Does 'mine crypto' qualify as a useful purpose? To some, maybe, but to me energy used for crypto is still wasted energy.
I'd really like to see innovators step up and disrupt the gas industry by coming up with new ways of using/capturing/exploiting the energy that otherwise would be wasted in flares. Mining crypto falls far short of that, imho.
I won't try and argue against "if we never had fossil fuels, the environment would be better" (I agree, but we also probably wouldn't be communicating right now, were that not the case), but by mitigating flares, you can significantly reduce methane emissions (98+%), CO2 (~70%)/CO (95%), VOCs, etc. It's not "good" for the environment, but it's a hell of a lot better than what's currently being done.
Lots of folks ITT have discussed a carbon tax on emissions; think of flare mitigation via crypto as an economic incentive for companies to voluntarily reduce their emissions much faster than a state/federal government can move to enact legislation. It achieves the same end result, just one is aligned with the current dominant economic system in the country, and one would likely end up in political gridlock.
It's using free or nearly-free power to displace an equal amount of compute that would otherwise occur elsewhere, likely using grid power. That unused power can now go to a better use. So yes, in a roundabout way it is useful.
It could only consume 'all excess energy' if the block reward is absurdly high, which it isn't.
Like, where were you (all) before crypto mining filled in the void? Decades of looking for a use case that reduces emissions, this does that while producing a valuable digital byproduct sellable on the open market. It doesnt really matter what that byproduct could theoretically be used for. A bitcoin has more use than a tradeable carbon credit, which also just has a theoretical application of reducing emissions in the future.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-opens-p...
If you're interested in using our cloud or joining the team to help scale our data center deployments or software, feel free to reach out (mike at crusoecloud dot com).