New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back
New York Bitcoin Miners Are Buying Up Power Plants—and Communities Are Fighting Back - Inside Climate News
Besides the climate implications, this highlights the centralization risks in Proof of Work mining; the only way to mine Bitcoin profitably is if you have some kind of privileged access to electricity with effectively low ongoing cost, and that access is gated by government regulation.
I understand the appeal of bitcoin as an alternative financial system, and I think there is a legitimate case to be made for crypto mining with power plants.
For example, we've lost almost all of our nuclear power plant fleet in NY because renewables made it uneconomical to keep them running, using crypto as a flexible load to keep those plants online would have been a great synergy. Similarly, pairing crypto with renewables would be fine.
But keeping fossil fuel plants running purely to mine crypto is suicidal as a species.
That's not why we lost nearly all of our nuclear power...
Yeah! Don't use power plants for crypto. Use it for AI, as god intended.
/S
You joke, but that's exactly what's starting to happen. The infrastructure that was being built for more crypto mining is in many cases being repurposed to run AI farms.