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Comment by bhawks | Hacker News Reader

Having a customer that is always willing to buy energy but can zero out their consumption within seconds of a single phone call is a great asset to grid operators. Outside of Bitcoin the only customers in this class are industrial operations and they usually cannot fully turn off as well as require hours of lead time to halt operations (if they're at a stage of process where that is possible).

Please balance the reflexive crypto hate with an appreciation of the logistical challenges of grid management especially when electrical supply and consumer demand don't naturally match out.

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Also note they do not actually 'cash out' pay the companies in $. They get credits they can use for electricity consumption at a more grid convenient time.

Yes, credits but money nonetheless that one would have had to pay if they were not able to manipulate their consumption at a point of great demand.

I share these words from direct experience of being a credit receiver from my utility company for several years which has been a great WFH benefit through awareness of the program. While I am now humbled and fortunate to have a renewables battery backed system in addition to multiple EVs prior to obtaining this renewable system I certainly played this money 'saving' game as well at every turn it was offered. The day before the voluntary shutdown my utility company would use this pre day as the credit baseline for the following shutdown day. I would lower the HVAC much greater than normal and charge all EVs beyond our typical SOC at a kW rate of 11 cents per. On the day of the shutdown I would use nearly no electricity intentionally and be credited at 1.25 USD per kW not used. Participating in this shutdown a few times a month would cover a whole month's bill++.

It is absolutely certain that someone will see this as "cheating" or "not fair" however everyone is equally capable of comprehending the offering as it stands and applying it to their own situation. It just takes time, which most don't want to give proactively, but those same "most" will certainly spend much more time reactively complaining. Mind your time as we all get the exact same interval of its passing however we certainly do not get the same aggregate amount.

Stay Healthy!

The article title is worded to attract click-bait. It's not wrong but it conveys the wrong assumptions. The energy company in Texas is an enterprise and they seek profit like everyone here (regardless of the perfect positions everyone here is claiming but probably never being close to attaining in real life).

This relationship probably works for them because at times when there are no customers, crypto could take the load. And the energy company cares more about continuing to sell electricity to make money rather than the opinion of people who are not customers and are not involved in these transactions.

The most questionable part about cryptocurrencies at this point is that the defence arguments keep shifting. First it was to get rid of banks, then it was to workaround autocratic regimes, and now it is about having an elastic electricity demand?

Cryptocurrencies are still a solution in search of a problem. The search has cost billions of dollars and multiple years so far. Maybe it’s time to call it a day?

You're certainly entitled to choose non-crypto solutions to whatever problems you face but saying that crypto isn't solving those problems for other people is just ignoring the facts.

Crypto continues to be a store of wealth and tool of commerce in countries like Turkey and Argentina. High throughput payment networks (lightening, ethereums L2 ecosystem) are delivering low latency and low fee transactions with strong security guarantees. On chain definitely rivals centralized exchanges trading volumes while providing lending / borrow facilities. And in this case of electrical demand there is a happy coincidence between Bitcoin miners and grid operators.

All this without massive public subsides, completely voluntary participation, and no government bailouts.

So it'll probably be a while before everyone decides to call it a day.

Latency and fees are higher than existing mechanisms in most of the world, and at much higher environmental cost.

Also, crypto is an objectively riskier "store of wealth" than traditional measures, and is mostly used as a speculative investment or an arbitrage opportunity.

> Latency and fees are higher than existing mechanisms in most of the world, and at much higher environmental cost.

This statement is simply incorrect. The later 2 scaling ecosystems built on top of Bitcoin and Ethereum offer 1-2 second transaction times for 3-4 cents in fees. The electrical costs are equivalent to sending an email.

https://lightning.network/

https://www.optimism.io/

https://arbitrum.io/

https://ethereum.org/en/layer-2/

> Also, crypto is an objectively riskier "store of wealth" than traditional measures, and is mostly used as a speculative investment or an arbitrage opportunity.

In a country like Argentina where inflation is over 100% the risk of holding crypto seems to be a much better deal than a savings account.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-argentina-presidenti...

> now it is about having an elastic electricity demand?

Now? I've been saying this for years now. It's a load on demand and a way to monetize any amount of excess energy in distributed manner. One of the potential future of bitcoin is to provide monetization that can let investors overbuild renewables so that they can fully cover regular demand in times where production is just a few percent of full capacity.

> Cryptocurrencies are still a solution in search of a problem.

Cryptos are just a thing that exists. Applications turn up as economy develops in new directions and landscape changes.

The problem is that crypto mining supports a floor on energy prices. If energy prices were allowed to go sufficiently negative, that would support a market for renewables storage and time-of-day arbitrage that would smooth the peaks.

These types of agreements existed long before crypto, there are other demand sources that will put in a floor but are not as easy to turn off during peaks.

The fact that there have not been scalable, reliable storage schemes devised that can be deployed safely at any location ideal to the grid is not bitcoin's fault nor is it Bitcoin's problem to solve.

I think it actually makes much more sense to overproduce energy with renewables and then just use extra for something. Crypto is a bit stupid use case, hydrogen production or something actually useful would be better. Negative prices reduce investments to renewable energy production.

> hydrogen production or something actually useful

Only if anyone buys hydrogen. And technological infrastructure for trading it exists. Even then risks involved in operating hydrogen production facility are way higher than just plopping a box with few miners near your brand new windturbine you are struggling to monetize.

Supporting the floor is what allows to overbuild renewables. Nobody would build another windmill if they couldn't sell their production for profit half of the time.

Storage is blocked by technology and resources. We can't wait for storage to build more renewables.

So are you saying that Texas, as in "the people of Texas", are better off if someone is purchasing their energy resources to further a generally fraudulent/criminal enterprise than to not have this person consuming energy to begin with?

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