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> You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen.

Ideally you need something where the cost of electricity would normally dominate the capital costs of setting up the operation. Otherwise, you're better off running the process all the time, and it's not a useful grid battery.

Alternatively, something where you need to overbuild the infrastructure, perhaps to serve peak demand or for emergency availability.

Water desalination plants and hydrogen factories are expensive to build, so they don't work well here. Bitcoin mining rigs aren't free either. Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build: they meet the second criterion as, for logistic reasons, we build way more cars than are on the road at any point in time.

Water desalination and green hydrogen production using clean energy are already real applications and growing markets. The cost of the water is a function of electricity cost, investment needed to build the plants. So, being able to use cheap clean energy for that would reduce cost and make that more attractive.

With water, you tend to use the cheapest option. If you are in the middle east on the coast, far from rivers or other sources of drinking water, desalinating is pretty much the only option. Which is why that has been common for decades. With green hydrogen, what matters is the cost relative to hydrogen produced from natural gas. Both are dominated by the variable cost of the energy rather than construction cost.

Bitcoin as a green, or rather less hopelessly planet destroying thing, does not make sense because it removes energy that could be used for actually doing something more worthwhile.

The problems with water desalination and hydrogen production is that if you dont run at a somewhat constant volume you likely aren't at the financial optimum. You can do maintenance and stuff when the energy price is high but turning everything off is just likely not financially sustainable. The energy cost is just one factor. If the plant does not use any energy it still has plenty other running cost that wont stop.

We need more solutions that work like pumping water back up into a reservoir (see other reply). These solutions aren't at risk that they need to run on high energy cost anyway to stay profitable.

Desal plants need to run constantly anyway, at least in my understanding.

Desalination plants aren't really something you build for profit, they're to secure your cities clean water supply and are usually taxpayer funded infrastructure projects.

if you have some reservoir that you can top up, that's a great buffer. Pumping drinking water into the sea because your reservoir is full is not a thing as far as I know. So that implies they either don't produce enough; or they vary production as needed.

A realistic/feasible deployment would perhaps pair desalination with solar or wind (more likely on the coast). During electricity peak hours, it might be more lucrative to sell electricity to the grid and then the rest of the time top up the reservoir. I guess depending on how scarce water is, the $ per kwh earned via water might actually be larger than selling to the grid. But you get my point.

You are right that these things being funded via tax payer money, makes this kind of lateral thinking less likely. But if someone were to do this commercially, this would be a great way to make it more cost effective.

>Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build...

Its also logistically hard to actually get the energy back into the grid from cars. Driving around with it is fine but if you cant put the energy back into the grid at peak time you still have to over produce more energy in total than just to cover the peak. It uses the energy which is good but it does not reduce the difference between peak demand an low demand. If that is reduced it has an overall larger impact than just to using the excess energy.

Pumping water back up into a reservoir is the most common and probably oldest way to store excess grid capacity like an actual grid batter (one that gives energy back to the grid). Ofc its not feasible in many places due to the lack of hydro power plant but there are other ways to actually store energy and deliver it back to the grid unlike the Buttcoin battery nonsense.

Just for the sake of anecdote, my state in Australia has both a desalination plant and a hydrogen plant, one was a government project to protect the state's water supply and the other was a private initiative to supply "green" hydrogen to steel plants and other heavy industries as they move to a different steel process.

So those are good uses of off-peak power when your local economy is already interested in having those things. The state also has some other initiatives to use the excess generation, such as residential water heating and EV charging using "smart grid" sockets that take into account the local and greater network's load and generation.

I haven’t looked at the details of the calculations but one of problems with mining is that mining hardware deprecates and therefor it needs to be used now - in two years more energy efficient hardware will render it useless.

So the idea of switching it on and off according to energy prices doesn’t really hold.

The mining hardware made by Bitmain uses the latest high-end fabrication nodes from TSMC. How much TSMC's manufacturing capacity is used by cryptocurrency is unclear; the number is hidden inside the high performance computing segment in TSMC's financial statements. But it is probably a sizeable part.

Since this model is mining with "free" power, it seems like even less efficient hardware could still be used profitably which would extend the depreciation (and reduce e-waste concerns). They might even buy used miners that are considered too inefficient by other companies.

> hoarding it; which is pretty much the only thing you can do with it

You just can't be more wrong than that! With Bitcoin you may buy narcotics, illegal guns, false passports, child pornography, order DDoS attack or even a murder!

