Quote from: Dabs on Today at 01:59:25 PM

Quote from: Wekkel on Today at 01:31:15 PM

Can we keep climate change FUD (directed to Bitcoin - FUD) out of this thread, please?

It's actually good to try to educate people on this and how it works as far as bitcoin is concerned.

What do miners do? They mine.
What do miners "pay"? They pay the cost of electricity to mine.

So what is it they want to do? They want to lower their cost of electricity so they pay less to mine. They want to keep more profit. Some want to HODL the difference.

A lot of miners tend to migrate (physically) their machines to locations where electricity is cheap, or where there is no other user of that energy. They tend to look for renewable sources of energy, or other natural kind of stuff, like hydro, tidal, solar, wind ... maybe even nuclear. Energy that would just be wasted or not used because they are so far from the rest of humanity or civilization.

See, the actual mining machines do not need to be located where people live. They can be in remote places. Some places are naturally colder, like both ends of the earth, the north and south poles, Iceland, Greenland, Russia, Canada, Santa's Village, whatever.

It's not as big an issue as the naysayers think. Besides, miners who mine where they live, they pay for that electricity anyway, so what's the big deal? Humans are willing to pay $1 per kilowatt to live where they live. Mining machines tend to look for whereever the cost of electricity is below 1 cent per kilowatt hour. 2 is okay. 1 is good. Zero is better.

All this energy not being used for any other purpose then goes on to securing the bitcoin network.

Now, we can all sleep at night knowing our money, or safe haven asset, one that has been performing better than anything else in the market, is secure, and will likely be secure for the next one hundred years.

I'd also like to add that I take exception to the "heat" argument with regards specifically and only to renewable energy. For renewables, heat release to environment is a net-zero. Heat energy comes in as solar radiation (and lets face it, ultimately all renewable energy, except tidal is at it source solar.) Either that solar radiation gets absorbed when it first hits, and get immediately turned into either heat/evaporation/plant growth/wind, and all of these eventually wind up as heat down the line, or that solar radiation gets turned into electricity, and then gets turned into the same amount of heat when it runs an ASIC. Conservation of energy.. physics is a bitch.

Now, having thought about this, I can think of one argument that would negate some of the above: If you are arguing specifically that renewables reduce the albido of the earth, causing less radiation (and thus heat) to be reflected back into space I'll give you that side of the argument as a possibility.. I'll need to do some research to see if this is actually the case.