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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

The solution to "Africa has unreliable energy" isn't to waste what little they have, it's to help them invest in more things like solar panels. Bitcoin doesn't help anything but itself.

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The problem is that it's faster to get some solar panels put up than it is to connect them to a grid. Once a community has an energy surplus, then until there's someplace else to which they could send that energy, cryptocurrency mining offers at least some income in the meantime.

Or, as I said, you could use it to do actual useful compute that people pay you for.

Does it pay as well? When your community is impoverished, that's kind of the most important factor; any compute (for which people pay you) is useful compute in this context, that usefulness scaling with how much people pay you.

Due to the economics of Bitcoin mining where it is always the same computation that can be offloaded to specialized hardware, alternatives pay better. Bitcoin mining is only profitable if electricity is nearly free or if you have specialized hardware and worth doing at scale only if you can combine both. Doing useful computations is profitable even with plain old computers paying California electricity prices.

If that were indeed true, then Bitcoin mining wouldn't be anywhere near as popular as it is now. Also note that my comments pertain to cryptocurrency in general (or at least the proof-of-work variety).

As for the useful computations you propose that ostensibly pay as well as cryptocurrency mining... which ones? If you're referring to something like cloud computing, keep in mind that the bandwidth requirements for cryptocurrency mining are basically negligible - which is an important factor to consider even in rural America, let alone rural Africa.

Invest in solar panels with money from where?

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