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Comment by g42gregory | Hacker News Reader

Wow, it’s “mind-boggling” now. Interesting choice of words. I wonder who comes up with these points and what is the mechanism for distributing them to the news outlets worldwide?

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Does it matter? Crypto, arguably useless to 99.9% of US citizens is ~~using~~ wasting 2% of all energy.

I believe 25% of US households own crypto at this point [1]. It’s more widely adopted then you think. BlackRock CEO said it’s “bigger than any Government”. And he would know. :-)

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-finds-that-over-25-...

Not all electricity is created equal. I don’t think Bitcoin miners should be allowed to fire up an old coal power plant just for the sake of mining Bitcoin, but in the case of renewables, like hydro, wind, solar, etc., there is going to be, at times, more electricity generated than we can use or store. All other use cases aside, the ability for Bitcoin miners to turn excess or otherwise wasted electricity into revenue is to the benefit of 99.9% of US citizens by way of lower power bills and/or property taxes.

That’s pretty cool if you ask me. Being able to approve and move forward with a big solar or wind farm project because you have a Bitcoin miner willing to partner with you for the excess electricity generated seems like a win-win to me. Again, we obviously don’t want Bitcoin miners using dirty electricity or straining the grid in peak times where higher priority use cases arise, but that’s a matter of governance and oversight.

Is it profitable to be a part-time miner? I thought the equipment was too expensive and short lived to sit idle.

At the per kWh price a lot of these miners contract for, it’s profitable even with older hardware. These arrangements also help extend the lifespan of older hardware.

So just because it's useless now, that means it will never be useful? I guess we should give up on every new technology that's not immediately beneficial.

It's been almost fifteen years and the principle use is crime and ponzi. Not only has it not been immediately beneficial, it's been without benefit for a long time.

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