Same applies to indoor cannabis growing power consumption.
So utterly and hopelessly dishonest
A lot of people have scratched their heads about Elon's backing of cryptocurrency while at the same time apparently being concerned about climate change.
What if it actually does make sense? What if increasing energy demand actually will help transition toward lower carbon emissions?
When demand is stable or falling, industries become very conservative. Why invest in anything new if demand is static? Just run that old clunky coal burner plant as long as possible.
But if demand is rising you have to expand. That means deploying new stuff. What new stuff do you build now? Well there's gas, which is mostly lower carbon than coal, but most new capacity being built is solar and wind. So you build that, then you build storage to back it.
Once that's done, then why invest more money in stringing along those ancient coal burners?
If you create net new demand then fill it with renewables you haven't reduced emissions at all because the coal plants are still running.
In theory, higher demand can make new tech cheaper due to economy of scale but the effect isn't linear; it's probably like an S-curve. Where are renewables on that scale? Are they already large enough that diminishing returns are kicking in? How much crypto energy demand would move renewable costs? Would it need to be 10% of existing usage? Higher? Lower?
I mean, what matters is whether replacing the entire financial system with Bitcoin would produce more emissions through mining than the system currently does.
Bitcoin is the settlement layer, tools built on top of it (like 2nd/3rd layer tech that can achieve 100K-1M+ transactions per second) require very little additional energy.
There is a non-zero possibility that the public's perception of coal power plants being associated with Bitcoin mining increases to a point where the support to ban coal power plants reaches an actionable threshold. Consider who benefits from delivering a setback to Bitcoin and see if they enter the arena of public opinion on this issue.
He is definitely egotistical but he obviously has more complex motives.
And frankly, he would not be the richest person on Earth if finance was where the sweet old money is.