You might have heard it said that mining it — ie the computer processing that is required to produce new “coins” — is more energy-intensive than .
In our kayfabe world, in which it is important to make sure the lines between truth and falsehood are never clearly defined, the best way of fighting back against such FUD is of course to produce utter nonsense material to counter the prevailing thinking.
Why? Because both entities are deeply involved in this “space” and now need to a) feel better about themselves and b) guard against people going off crypto on the grounds that it is actually a Very Bad Thing.
ARK Invest, meanwhile, has been predicting that blockchain’s economic impact could be as significant as that of electricity since 2019 and offers cryptocurrency investing as one of its alternative strategies.
Bitcoin miners are unique energy buyers in that they offer highly flexible and easily interruptible load, provide payout in a globally liquid cryptocurrency, and are completely location agnostic, requiring only an internet connection.
Here’s the rough argument: solar and wind create more energy during the day than at night, when it’s needed.
The white paper imagines bitcoin mining being a solution, alongside battery storage, for excess energy.
It’s estimated that 72 per cent of bitcoin mining is concentrated in China, where nearly two-thirds of all electricity is generated by coal power, according to a recent Bank of America report.
The intermittency problem is a problem not because of a lack of demand for excess energy, but because of the cost of transferring that excess energy to time periods when it is actually needed.
The problem with trying to unpick this sort of “research”, as we have noted before, is that there are so many bizarre and unfounded assertions that pretty much every sentence requires dealing with individually.
So, best to just accept this “white paper” for what it is: a bunch of people who have attached their names to a destructive asset class desperately trying to reverse ferret without actually reverse ferreting.