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Comment by tfourb | Hacker News Reader

Of course this requires cryptocurrencies to have some form of actual utility, which so far isn’t in evidence. Absent this utility, excess renewable energy could simply be stored for later use, ie in chemical batteries or as hydrogen.

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Yes - the energy is useful itself, no need to convert it into speculative financial assets to make something out of it.

The shady nature of what often goes on in crypto has a lot more to do with human nature than the technology of trustless distributed ledgers.

It's still a wild west out there, and we weren't exactly model citizens during the literal wild west either. It wasn't tamed by people altruistically agreeing to stop robbing each other with their powerful gun technology, but by laws and law enforcement; crypto needs the same, and then we can hopefully eventually enjoy the benefits of the technology, freeing us from the iron grip of ancient scumlords like Visa, MasterCard, PayPal etc.

There's no fundamental law that says a technology must be abused, that's human choice.

(BTW another choice is Bitcoin choosing to stay with extremely wasteful proof of work consensus mechanism, when proof of stake by all indications seems to work too. Again that's not something fundamentally flawed with crypto in general, that's people making greedy decisions because they're balls deep invested in Bitcoin in particular. Right now it's the top dog, but we should hope it won't always be like that if they continue to grossly misuse energy by choice with viable alternatives.)

I find it extremely disappointing how even the HN crowd struggle to distinguish ubiquitous human greed from the problem crypto solves and its potential uses. Just because crypto hasn't broken down your door and forced you to get some benefit from it doesn't mean it's intrinsically useless; if we all ate with chopsticks and knives were mainly known for use in stabbings, it doesn't logically follow that knives are fundamentally a weapon. Give it time and law enforcement, maybe that knife can be good for something else one day.

But crypto serve no purpose that isn't best served by an existing solution. Feel free to keep writing novels about scams.

Thanks for proving my point so vividly.

Maybe my hope regarding HN being one of the last places for civilised and nuanced discussion is misplaced, and it sure seems to be changing in recent years.

You still don’t give an obvious use case for cryptocurrencies (beyond the math being interesting). You are right that most technologies are not inherently evil but the same holds for „traditional“ banking including credit. There are plenty of customer-owned banks and there is no reason a transparent, fair and secure alternative to visa couldn’t exist if someone bothered to build it instead of some power hungry crypto scam.

What's the incentive to create it without something like Bitcoin mining, which can be deployed practically anywhere with an energy source and internet connection, to balance out the costs of doing so? Even if there are better uses, if we can't transport the energy now then it's pointless to build new stranded energy sources. Bitcoin provides the incentive to start that development now. Maybe in the future, batteries will offer a better use of the energy, and won't we be glad to have the existing energy source as soon as that happens?

You misunderstand the problems with energy production, we already produce excess. The plant produces a fix amount of KwH, wether it's used or not. So some of it isn't used, and is considered excess.

It can be used to do anything, but for some reason you want it to do crypto.

The excess can’t be used for ‘anything’, just for the types of flexible demand that can quickly migrate across space and/or time.

> ... excess renewable energy could simply be stored for later use, ie in chemical batteries or as hydrogen.

"Simply" implies "in an economically viable fashion" here. Which means that someone has to be willing to pay for (A) building these batteries or electrolyzers and (B) operating them.

Building such systems to an industrially relevant scale hasn't really happened yet. Because it hasn't been economically viable.

Just now they're building a 30 MW electrolyzer near Leuna and it'll be the largest in Europe. Compare that to a regular powerplant which has 1 GW and you'll get an idea that large scale hydrogen synthesis isn't all that near.

Either (A) governments subsidize such systems to a great degree or (B) electricity has to be dirt cheap for a decent fraction of the year (say 50 % or 4400 hours), because if you want to run an electrolyzer, ideally you want to run it 24/7, not every second day at noon because there's cheap PV electricity.

I think (A) is more likely to happen within the next decade than (B), but even when we eventually have these electrolyzers, Bitcoin mining might still be more lucrative.

Non-interdictability and resistance to everything short of thermo-rectal cryptanalysis is actual utility, even if non-USG-approved actors transacting isn't useful to you.

Arguably this is currently more of a bug instead of a feature given it’s used primarily for crime and scams. Government regulation over money flows has legitimate purposes and is not pure repression.

Unfortunately, someone opened Nakamoto's box and now we have to live in that universe.

> .. given it’s used primarily for crime and scams.

Often claimed and yet not true.

> Hamas thought it could flout Western surveillance and international sanctions by embracing the world’s leading digital asset. It thought wrong, and the story is illuminating for those who mistakenly believe that bitcoin provides a safe space for criminals, money launderers and the financiers of terror.

from here: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4273988-hamas-just-learn...

Or thermal storage.

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