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by inigyou
5 days ago
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That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can. |
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Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.
Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.
Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.
With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.