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Comment by hddherman | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be better to instead store that surplus energy using methods like this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

The value of Bitcoin is purely speculative and varies wildly, at least with stored energy you always have a market that's willing to buy it from you.

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Not the OP, but my assumption is that most miners sell the Bitcoin they mine into fiat currency as quickly as they can.

Better for whom? The upfront investment is much higher. If the market buys energy from you, they give you money. You can turn bitcoin into money instantly without having to store energy. You don't care about the value of bitcoin fluctuating, you care about the instant profitability of mining vs storing the energy.

Sure, we get the arguments why people prefer Bitcoin mining to other possible uses for energy. We just don't see it as remotely plausible that this leads to a net increase in renewable energy available for things which are not Bitcoin mining (especially since Bitcoin demand for energy which costs less than expected block rewards is inexhaustible by design and gravitates towards the cheapest power source).

Difficult enough to find real world examples of places whose existing power demand became more economic to convert to renewable sources as a direct result of cryptomining, never mind to assume the scale of these ventures plausibly exceeds the amount of fossil fuels burned to mine Bitcoin or provide power for other activities which needed to find additional power as a result of Bitcoin mining.

From my limited experience as an observer of the cryptocurrency world, my impression is that mining hardware usually has a certain time period after which it starts paying itself off (6-18 months range). You can probably turn it into money relatively quickly assuming that there's enough real money coming into the system, but the cost of the hardware and the fact that all this custom silicon and electrical components present in the ASIC-based mining hardware results in additional cost, especially the environmental kind of cost that has to be taken into account. Those ASIC-s aren't much good for anything else once they've been made obsolete by generational improvements.

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