Jack Dorsey claims Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy

I mean this is like saying coll-rolling incentivizes renewable energy or pouring lead into the river incentivizes the local water agency to up their game. Technically correct, but in this case the worst kind of correct

An important thing to realize about proof-of-work is that at the moment, it's constrained by availability of hardware: both SHA256² ASICS (Bitcoin) and GPUs (other coins) are in short supply right now. Additionally, the quality of that hardware is still not that good, with frequent failures when used for PoW mining (though that has improved a lot). Historically, that's given miners in low labour cost jurisdictions a surprisingly big advantage. I've personally visited mining in China a few years back: it was amazing the degree to which the place was a death trap. Huge piles of flammable packaging just left in big piles, high voltage bus bars just sitting out in the open with just signs to "protect" workers from being electrocuted, etc.

But as things calm down, PoW mining becomes dominated by the availability of cheap power and cheap cooling. Ideally negative - IE doing something useful with the waste heat (harder than it sounds as you're competing against heat pumps). And when rapid growth isn't as important, you can afford to spend the relatively small amount of time and effort making the equipment last much longer. Like all electronics, there's no fundamental reason why it can't last ~forever, and the extra up-front cost isn't that much if you're using the equipment for a few years.

Finally, because renewables have an enormous range of production capacity between different weather conditions, we can expect a renewable only grid - especially one dominated by solar and wind - to have far more capacity than needed for much of the year unless storage becomes much cheaper than it is. That's why PoW mining using up that excess is plausible. But it remains to be seen if it can compete with stuff like long-term storage in the form of hydroelectric, hydrogen, etc.

Are we meant to take this seriously or we meant to treat this in the same way Tobacco companies told us that cigarettes were good for you?

I mean, some of this is kind of stupid

>Bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers in that they offer highly flexible and easily interruptible load

Is it? Is that at all true. My guess is that the economics of crypto are such that to get an ROI on your huge capital expense (mining boxes that have a limited life and are depreciating quickly), you need to be running your mining rig 100% utilization. My guess is far from being a buyer of last resort the exact opposite happens - you build your mining farm next to a wind farm and instead of acting as a buyer of last resort your miner soaks up almost the entire supply of cheap energy pushing all the actual useful activity back onto non-renewables. What happens when China changes their regulations, a load of miners fall off the network, the reward shoots right up and miners cause brown outs around the world because they're suddenly no longer buyers or last resort but instead are incredibly incentivized to mine as much as possible.

And I say guess in all this because the white paper offers literally no justification for why BTC miners would be a buyer of last resort instead of what they are demonstrably doing right now - which is crowding out useful energy uses in markets where energy costs are artificially low.

+ “Bitcoin is good for environment”

+ YouTube CEO awards herself a Freedom award

It all makes sense now - it is an opposite year from Sponge Bob

Can he show proof of work or do we just take his word for it?

We will never have an energy surplus, because cheap enough energy will be used for cryptocurrency mining. It's like when we thought that the industrial revolution/productivity boom would lead to a four hour work week.

For any cryptocurrency experts out there, is there any way the Bitcoin protocol could be altered (or temporarily halted while being updated) without compromising the blockchain so that instead of guessing for some hash/key combination, it could be part of some distributed computing project? Like assisting in the Folding@Home or some other project that benefits humanity in some way? I know hindsight is 20/20, but it represents an immense wasted opportunity and supposedly consumes more electricity than all of Argentina.

If you own a wind farm, bitcoin is great because you can use excess energy to mine bitcoins when demand is low.

That doesn't help the environment directly of course, it only helps you.

But I suppose you could argue that it drives down the cost of operating a wind farm, which in principle makes you able to sell renewable energy cheaper.

What if it incentivizes proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies in the hopes of overtaking Bitcoin?

it incentivizes the cheapest energy source... like every other thing that uses energy...

Eagerly awaiting info on how it’s good for motherhood on May, 9

Why do people still listen to this clown?!

It's a bold strategy, Cotton.

Elon Musk agrees.

I agree with Dorsey on this. It reminds me of what Andreessen said, “The best thing for the environment is economic growth.”