Not very easily: the capital expenditure required to build, say, an aluminum smelter (which is how Iceland converts excess geothermal into cash) is orders of magnitude more than some crypto rigs.
A BTC mine fits into a few shipping containers, needs no in-out logistics, and can easily be transported around as needed
uhm what? the presence of miners mean energy prices rise as well as more environmental destruction to produce energy, especially if it's a place without green(er) energy production.
Obviously it's all stupidly chaotic, there might be a huge waterfall somewhere, and if we ignore the natural beauty aspects, before some cryptobros show up with money (however tangible) to build a hydropower plant and some wires to their container site, that waterfall's energy is not being utilized...
yep, that's my argument above. and i personally wouldn't say hashes "are mostly thrown away", i would argue they're all thrown away, especially when considering this 'tech' will become defunct in a few years.
“In what may be the best expression yet of capitalist realism, a new tool for free market speculation has become for many a populist symbol of resistance to the ravages of finance capitalism.”
https://mronline.org/2021/12/28/cryptocurrencies-a-view-from...
...yet creates absolutely zero actual value.
it is one of the greatest and most destructive speculative pyramid schemes yet.
It's only the first uncensorable / decentralized kind of money, nah must be nothing.
Censorship doesn't necessarily mean the thing being censored is deterministically "bad" or "evil".
Bitcoin is above morality, morality is a human construct, Bitcoin is math and computer science, by definition it cannot have morality.
Now, you might or might not agree that Bitcoin should be allowed to exist given it facilitates activities such as the one you linked.
But since it's uncensorable in the first place... you cannot outlaw it.
Pandora's box is open, and it cannot be closed once it is open (unless you break Bitcoin's cryptography).
Uncensorability /is/ valuable, to the people that don't want to be censored, and want to exchange money without asking anyone permission, whether that's a drug dealer, or an unbanked worker in Venezuela.
They'll catch up eventually. See how some politicians are already starting to call on mining bans.
They can easily fully ban it and enforce it. Let's say, put mining on the same level as growing weed or making heroin.
Your super first kind of decentralized money is now fucked.
Geothermal energy has very few emissions.
If Iceland shuts down aluminium smelters in favor of bitcoin miners it is a net benefit.
https://nea.is/hydro-power/power-intensive-industries/nr/70
It's also quite borderline as to whether or not it breaks even these days. Supply chain woes increasing prices have helped last year for example but before that they were losing money.
https://www.ruv.is/frett/2021/09/14/icelandic-smelters-helpe...
Also, if the claim is correct (about crypto making energy price arbitrage much easier), then a motivated reasoner could argue that it has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies by forcing energy to obey the “law of one price”.
Which, to clarify, doesn’t necessarily make it positive-sum overall, but still needs to be weighed against its energy usage cost to accurately gauge the full effect.
Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1].
But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy).
[1] hopefully with sustainable management
[2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.
1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day
2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland).
3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.
Even better, the price of crypto is so high that it can be profitably mined even in countries with very high consumer power prices. I want to see you travel to Kazakhstan and tell them that paying 35 cents per kWh now that all the production goes towards crypto has had the positive effect of eliminating inefficiencies - namely the consumption of people living there. You might not make it back alive.
(Also, an expectation of prices being higher than they "should" would mean that one has to consider an incoming crash and the whole operation should probably start getting wound down, so as not to be left holding the bag with now (almost) worthless cryptocurrencies and mining rigs. In that sense, yeah, you're probably better off staying closer to home, which I'll assume to be one of those "high consumer power price" countries.)
I already said in the comment that it is "probably not possible everywhere". But to clarify that hypothetical, the arbitrage would be reselling the energy to whatever energy use-cases exist in Kazakhstan that aren't subsidized (which probably exist since it's unaffordable to subsidize energy everywhere in a country without bound).
Also, really? Is that your standard for the merit of an argument? Whether Kazakhstanis will kill you over it? I explained in detail how the efficiency manifests in another comment [1], and (also) already said it doesn't necessarily cancel the negative effects of crypto.
And not particularly efficient : if you cannot beat the highest market prices...
And comes with the risk of catastrophic release of that stored energy. Which means that the authorities will be much more interested in getting involved !
And the biggest issue is that if you try to become an energy seller, it becomes much harder to go under the radar as part of the black or grey market ?