A lot of renewable energy is wasted because it is produced at the wrong time or/and at the wrong place. Bitcoin pays a base price for such excess energy. Anywhere. Anytime.
This again isn't compelling: it's not clear how the solution to "wasted" (read: lost opportunity) renewables is to actually waste them by cracking hashes.
(It also undermines the original point of the article: what incentive do bitcoin miners have to make renewables more available, if they can just pack up their rigs and move to wherever energy is cheapest? Mining incentivizes short-span access, not the kind of massive distribution grids that we actually need to make renewable energy sustainable and reliable.)
What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.
woodruffw|4 years ago
(It also undermines the original point of the article: what incentive do bitcoin miners have to make renewables more available, if they can just pack up their rigs and move to wherever energy is cheapest? Mining incentivizes short-span access, not the kind of massive distribution grids that we actually need to make renewable energy sustainable and reliable.)
majinuub|4 years ago
What's valuable is purely subjective. That's what makes markets work. Its also why planning economies from the top down doesn't work. What seems like wasted energy or capital to you is very useful to another person. Many people (myself included) believe that a decentralized, digital, hard money that is tied to the real world through energy is extremely important. So to those people its not a waste of energy, far from it.