[kragen]

are we talking about people doing bitcoin mining or hash cracking?

bitcoin mining is an extremely competitive business of finding the cheapest sources of energy and mining hardware; because the cheapest energy sources are all renewable, mining bitcoin with fossil-fuel-produced power is unprofitable. so the electricity we're using to mine bitcoin is mostly solar, wind, and hydroelectric

as for the cracking, i don't think we know anything about where it was done or how much energy was needed, but if the energy cost was significant, i'd expect the solver to have done it somewhere where energy was cheap

[BobAliceInATree]

electricity is basically fungible (minus a distance factor). So if you're using up the cheap, renewable electricity for mining, guess what you're using for everyone else's day-to-day electricity? Yep, fossil fuels. (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...)

One major exception to this is geothermal electricity in places like iceland where there's abundant green electricity, but you can't transport it to any neighbors.

So just using renewable sources for electricity doesn't actually make mining renewable until we're in a society that's 100% renewable.

[kragen]

the distance factor is a primary consideration when it comes to electricity; most electricity is consumed within hundreds of kilometers from where it's produced, because only in china is there uhvdc transmission, and even inside china there isn't nearly enough uhvdc and hvdc transmission capacity to meet demand

consequently, there are lots of places where there's abundant green electricity that can't be economically transported to any neighbors, which is why green electricity is cheaper than coal, nuclear, and gas energy. if it could be economically transported, it would be; instead, it is sold locally at much lower prices. only rarely is this seen by residential end-users, but in much of the world the 15-minute prices paid on the wholesale market by electric utilities are public information, so you can easily verify this

as a result of that, just using renewable sources for electricity does actually make mining renewable

as for the grauniad article, there are a lot of people doing unprofitable business things in lots of businesses, but they tend to be self-limiting, because those people run out of money before long

[kragen]

correction, since 02017, there's also uhvdc transmission in brazil from the belo monte dam. 66% of electrical generation in brazil is hydroelectric

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xingu-Estreito_HVDC_transmissi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xingu-Rio_HVDC_transmission_li...

[yunohn]

Finding the “cheapest” energy to do useless work, is still wasteful pollution.

[kragen]

'pollution'? actually no. why would you even think that?