Squandered electricity is like burning cash. It's obvious waste. Hesitate all you want.

Note that chemical batteries and pumped storage hydroelectric both store large amounts of electricity very effectively (there lots and lots of deployments that were done by commercial interests seeking to improve the economics of their operations, some going back decades).

Burning cash is a poor analogy, apart from the destruction of the physical paper (which is very cheap). Burning cash causes a small amount of deflation, which increases everyone else's fortune a tiny amount, but does not waste any human effort.

A better analogy would be digging a hole and filling it up again. Or maybe better, causing a small amount of destruction to something that other people value.

So if I take a truckload of 100$ bills, a bottle of gin and a can of gasoline, drive into the dessert, out of sight of the authorities, and burn the entire lot, then the next night all retailers will have a vision which tells them to lower their average prices by 0.573%?

It's a hypothetical point; a small reduction in money supply will affect prices far less than the uncertainty or random fluctuation in the measurement of prices.

Is this comment sarcastic? I can't tell.

The money supply affects prices. It's basic econ.

How fast does a change made by a private actor to the money supply propagate? Surely not instantaneously?

By the time you fill your truck with those $100 bills, the prices will have already adjusted. If you decide to not burn them, but spend them quickly, the prices will adjust again.

> causing a small amount of destruction to something that other people value.

Yea, like the environment.

We were “storing” that electricity as natural gas or coal until someone fired up more bitcoin miners and someone else adjusted production upward to keep the power lines steady.

Bitcoin miners work fine as heaters too