[schoen]

The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more.

> Random Ex: Texas power outages during summer peak AC usage. It's infeasible to spin up and spin down extra generators to meet spikes in demand. #Bitcoin fixes this by providing excess supply a discounted demand during normal hours that can be routed away during peak needs else where. Ditto for renewables.

Could be, but are the price signals really in place to make this out work in practice in many places? How many electric utilities have so far succeeded in charging people more at all during peak demand times? (maybe other than electric customers they've identified as industrial)

Edit: To be clear, I agree that there is such a thing as surplus power generation and usefully smoothing out demand, I just don't agree that we're in a scenario where cryptocurrency mining is predominantly used or predominantly incentivized to be used that way.

[zMiller]

> The biggest trouble here is that pollution externalities of power generation are very commonly not priced into the cost of electricity, so generic incentives to consume energy also very commonly mean incentives to pollute more.

This is true and is a function of context and locale. That's the point. Opportunity cost.