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Comment by jack_pp | Hacker News Reader

It's not that easy. Renewable power plants could be setup in areas where it makes no sense due to the logistics of transporting that energy to normal society and that plant could be 100% used to mine crypto which in a way makes crypto a "wireless energy transport technology".

Complaining that crypto uses a lot of power is like complaining India is trying to burn fossil fuels which will harm the planet. India wants to boost its economy the same way the west has done. Crypto activists want a democratised / uncontrollable financial system and so far mining and burning energy is the only way we know how to achieve it.

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I strongly disagree with the points that you make. There are many ways to implement fair financial systems. Crypto activists chose to ignore them, refused to understand the sources of failures and just attact principles.

Instead, crypto advocates brandish an apparent technological solution that is at amost a very leaky abstraction. I can’t even stop screaming at how offensive is “wireless energy transport technology”. In doing so, you ignore that the scales in play are absurd: securing dozens of transactions should not have a larger environmental footprint than taking a billion people out of poverty. That you think this is even an argument is horrifying.

What's offensive about it? Today energy generation of any kind has to have a way to transport that energy to a consumer. Bitcoin is in a privileged position of being able to use energy to create value locally to the energy producer. You might argue a datacenter could do the same thing but a datacenter requires a lot of staff and infrastructure while a mining operation doesn't. There's also the problem of a high speed high bandwidth internet connection.

So what is your solution to this? There are ways to generate energy purely from ocean waves, this is being used near shore for the reasons stated above (you must transport the produced energy to shore) but we could install these way further and just rely on a sattelite connection for internet.

How else would you utilize these yet untapped potential energy producing areas? Handwaving and using strong negative words aren't an argument.

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> There are many ways to implement fair financial systems

Depends on what you mean by fair but please do list those other more efficient ways

How does one turn crypto back into energy?

You sell it for dollars and buy energy with it

Yeah, that's not creating energy.

Is buying solar panels and using them creating energy? If so you could do the same thing with your mining proceeds.

But that's not what anyone's doing, or what anyone's going to do, with cryptocurrency.

Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...

That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.

I never stated that miners are doing this, only that crypto mining could enable this new opportunity that never existed before it.

I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.

"Cryptocurrency miners could, in theory, buy massive amounts of solar panels with the money they make by mining" is not in any meaningful way a refutation of the criticism that cryptocurrency actually, right now, in the real world, uses an absurd amount of energy and contributes significantly to the greenhouse gases warming our planet.

By that logic, anything that makes money makes energy. Because money is fungible. I could use money from any source to buy solar panels and use them to create energy.

I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.

How do you get the energy out of crypto?

Your satire is worthy of Gulliver's Travels !

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