• keepthepace@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      I’ll try one more time, but in my experience, explaining the same thing 3x never leads to constructive discussion.

      Forget about peaks, apparently it confuses you. Just consider that: Renewables have intermittence: they will sometime produce more than we consume, and sometime not enough. “Smoothening” it means that you try to produce less when there is a surplus and more when there is a deficit. For instance, adding a battery to your system does that. Adding a mining rig that earns you money to reward you wasting energy creates incentives to waste even more. It raises the opportunity cost of smoothing the intermittence.

      People here suggested that boiling water was a better use of energy than bitcoin mining. Maybe I can get one person to see how insanely narrow minded that attitude is.

      Nice, a preacher!

      Sending heat into space is a better use than giving values to bitcoins. High bitcoins value gives an incentive to sink energy into the BTC system. I was careful to talk about “crypto” in general as I think some blockchain applications are worthy, allow traceability, allow decentralization, but proof of work crypto needs to die.

      My attitude is held by two types of people: those who don’t understand anything about crypto and people like me who have been into crypto long enough so that they remember mining BTC on CPUs and understand the underlying tech and its implications. You seem to be inbetween. I dont blame you, the scene is crowded with people who think they are geniuses because they understand a little bit what a hash is and a little bit what a currency is. But knowing enough CS to confuse an economist and enough economy to confuse a programmer is not enough to be either. And you are going to get some flak by attempting the same attitude in ecology.