Proof of work cryptos are a pox on society. That said they are some of the most location neutral energy consumers. This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission. 1TW is around 20% of global energy production. This is enough of a factor to impact manufacturing of renewable energy equipment. It allows them to achieve economies of scale faster and accelerate the transition to cleaner energy that we need.
It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1]
"According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2]
The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources.
That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs.
Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
The high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's 0.012 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant. But it's still interesting to know which direction the incentives run.
The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world.
Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.
>This allows mining farms to be located adjacent to hydro dams or wind farms to get the cheapest energy and use energy that would otherwise be lost in transmission.
Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?
If only we could send a self-replicating machine that builds raspberry pis and solar panels to the moon with an uplink.
Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter.
Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm.
Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.
As explained above, the real number is closer to 0.012 TW, so while the impact on the renewable transition is probably positive, it's very small, more like 0.1% of global energy production.
It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd instinct, not rational thought.