A lot of people need bitcoin.

It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation.

Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.

Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too).

So people that has the same opinion as you, I consider this opinion invalid until they come up with a solution better than bitcoin for the problems I mentined.

To be clear the problems are:

1. How to save money when government is hostile to saving money.

2. How to transfer money when it is ludicrously expensive and/or government or companies are hostile to money transferrence.

EDIT: people downvote me, but none of the answers below so far address the 2 problems I mentioned.

The closest is someone talking about solving problems with trust, but that is the whole issue, if you can't trust the central authorities and companies, who you trust?

A great comparison I've heard is 'how much energy is required to mine one bitcoin's worth of gold'? I haven't seen a figure, and as gold's negative externalities are more about groundwater pollution than CO2e it wouldn't tell the whole story, but it would still be an interesting comparison.

Gold is about 0.8 tons / troy oz. Given the current exchange rate of ~30 troy oz / BTC, that's 24 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-gold.

At current mining rewards, 329,000 BTC are mined each year, producing 37 megatons of CO2, or about 110 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-bitcoin.

>It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation. >Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.

You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.

I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

your comment only makes sense if it's interpreted as describing a world where bitcoin conquers the world and there is no other kind of money

> Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash

We've been solving the problems of trust literally for millennia. For some reason bitcoin apologists pretend history never happened, and painstakingly attempt to re-create the trust systems humans have had in place, once again literally, for millennia.

In practice the problem of trust is not a big deal, otherwise nobody would be able to trade anything.

I think you're mostly right. As with many problems in society at the moment, the complexities have arisen because we're so eager to connect everything to the internet and make it "exist" there. Also that we're so eager to make it work globally.

I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out.

I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally.

The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust.

Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.

My conjecture is that given two economic zones of roughly equal size, the economy which requires less energy to achieve a unit of productivity will be more competitive.

Right now the game is being framed as honest crypto vs corrupt government legacy weakness, but I think an economy that must devote huge resources to maintaining the security and operational infrastructure of their currency will be at a comparative disadvantage.

The defi stuff appeals to me as enabling composable bottom up tools for interaction but trustlessness I think is a very niche attribute which adds a lot of expense and in many cases doesn't mitigate any risks.

We have of course not "solved" trust but our world functions only to the extent that we have and share trust. It is far more valuable than any other asset maybe

> You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins?

while I don't really agree with the bitcoin maxi mindset of the comment you are replying to, do you know that you can buy as little as 1 satoshi? (0.00000001 BTC). Yes, eventually all BTC will be mined (in about 2140) but considering 1 sat is currently worth 0.0006 USD, there is still quite a bit of room for very small amounts of bitcoin being widely accessible (fees being a different issue that will improve with time).

The price (and therefore value?) of satoshis rise/fall at the exact same rate as a price of a bitcoin, so I don't see how this invalidates their argument.

if you can acquire 0.0006USD worth of bitcoin then the price of bitcoin alone is not a limiting factor. Maybe if OP is talking about hundreds of years in the future and BTC is worth $1 Million+?

If the USD were completely replaced with bitcoin (ignoring long transaction times and other garbage) you'd expect approximately 1BTC for every $1.3M currently in circulation. In just a few decades even a Satoshi would be worth the equivalent of $1+.

Due to fractional nature of btc to ~8 decimal places, the math is that if everyone on the globe has it, they all have 0.03 btc and coffees will cost 0.000001 btc (so to speak). It’s unlikely that the whole globe all holds it. So this whole paragraph isn’t really an issue based on your unfair claim

You do realize the total number of land on earth is limited, and it will get harder to buy land? Every generation will have to fight over land, and this is extremely unfair.

So is your beef against capitalism? Or the medium of exchange?

Fiat currencies will still exist. Remember, Bitcoin is a competing asset to fiat, not a wholesale replacement. I suspect that even if central banks adopt Bitcoin as a currency reserve, their fiat will be pegged to it by some ratio only.

At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.

But these same arguments could be used against gold. And yet gold serves a valuable purpose in the economy as it allows people to take more investment risks.

If gold went away as a trading instrument no one would notice. It exists, but it is not integral. Much more value is stored in the stock and bond markets and RE

Denying is easy but what other fair "waste" do you propose to keep a trustless decentralized system running?

