Never thought a site called "Hacker News" would be so anti-technology as I'm seeing in these comments. Use the energy. We'll start making more of it and cheaper. Everyone benefits.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
not even remotely in my opinion, bitcoin uses cheap electricity, and if carbon-free is cheaper like everyone proposes then it should be quickly adopted by bitcoin miners
If you don't hate a technology which disrupts an energy market by combining a local people centric market with global interets, ...
I really don't mind people playing around with blockchains, i hate that people who have access to cheap energy sell this advantage to some global weird fuckedup market and disrupting and overloading local power grids, increase demand for coal and other non renweable energy and waste double amount of resources through also requiring AC.
If every bitcoin miner would just run on real 'overpower', would use the process heat to heat houses and stop mining if energy is needed without compensation money, i would not care.
But thats just not the case for bitcoin.
And it doesn't even solve a problem because you never just transfer bitcoins from a to b and b to c without anything offchain and everything offchain can't be protected by the blockchain. So effectivly blockchain is garbage.
And don't tell me about smart contracts, this is not working. No company in the world will leverage the contract amount because 1. you would need the double amount of capital and 2. big rich companies/entities could destroy small entities because they could just frezze assets.
If the entire US grid was using renewables, the entire stack was carbon-free and the work had been done to offset the building of those facilities and all the transmission gear between production and consumption, your argument would hold up: using energy in this scenario becomes side-effect free. Using more of it would cause the creation of more of it, and more efficiently from a capital investment perspective, and prices would come down for everyone.
But that is not what is happening today.
The grid is already facing capacity issues. The industry is already concerned about "congestion": adding demand via EVs and heat pumps all over the globe is going to stretch the grid as it is. The cost - both time and capital - of upgrading it all is unfeasible, so we need to find ways to reduce consumption.
Add into the mix the need to complete the transition to renewables, and we're in a situation where really, Earth needs to become more conscious about energy usage and more efficient in its use.
If 2.3% of the power was being used to fabricate new technologies that would change the situation - manufacturing of more efficient machinery, building new wind turbines, fabricating new solar panels - we could make the argument that while energy resource is not infinite, this process would help us move to a point of better resource management.
Using it to create magic numbers that libertarians trade with each other, is just silly.
It's especially silly, because they could simply switch to a less energy intensive mechanism, and still have their magic numbers to try and take down central bankers with.
Ehh
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...