Comment by rprospero
3 years ago
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.