[ajmurmann]

The real solution here is not complaining about individual use cases of energy, but effective carbon pricing. Wit cap & trade on a global level, this wouldn't be an issue. Of course there seems no political will nor ability to make this happen any time soon.

[vinger]

The big miners in China and Iceland are using hydro and geothermal. Pricing the other miners out might have some interesting side effects.

[exyi]

China is relying heavily on coal power (AFAIK, can't find reliable source quickly). Iceland has clean energy, but in contrary to the popular wisdom "only" ~30% is geothermal, most is hydro. See https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/IS for more detail.

[hulahoof]

They are taking about the miners, not the grid as a whole. There are some massive operation utilising hydro setups in the middle of nowhere that were otherwise unused

[kevingadd]

In some cases miners literally steal electricity or other resources to mine, so carbon pricing won't affect scenarios like that [1]. Maybe we can treat those as a rounding error... At the point where miners are willing to do things like build a transformer station you're in wild territory way beyond a neighbor tapping into your cable line for free TV. If the money's good, what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

[1] https://modernconsensus.com/cryptocurrencies/bitcoin/russian...

[wmf]

what's stopping a connected miner from bribing the right people to get a discount on electricity and skip the carbon tax?

International sanctions. Civilize or die.