be wasted.
On your point 2, what are you saying? That it is cheaper to mind from renewable source than non renewable? I agree so not sure why you're saying otherwise. Renewable energy often produces more unusable energy than coal. You can control how much coal you put in the fire, you can't control how much sun or wind hits your panels or wind turbines. Energy that would otherwise be wasted is cheap energy. That's my point.
I am not sure I agree with this, not much energy is wasted, grid off demand prices from renewable sources might be good options for miners, but net is still negative, simple I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day, for only few unknown amount of days a week/month.
There are two situations:
1. Current solar and wind generation that wastes energy (known as "curtailment"). In Texas, about 17% of wind energy is curtailed. In California, about 25% of solar energy is curtailed. https://slate.com/business/2016/07/how-energy-waste-in-solar... https://www.caiso.com/documents/curtailmentfastfacts.pdf
2. Potential renewable energy production that doesn't happen because of cost effectiveness in areas where curtailment would be high. In places that are poorly connected to agacent energy grids, curtailment might be quite a bit higher than existing production, especially if the goal is to power a larger fraction of an area's electricity with solar and wind. It wouldn't be unreasonable to imagine renewable power production with 50% curtailment.
Another example of wasted energy is natural gas flare offs. People are starting to utilize these for bitcoin mining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkeZVcGsva8
> I can't see use case where miner will be I am only making money for 2 hours a day
Well, it wouldn't be for just 2 hours a day. 25% curtailment simply mean that only 1/4th of the day has usable excess energy. It could mean 26% excess energy for 23 hours a day, or it could mean 85% excess energy for 1 hour a day. If you have a location with 25% excess energy, you could be running on excess energy for the majority of the day. Also, power storage could help a lot. There are types of power storage that do very well for short period of time, but poorly for long periods of time. So by storing some of that energy for an hour or two, you can use that energy to mine when there is 0% excess but no extra energy is needed by the grid. Electric generation isn't as simple as people think.
Does this proposal suggest that increasing BitCoin production could economically lead to the funding of anywhere near that many wind turbines? (Or, rather, many more, since much of that energy would be cannibalized by the mining.)
1. Average offshore wind turbine output ~6 million kWh/yr
Why can't we stop pretending it is not just an unregulated investment? It's good at that. Market it as such and stop portraying it as anything else.