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If you're using solar, you're still wasting energy that could go into replacing coal or gas elsewhere. Fully green bitcoin mining is still hampering our efforts to tackle climate change.

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That's only true if the miners didn't buy the solar panels themselves.

Those panels could still be deployed elsewhere and produce power for the grid.

Manufacturing them is not environmentally neutral either.

I can also argue increased demand for solar panels increases manufacturing and lowers prices over time making solar more competitive. It's not clear that it's a net negative.

This has been the effect we saw when Germany started investing so heavily into solar.

Economics are fully at work in every market, including renewables. If it's more profitable to... I'm not even sure what your alternative would be but I'll say feeding the energy back into the grid, then miners would do it. It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy, especially off-grid renewables, just because you perceive their use to be "wasteful"

> It's definitely not up to you to decide what people can and can't do with their energy

It absolutely will need to be if we are going to avoid frying the fucking planet. The free market is the enemy of humanity.

We're talking about renewables? How is that frying the planet?

We are talking about energy. Most of it is not produced by renewables. Any renewable energy that is being wasted on cryptocurrency bullshit is not going into displacing coal and gas, which are currently frying the planet.

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