If the crypto miners hadn't existed then Texas may not have had the flexibility required to avoid blackouts. If Texas didn't have this mechanism in place then mining would be less efficient. Isn't this a great solution to excess renewable energy? What is there to curse?
“But what happens if they don’t burn the gasoline in the first place, don’t the same SmokeCoins just get generated somewhere else then? So what net value is created by burning the gasoline?”
The Crypto-Kid’s peanut brain implodes while considering this thought.
There are plenty of better ways to increase demand that are more useful than burning it for fungible security. For example you can build datacenters that can shift load by time and location based on the state of the power grid. Google and Facebook already do this. You can build battery plants which address the problem directly. Electric car charging should be incredibly complementary to demand response.
Posing Bitcoin as a solution to generation problems assumes that the biggest problem is finding ways to use energy, which is absolutely not the case. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Sure, in totalitarian economy there could be a lot of smarter ways to utilize resources and opportunities, but we don't have such economy for very good reasons, so in our economy, bitcoins are the simplest possible mechanism (technologically, politically and economically) that facilitates this funneling and we are lucky it already exists. The only problem is the cost of new mining hardware, but with Moore's law dying out and fabs overbuilt because of the pandemic shortages I think new, more efficient generations of mining hardware should come out at longer intervals and mining with few years old hardware should be feasible if you are powering it with renewables at peak production times.