this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
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To be fair; this is a valid use case.
If you are a solar power producer; rather than offering your energy at -ve rates; run a crypto farm when the output is too high. This is far better than running the same farm on coal.
But it would be better going into something useful.
I want to pre-empt the argument from the Bitcoin people that while this is a logically sound argument for how Bitcoin mining could potentially help the environment by making renewables more economically feasible, using this argument to describe Bitcoin mining electricity usage is completely invalid—Bitcoin mining as it exists today does not merely use excess renewable energy; it consumes energy even in times of demand when it could be given to residential, commercial, or industrial customers. Without the excess demand from today's Bitcoin mines, the capacity that is freed up can be used to close fossil fuel power plants.
To be clear, Bitcoin mining will never help the environment. There are ways to reduce it's negative effects though
CCS would be much better than bitcoin; even though CCS is very inefficient; if the power price is effectively -ve; that means that you are only paying maintenance costs to run your CCS