Not true. We have actively sought the cheapest electricity sources for our rigs. I guess it depends on the scale you're operating at, but you're not going to be too profitable plugging into your apartment wall socket here in Central London @ 20p/kWh!

People still do it in California with power rates as high as $0.40/kWh or more.

This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling. People signing their gaming rig into the network aren't a factor.

> This is not true. Miners are sophisticated business enterprises that select mining farm locations carefully based on access to cheap power and natural cooling.

Miners were supposed to be everyday Joe’s.

Patently false. I do a lot of contracting work for miners, they specifically tune their operations to the power cost of an area and in variable rate loads will switch off miners during peak costs. $/kWh is a big concern for actual mining operations, maybe not for people with one or two rigs in their basement.

For some reason I imagine that you are not managing e.g. Chinese mining operations.

Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable.

Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.

You're correct, I'm dealing with exclusively American operations or American operations run by foreign entities. Most have relocated to explicitly get onto hydro. YMMV, but that's been my experience.

> I do a lot of contracting work for miners

Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?

Requiring a contractor isn't a big ask. All it takes is not knowing someone who has networking chops. I work regularly with around 10 mining operations, 8 of them explicitly relocated to get on hydro because of how inexpensive it is. These guys care deeply about getting the most kWh for their money, because they still have to deal with turning a profit, and anyone who doesn't understand that has not actually dealt with real Bitcoin mining operations.

Majority of miners are companies trying to make a profit. Every variable is a consideration, like location, energy source, cost and so on.

The small mining operations run by the common person has almost no impact in the scale of the network.

Maybe in the beginning but today miners make lots of choices about where to build/expand their operations based on energy costs, government policies, energy source and more.

Maybe not individuals, but large one must think economy.