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Comment by sammy2255 | Hacker News Reader

What if it’s 100% green energy? Is it a waste?

Probably. The energy could have been available to any energy intensive industry, helping them if the resource is too scarce and eventually lowering production prices if it wasn't scarce. You notice it in Germany where energy has become very costly in the last couple of years, where it then makes more sense to limit production or even close all together.

My impression is that transmission capacity is often the limiting factor, so you can’t really think of eg solar energy as being fully fungible. At least in the US, there are frequently multi-year delays on solar deployments because the transmission capacity to where it could be reasonably used isn’t there. The interconnection queue is extremely long in many places.

As something that’s eminently portable, I think crypto mining might actually have a use in derisking building out solar deployments, as a sort of buyer of last resort.

It might be nice to have other very portable energy sinks to eat up temporarily cheap locally available electricity. I think this might be part of the dream of the hydrogen proponents.

Yes.

You can do actual useful stuff with electricity no matter where it came from, like smelting aluminium, training AI models or desalinating water. Wasting it on mining bitcoin is literally the last thing we should be doing with spare energy.

If that spare energy doesn’t have a use yet, negative pricing will find one… but allowing that use to be “computing mathematical puzzles to support a deregulated financial instrument whose chief uses are illicit transactions and speculative investment” is just absurd and we should regulate this away.

I'd argue that the jet fuel used to fly private planes around is also wasted energy. Let's tack on idling transport/personal vehicles while we're at it please.

I would argue that it's still a waste, because that energy could be put to an otherwise better use. Now that energy has to be replaced by a non-green counterpart since it's been spent.

What if you're using that energy in your hot tub, or to heat your house during the winter?

Are you arguing staying alive through winter as something less beneficial to bitcoin mining?

Depends if they are wintering inside or in the hot tub.

If electricity is being used to generate heat (for a house, hot tub, etc), and that heat happens to be generated by a bitcoin miner, is it more or less wasteful than only using the electricity to generate heat?

That's fine, provided you weren't going to heat it with a heat pump before you decided to use a Bitcoin miner. I suppose there's also a slight environmental cost in producing a Bitcoin miner vs producing a heating coil but I'm going to assume that's negligible.

Since energy isn't easily transported, wouldn't that really depend on where the energy was produced?

I'd argue that no other thing, apart from information, is transported as easily as electricity, once the grid exists. Sure, there are capacity limits, but I doubt that shutting down crypto mining would cause problems to the grid.

I recently read that some are thinking about connecting the US with Europe via DC cabling.

Here's a related, old article: "Submarine power cable between Europe and North America: A techno-economic analysis" (2018)

• Developed a 2030 power dispatch model of Europe and North America (NA).

• Identified socio-economic benefits of European-NA electricity trading through a HVDC cable.

• A 4000 MW cable increases social welfare by 177 M€ on an annual basis.

• This benefit for society is sufficient to cover the investment costs.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...

I did not expect the the energy would flow so heavily to North America (24.1:3.3 TWh ratio over a year).

And adding green energy to the grid would let you displace/turn off non-green generation if the load wasn't increasing (as much).

Yes? If the energy could be used for something productive, but is instead used for something unproductive, then it is a waste

While that energy technically serves the purpose of letting a monetary system function, traditional monetary infrastructure requires vastly smaller amounts of energy, thus this is a wasteful use of it

Last time I did some numbers, bank of america spent around $1bn per year in cybersecurity alone, and bitcoin mining energy cost about 10x that. For ensuring the security of a trustless worldwide monetary system, it's not that bad in comparison.

… unless your trustless worldwide monetary system wants to process more than seven transactions per second.

I guess BoA probably handles a little more than that?

The energy expense of Bitcoin is dominated by its Proof-of-Work algorithm, the cost of processing transactions is negligible compared to that. And the PoW operates over the root of the last block's Merkle tree, which is a hash of all the transactions in the block. Being a fixed-size hash it doesn't matter if the block contains 1,000, 1 million or 1 billion transactions.

Therefore Bitcoin could scale to handle millions of transactions per second with a sublinear increase in electricity spent. [0]

[0] http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...

Yes.

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/09/03/giant-wyoming-carbon...

> CarbonCapture cited “intense competition from data centers” in the region for electricity as partially the reason why it is moving from Wyoming.

Wyoming is a very popular state for cryptocurrency mining due to substantial state support, cheap energy, cool climate, etc. Miners use a lot of clean energy that would have been used for more useful purposes, as shown by the article I linked.

There may not be a continuous fuel expenditure, but there is a maintenance cost for the grid infrastructure, keeping panels or turbines in good working condition, etc. -- not to mention the manufacturing costs and, since no organizations are currently engaged in microwave power transmission from solar-power satellites in space -- not insignificant associated monetary and opportunity costs to the land used.

Conclusion: yes, it's still a waste, unless that energy was surplus absolutely not going to be used for anything better or able to be stored, although even then the compute resources could have probably been used for more useful problems.

> What if it’s 100% green energy?

It is very much not: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

Only in very limited scenarios. Namely when there is excess production and it is used near production of that green energy. And the green energy is not dispatchable. So wind or solar in times of excess production.

Which as a whole is very limited scenario.

Not unless everyone is using green energy.

California uses green energy, but in doing so increases the mining reward, which increases the mining from countries like china and russia, who do not use green energy.

It's all one energy market however. It's a bit a of rough approximation, but green energy wasted on unnecessary purposes is green energy not used for necessary things.

There's no where that is oversaturated with renewables 24/7 and these kind of workloads aren't scaling up and down to just use renewable excess so it's a moot question. Except in the very peak of solar generation when there's a grid excess every watt spent on BTC or any other PoW chain is wasted. They're all speculative toys.

It's even more of a waste.

Until green energy can cover all the other power use, this will still have wasted non-renewable energy by precluding others from using it and thus contributed to climate change.

Of course. It's still energy produced which could be used for something that is not a scam; that is not just funding North Korea with extra steps.

Given that green energy is currently finite, and shortfalls are (generally) made up for by non-green energy, yes.

Yes, there are opportunity costs.

You still have to pay infrastructure deprecation costs, financing costs and labor costs.

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