this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Also over half is used by green energy already and will continue to grow
There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.
The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.
I’ve read different stories. Of towns where cheap and renewable electricity can be made but it’s financially not viable especially at the start. So Bitcoin miners were used to sell the excess energy and that made the project possible. In a way something like Bitcoin can create a global price/demand for electricity which can have its advantages like I mentioned or disadvantages like you mentioned.
I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.
They don’t require high internet speed at all. Why do you say that? You have to keep up with the network that creates a couple MBs of data every 10mins. That’s it. You need processing power and as such electricity but none of that requires high speed internet, quite the contrary. You can get away with a mobile data in most places.
There's a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn't be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn't be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.