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Comment by OrlandoHakim | Hacker News Reader

Patiently waiting for your proposal for a better solution. Actually the whole industry is and has been waiting for a less wasteful solution since well before Bitcoin existed.

In the future maybe we can just switch to nuclear fusion and everything will be better. In the real-world of the present, this is a good and practical solution for reducing greenhouse gas and finding a higher value purpose for otherwise waste energy.

What’s not to like at least until you or someone else invents something better?

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Oil extractors should be charged for the pollution they make. This will encourage them to build the infrastructure to collect the natural gas. https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/cleaner-fuels/oil-industry...

Using it to make Bitcoin is only currently economically viable due to a combination of underregulation of oil extractors (reducing the cost of the pollution) and underregulation of cryptocurrencies (increasing the profit from mining), with both types of regulation being held back by Texas legislators.

ND has passed legislation to incentivize flare mitigation (e.g. https://www.ndlegis.gov/assembly/67-2021/documents/21-0935-0...) that aims for the carrot rather than the stick, though I anticipate that at some point in the near future we will see more jurisdictions go for the stick.

>> And the energy from these flares can't be used for actually useful applications, because?

> Patiently waiting for your proposal for a better solution. Actually the whole industry is and has been waiting for a less wasteful solution since well before Bitcoin existed.

Leave the gas and the oil in the ground until it's economically feasible to utilize both for useful applications.

Some things that aren't useful applications:

1. Burning it just to get rid of it.

2. Cryptocurrency mining (i.e. wasting huge amounts of irreplaceable resources for ideological reasons to maintain a simple transaction register that can be done far more cheaply and efficiently in other ways).

Fair point. Maybe we start by asking Germany and Western Europe to stop funding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?

I realize that these decisions have consequences and it might be preferable to mine bitcoin with flared gas that we can then sell to Germany so they are not reliant on Russian gas.

I am not well-enough informed on the subject to claim to understand all the consequences of such a move.

How are you so confident that your suggestion is best for all stakeholders?

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