Comment by toraway

You're making a lot of highly idealized assumptions that don't hold true in reality.

Most significantly that the increased demand due to mining will result in grid operators investing in proportional new capacity to offset it over a reasonable time scale. Instead of just driving up prices due to basic supply/demand.

Also that miners are only consuming electricity when renewables dominate the mix. Otherwise they're responsible for more CO2 emissions to do something useless.

Plus in markets like Texas, miners also manage to get subsidies intended for actually useful customers like factories to go offline at peak times. So ratepayers are essentially paying protection money so they won't over stress the grid by performing their useless work.

In a world where bitcoin miners had to install new solar capacity to entirely offset their peak usage and sell back to the grid any excess then sure, seems like that wouldn't be a big societal net negative like it is right now.