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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

    Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.






  • I would love if this were an option, but it’s not. The current battery technologies don’t have the scale for grid level storage capacity. The only grid scale storage solution that is really being done is to build very expensive infrastructure that moves water between two dams of different heights, and building more of those doesn’t seem politically likely at the moment

    The reality is that there is much a whole bunch of excess energy supply that is produced because power plants can’t cycle up and down with demand. So they have to keep producing at peak demand 24/7 (there is some nuances based on the type of power plant, NatGas is faster to turn on/off, but this is broadly true)

    I have my qualms with Bitcoin. As a currency it has significant transaction speed problems, and potential security ones after a couple more halvenings. But I don’t see a problem if Bitcoin miners want to pay energy producers to use energy that would be produced anyway and earn the producers nothing.





  • I’ve always found this argument against crypto to be a bad one. The headline will say something like “Crypto mining uses XYZ total energy” and we’re supposed to infer that this means crypto is polluting a lot. But it doesn’t say how much pollution there actually was. For economic reasons, these miners often use cheap excess energy that would have been produced anyway or green tech. Not all of it obviously, but that level of nuance is missing.

    Also, we don’t make the same moral arguments against other energy uses. Air conditioners use more energy than Bitcoin mining does, but we don’t go around saying the government should ban people from using AC.

    There are legitimate problems with crypto, but this one never convinced me