[woodruffw]

The argument in the first article isn’t compelling: we have direct evidence of Bitcoin miners exploiting the diminishing profitability of coal plants to buy them on the cheap and reopen them solely for mining. Similarly for any non-renewable source: the traditional demand slump for each will encourage miners to pick up the slack, rather than investing in renewables.

And even this is, on its face, a ridiculous end goal: we should be building renewable sources of power to replace our societies’ needs, not to supplant them with cryptocurrency.

[Capira]

A lot of renewable energy is wasted because it is produced at the wrong time or/and at the wrong place. Bitcoin pays a base price for such excess energy. Anywhere. Anytime.

[woodruffw]

This again isn't compelling: it's not clear how the solution to "wasted" (read: lost opportunity) renewables is to actually waste them by cracking hashes.

(It also undermines the original point of the article: what incentive do bitcoin miners have to make renewables more available, if they can just pack up their rigs and move to wherever energy is cheapest? Mining incentivizes short-span access, not the kind of massive distribution grids that we actually need to make renewable energy sustainable and reliable.)

[majinuub]

I'll repeat what I said in another comment here:

What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.

[woodruffw]

"What's valuable is purely subjective" is the kind of basal argument that nobody finds convincing. It's also a far cry from a justification for wasting energy, unless you plan to take an excursion into the lands of moral relativism.

Here is my opinion: it is entirely possible, common even, for people to be just plain wrong about the things that they value. That doesn't mean they don't value them; it means that their underlying justification is predicated on transient conditions (like artificial scarcity) or is otherwise underdeveloped w/r/t to their motivations. Bitcoin epitomizes this.