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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

It does seem like a pretty cool thing that any excess electricity can be turned into money very trivially but I don't understand why this argument wouldn't also mean "Bitcoin could support coal energy development". Like, the technique described in the article of mining while a project is coming online would be true of every energy source right?

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Coal power almost anywhere is prohibitively expensive for the purposes of mining. Generally places that use coal are desperate for power so residents will pay 20c or so per kwh, which is way more than any miner would pay. Mining profits are razor thin already, so they need to go where they can get the cheapest power they can, which is usually right next door to hydro plants.

Right now the coal industry is being subsidized by US taxpayers, so maybe we could start by not doing that as much.

Theoretically, but I'd wager running a coal mine is many times more expensive than letting water or wind run through a turbine, so it may not be economical as the running costs of a mine would not get recovered.

I was about to make a similar comment. One property of coal plants is that they can't ramp up or down very well with usage demands. I have a friend that operates at a coal plant where they installed miners to run during off hours when the demand is low, so rather than running at a loss during that period they more or less break even. It definitely would tip the balance for keeping that plant running for longer rather than replacing it with better alternatives.

Mining is extremely reliant on basically zero cost energy given how efficient the network is. Something like coal only makes sense in corrupt countries like China where the bureaucracy is in place to make an unneeded coal plant, with no industry required for it. So the officials can mine Bitcoin and pocket the money. But in a real free market this is wildly unprofitable.

Numbers are spotty now for all sorts of reasons, but from the latest numbers I'm seeing, about 20% of bitcoins are still being mined in China (despite it being illegal) and 60% is being mined with renewables.

China is building out hydro plants way faster than they're building coal plants.

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat13/sub85/item323.html

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