[labster]

Bitcoin mining uses up all of the efficiency gains from energy saving over the past decade, and more. Bitcoin incentivizes carbon production by keeping electricity demand artificially high, even dedicating entire coal power plants to a single mining location. Therefore, cryptocurrency has already guaranteed we will never have time to advance on the Kardashev scale.

[zherbert]

That's preposterous, Bitcoin incentivizes production of whatever energy is cheapest. That does not necessarily mean fossil fuels, though it is often that those are cheaper.

Hydro is a perfect example. A sizeable percentage of all Bitcoin mining is done with cheap hydro.

Bitcoin will do the same for nuclear, making it cheap and plentiful.

[labster]

How does Bitcoin incentivize cheap energy? It only incentivizes energy that has a marginal cost less than the Bitcoin it can produce. As long as human speculation outpaces finite resources, it makes economic sense to burn the most expensive, dijon fuels. This is true even if externalities are factored into energy prices, which they aren’t.