You are reading a single comment by @hesa and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
hesa
Not to miners. For them, the only incentive is to find the cheapest (also has to be reasonably reliable and available in the desired quantity). All the miner needs to care about is the price. Why should they care about how it is produced? Why would a miner want to be tied to one particular form of energy production when they could have the freedom to shop around? Why would they want (big one this) to make their business more complicated?
Bitcoin miners do not have to care. The current financial rewards mean that business is attracting those who really don't care.
In any case, the biggest problem is the sheer volume of energy being consumed. The share of the world's energy coming from Green and renewable energy sources is slowly increasing. Even in their current status as an experimental niche, PoW cryptocurrencies have the potential to completely outstrip that growth and increase the demand for fossil fuels. If they actually replaced fiat currencies, the amount of energy required to run the world's economies would be several times larger than the entire energy demand of the world today.
There's no such thing as free or even totally green energy. Setting aside land or water for energy production, construction, maintenance, even the significant waste heat generated (because no mechanical or electrical process is 100% efficient), it all adds up. And it would add up to a really big figure if BTC ruled the world.