If this was the only source for this story, and if this was the only or the first powerplant that does this, I would agree. This is just the link I saw first. Here is a better source, and you can find a million more.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/environmentalists-shake-finger-at-finger-lakes-bitcoin-mining

The reason I am reluctant to continue reading your article past the first few paragraphs is that I can’t shake the feeling that you have gaps in your understanding of real-world people and economics, and fill them by wishful thinking instead of research.

For example, what you wrote about coal in the above reply. Remember how the gas prices literally dropped *below zero* a few years back? How does that work in your model of the world?

The mining infrastructure is already in place. Those wells are not going anywhere. When the demand drops, so will the price of coal, because people want to sell it. For them, having a mine that is already running, the stuff that comes of the ground is practically free, and sometimes actually costs money on storage fees. Same with the powerplants. It is cheaper to re-open an existing power plant than to build a new solar setup, even though coal theoretically costs money while light doesn’t. Plus, crypto gives you an incentive to run your existing coal-burning infrastructure at full capacity 100% of the time, instead of according to demand, because it makes it literally cheaper to burn coal than to leave the plant idle.

Yes, there is going to be a point, “eventually” where you have to invest *again* into those mines or plants. But some of those coal plants have been running for 80 years. Some new ones are being built in China — where most Crypto is mined — today, because for them it is often still cheaper to use coal. We don’t have another 80 years to reduce our carbon footprint.

And this is not going to end there. What use is us being a Kardashev 2 civilization going to be, if most of our energy and infrastructure is going to be used to mine crypto?

Crypto gives you a *simple* way to make “money”. No need to actually do anything, invent anything new, produce any useful product, just plug in and make “cash”. This way this is going to be *the first* choice.

When you mine resources at exponential speed, they very quickly stop being infinite, and it starts mattering very much how you spend them. If you have a driver like this, where you can burn energy into money at any point, then at no point is anything going to be free, because everyone and their replicator machines are going to be competing for the resources to make money. A few people will never have enough (see Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.). Those are going to be the people that will compete to consume the solar system to make more money before everybody else — they would probably even without the help of crypto, but without crypto they would have to figure out ways to monetize it — to do something *useful*. With crypto, they don’t have to. They can just stripmine everything and make bitcoin miner FPGAs (utterly useless for anything else), and solar panels.

Those resources are going to be missing from every other human endeavor, going back to where we started — hungry and competing for scarce resources, with a token Kardashev 2 medal to hang on our wall. The only natural stopping point for this is “every planet is disassembled for raw materials and the sun is layered with solar collecrors”. And then we will send probes to other solar systems to turn them, too, into bitcoin miners - a bright new crypto future.

That said, I will go finish reading your article now, just to see what your conclusions are, and how you think this future will benefit us all.