Comment by kibwen
9 hours ago
The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.
I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.
I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.