Quote from: richardsNY on February 22, 2018, 08:58:26 PM

It however will impact those (non crypto entities) who need the same resources as miners. It's going to be interesting to see how this will play out in the future....

Exactly, that's what's worrying me a bit. Everything will depend on what will be the proportion of mining in relation to the the total "electricity producing hardware" market - if it's large at a given time, then the impact on prices will be big.

More precisely one can say:

- The faster the world changes to renewable energies, the less the impact of Bitcoin mining will be.
- The steadier and slower the mining electricity consumption grows, the better (less price impact). At the contrary, if there is a short boom there could be shortages (like GPUs in the altcoin market today)
- The bigger the impact of mining in solar/wind energy hardware prices, the higher the probability of regulation or even prohibtions - the most likely scenario for me, however, would be a special tax on miners that could be used to pay subsidies to other users of "electricity generating hardware".

As miners' electricity consumption depends largely on the Bitcoin price, the best scenario for us would be a steady price/adoption growth without insane bubbles like in 2011, 2013 and 2017. I hope one day that becomes possible.

But as I can't rule out problems in the future, I still support technologies like PoS, proof-of-space/capacity and proof-of-burn that have potentially better energy efficiency, although they may be less secure.