Square: Bitcoin Is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future
So many people here who clearly didn&#x27;t bother to read much (if any) of the paper talking about how the headline is &quot;obviously&quot; wrong. If it feels &quot;obviously&quot; wrong to you, it&#x27;s because of your preconceived notions and biases. How about reading the paper before making fools of yourselves?<p>A couple points for the extra lazy:<p>* Renewable power generation from wind and solar has a much higher ratio of wasted power because they have such high variability in output. Because of this, in cases where the power generally can&#x27;t be cost effectively stored or supplemented (by dynamic increase of dirtier energy), wind and solar simply won&#x27;t be built in favor of coal plants. Bitcoin mining can use this wasted energy, which increases the revenue that can be generated by renewable sources, thus making it more likely that areas will choose renewable over coal.<p>* Bitcoin mining is a fixed quantity: so the more mining done using renewable energy, the <i>less</i> will be done with coal power (so when SamBam mocked this paper by saying &quot;If we double the amount of electricity used on the planet, people will need to spend more on solar panels!&quot; He completely didn&#x27;t understand the zero sum aspect of bitcoin mining).<p>* In fact, this has a more pronounced effect because players in the market who aren&#x27;t as efficient can see their margins decrease below the point of profitablity. Since otherwise wasted electricity is cheapest, more and more bitcoin mining will be done using it, which means less and less will be done using usable electricity.