Comment by kentonv
2 years ago
You joke but in August the biggest Bitcoin mine in North America got paid 3.5x more by the utility to turn their rigs off than they made in actual Bitcoin mined -- and they say openly that collecting credits is core to their strategy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/texas-paid-bitcoin-miner-rio...
Well that’s it then. I will startup a small crypto mining company, threaten to mine bitcoin and get paid out not to.
You have to make a creditable threat first. My guess is even though bit being paid not to mine bitcoin is where the money is, they would still lose money overall if they didn't mine bitcoin at the time when they were not paid to not use power.
That is you need to buy servers and keep them functional in order to get the subsidy. The subsidy isn't enough pay for the servers on its own. Probably bitcoin itself doesn't pay enough for the servers/power/space it needs anymore, though that requires analysis that I can't perform.
The payments are described as "credits" which I assume means they only offset future power purchases; ERCOT doesn't actually give you cash. So you do have to have some sort of machine that converts power into money to take advantage of it.