Comment by pcdoodle
3 years ago
Another useful aspect:
Heat pumps will take a long time to reach every application that needs heating. EG: drying grain. Sometime heat pumps are not the answer (-21F for instance). Bitcoins resistive heating properties are almost 100% efficient.
With bitcoin mining: Money In = Heat + Air Flow = Money Out.
Electrical energy now has an opportunity to not be waisted where it normally would be. Think renewables where line loss / demand doesn't make a perfect system. Bitcoin can act as a storage device with near free movement allowing flexibility in these systems.
This monetary recovery can also be used to move money/energy to other places without the line loss.
It’s that last step I’ve never understood. I get that some guy in Iceland has excess power generation and can use that to mine bitcoin. I can then buy those bitcoins from him. However, I’ve never heard an explanation for how I then recover the energy from the bitcoin?
The closest I’ve heard is that I could use the bitcoins to buy electricity from someone else, but I could have just paid that guy in the first first place and cut out the guy in Iceland. Also, it feels like we now have two power plants involved in charging my laptop, which feels like a lot of overhead.
I’ve heard this explanation enough that there must be something obvious that I’m missing.
You could take the bitcoin from excess hydro generation in a northern climate and deploy solar panels in a climate where solar has great ROI for instance.