Waste is how it's fair and how it negates cheating by letting people stick to its investments.

Some might argue that it’s not worth the cost.

Some people never lived through hyperinflation or had their entire bank accounts frozen by a desperate government. Bitcoin itself is obsolete but everyone needs cryptocurrencies in general. Protection against government stupidity is absolutely vital and it literally doesn't matter how much energy it consumes as long as it accomplishes that goal.

I agree we already have a system of money and trust. Bitcoin energy demands will scale much more than any other uses of the energy grid going forward, so our entire economy becomes slaved to preserving bitcoin. A dystopia

We do NOT have money and trust today. Every single government ever has debased their currency. Central banks cannot be trusted not to destroy your hard earned savings. A dystopia is being enslaved to the existing economic debt machine, rather than being free to trade the hardest money ever invented by humans. When folks understand this, they run to the fiat exits.

To trust whom instead?

How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?

Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.

Math and Energy. That's the beautiful thing. If you trust the ECDSA is secure, and you trust that SHA256 is secure - You don't need to trust the individual network participants.

If ECDSA or SHA256 were shown to be weaker than believed, they can be substituted in the bitcoin codebase (given approval of all participants, which are incentivized to ensure the computational security of the protocol).

The energy is the barrier to prevent malicious parties from rewinding history. Fundamental, understood quantities in the universe is far better than the political whims of the party in charge.

What does hyperbitcoinization look like? This infographic video provides some introduction to what this could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac (Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million)

You will still have political parties. They will be the ones with the militaries.

The endgame of HODL is a digital Fort Knox. Under the gold standard people didn’t actually exchange pieces of eight. They used paper money.

Yes, and what will they pay the soldiers? Worthless Fiat? Part of the debasement of the roman currency was to pay their armies. When you take that ability away from a state, how do you maintain them without unlimited funding? I don't know if bitcoin will end all wars, but it is far closer to a peaceful coexistence than debt-based economies.

You might manage to cause an upheaval in which who runs the state changes hands, but nothing else will change for the better.

You’ll just get a new state which holds Bitcoin and issues debt based on Bitcoin in the form of promissory notes.

It’s pretty simple - just require taxes be paid in Bitcoin and use violence against those who don’t pay. Just like with other revolutionary wars, you pay generals with land and soldiers with the new currency (I.e. Bitcoin). Some of those generals will end up as a dictator or president depending on whether you are able to establish a democracy.

The state will be the ultimate HODLer just as it was with gold.

Yes I see bitcoin causing a lot of trouble, if it is successful. And by trouble I mean violence and political upheaval

Your "dystopian" world was the status quo for thousands of years as people used gold. You don't have to imagine how the economy would look, you could just pick up a history book.

Gold was not a universal currency, and it wasn't a currency in common use.

You could pick up a history book, and you would learn that gold was almost never used as currency because it was simply too rare, and too valuable for the amounts traded in normal commerce.

Rather, silver was the currency of choice in Europe and most of Asia, with lower-value denominations eventually showing up as coins made of less valuable metals.

Nothing dystopian about it. Precious metals were standard currency for most of human history. It's the modern fiat currency system that's abnormal and highly inflated in value.

If the dollar inflates to hell, I wouldn't lose much. I'd still have my skills, to work for a living. I'd still have my house, my car, my workshop, my tools, my computers, etc. Unless it's a total collapse I'll still have my stocks, too.

Preserving my wealth in the event of the dollar rapidly losing value is not a problem for me. I'm 90% OK on that front without even trying particularly hard to do anything about it.

What would be a problem for me, is that a failing dollar might be a symptom of the US government failing, in which case society would be falling apart around me. If basic services like roads, infrastructure, fire and police, electricity and clean running water aren't working properly nationwide, it's going to interfere with my life big time. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly: e.g. my grocery store has trouble restocking because the supply chain is not running smoothly. Bitcoin doesn't help me with that type of problem at all.

I'd be better off trying to keep my government functional by promoting and voting for good policies, staying involved at the local level, and generally acting as a participant in government rather than a subject of it. Playing John Galt and pretending that I'm just going to have my own safe little bitcoin world if our government fails, so I don't care and in fact assume that it WILL fail, would be both sickeningly cynical (regarding society's outcome) and naively optimistic (regarding my own outcome).

We don't have trust? You should look deeper at every transaction and interaction you undertake, every day