Ideally you need something where the cost of electricity would normally dominate the capital costs of setting up the operation. Otherwise, you're better off running the process all the time, and it's not a useful grid battery.

Alternatively, something where you need to overbuild the infrastructure, perhaps to serve peak demand or for emergency availability.

Water desalination plants and hydrogen factories are expensive to build, so they don't work well here. Bitcoin mining rigs aren't free either. Charging cars is a great application even though cars are expensive to build: they meet the second criterion as, for logistic reasons, we build way more cars than are on the road at any point in time.

Its also logistically hard to actually get the energy back into the grid from cars. Driving around with it is fine but if you cant put the energy back into the grid at peak time you still have to over produce more energy in total than just to cover the peak. It uses the energy which is good but it does not reduce the difference between peak demand an low demand. If that is reduced it has an overall larger impact than just to using the excess energy.

Pumping water back up into a reservoir is the most common and probably oldest way to store excess grid capacity like an actual grid batter (one that gives energy back to the grid). Ofc its not feasible in many places due to the lack of hydro power plant but there are other ways to actually store energy and deliver it back to the grid unlike the Buttcoin battery nonsense.

With water, you tend to use the cheapest option. If you are in the middle east on the coast, far from rivers or other sources of drinking water, desalinating is pretty much the only option. Which is why that has been common for decades. With green hydrogen, what matters is the cost relative to hydrogen produced from natural gas. Both are dominated by the variable cost of the energy rather than construction cost.

Bitcoin as a green, or rather less hopelessly planet destroying thing, does not make sense because it removes energy that could be used for actually doing something more worthwhile.

We need more solutions that work like pumping water back up into a reservoir (see other reply). These solutions aren't at risk that they need to run on high energy cost anyway to stay profitable.

Desalination plants aren't really something you build for profit, they're to secure your cities clean water supply and are usually taxpayer funded infrastructure projects.

A realistic/feasible deployment would perhaps pair desalination with solar or wind (more likely on the coast). During electricity peak hours, it might be more lucrative to sell electricity to the grid and then the rest of the time top up the reservoir. I guess depending on how scarce water is, the $ per kwh earned via water might actually be larger than selling to the grid. But you get my point.

You are right that these things being funded via tax payer money, makes this kind of lateral thinking less likely. But if someone were to do this commercially, this would be a great way to make it more cost effective.

So those are good uses of off-peak power when your local economy is already interested in having those things. The state also has some other initiatives to use the excess generation, such as residential water heating and EV charging using "smart grid" sockets that take into account the local and greater network's load and generation.

So the idea of switching it on and off according to energy prices doesn’t really hold.

You just can't be more wrong than that! With Bitcoin you may buy narcotics, illegal guns, false passports, child pornography, order DDoS attack or even a murder!

It is really useful to hoard! Not to ge rich, but to avoid getting poorer in countries with rampant inflation.

Also it facilitate money transfers a lot.

Yes, a transaction in bitcoin is expensive, but a international wire transfer on my country for example is EVEN MORE expensive, so transferring money using Bitcoin, even after eating all the fees, is cheaper (and easier too).

So people that has the same opinion as you, I consider this opinion invalid until they come up with a solution better than bitcoin for the problems I mentined.

To be clear the problems are:

1. How to save money when government is hostile to saving money.

2. How to transfer money when it is ludicrously expensive and/or government or companies are hostile to money transferrence.

EDIT: people downvote me, but none of the answers below so far address the 2 problems I mentioned.

The closest is someone talking about solving problems with trust, but that is the whole issue, if you can't trust the central authorities and companies, who you trust?

You do realize that, because the total number of bitcoins is limited, it will get harder and harder to get bitcoins? So every generations will have to work/fight harder to get their currency, which is extremely unfair? Why would a newborn have more trouble to get his hands on money compared to the ones (like myself) who had it easy to buy cryptos while it was cheap? And what about increase/decrease in population: central bans may implement bad policies but at least they did not tied their hands in principles (e.g hardcoded limited number of coins) and can adjust things as they are needed.

I understand your argument as "humans do bad things today, let's hardcode things with technics" without consideration as to why the hardcoded things will remain beneficial to all/most in the long term. Humans are fallible and inconstant but they are human after all. We can't do without trust so why try to replace it with mathematics anyway? Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

while I don't really agree with the bitcoin maxi mindset of the comment you are replying to, do you know that you can buy as little as 1 satoshi? (0.00000001 BTC). Yes, eventually all BTC will be mined (in about 2140) but considering 1 sat is currently worth 0.0006 USD, there is still quite a bit of room for very small amounts of bitcoin being widely accessible (fees being a different issue that will improve with time).

At some point, the real yield on a government treasury will exceed the real yield on Bitcoin, indicating that a better savings rate in fiat is available. This will shift value back out to fiat, similarly to the way gold inflows/outflows in expansion and recession.

> Only because we _currently_ lack trust? If so, shouldn't we focus on that instead?

my friend, if you can solve the problems of trust in human social systems, you will have solved a lot more than decentralized digital cash

I can trust that the local coffee shop will give me a coffee for my money. I can trust my employer will pay me, failing that I can trust the local courts will sort it out.

I can't really trust that a bitcoin wallet host, some ephemeral digital entity I have very little insight into, will hold onto my wallet. I can't trust that a cloud provider in the states will hold onto my files without scanning them. I can't trust that an eCommerce store will definitely ship me goods internationally.

The human element disappears online and we have starting trying to fill that void with digital trust artifacts, like digital contracts. The blockchain itself was a technology entirely about trust.

Maybe we're trying to stretch our ability to trust networks, social or otherwise, too far.

Right now the game is being framed as honest crypto vs corrupt government legacy weakness, but I think an economy that must devote huge resources to maintaining the security and operational infrastructure of their currency will be at a comparative disadvantage.

The defi stuff appeals to me as enabling composable bottom up tools for interaction but trustlessness I think is a very niche attribute which adds a lot of expense and in many cases doesn't mitigate any risks.

So is your beef against capitalism? Or the medium of exchange?

At current mining rewards, 329,000 BTC are mined each year, producing 37 megatons of CO2, or about 110 tons of CO2 / one-bitcoin-worth-of-bitcoin.

Waste is how it's fair and how it negates cheating by letting people stick to its investments.

Preserving my wealth in the event of the dollar rapidly losing value is not a problem for me. I'm 90% OK on that front without even trying particularly hard to do anything about it.

What would be a problem for me, is that a failing dollar might be a symptom of the US government failing, in which case society would be falling apart around me. If basic services like roads, infrastructure, fire and police, electricity and clean running water aren't working properly nationwide, it's going to interfere with my life big time. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly: e.g. my grocery store has trouble restocking because the supply chain is not running smoothly. Bitcoin doesn't help me with that type of problem at all.

I'd be better off trying to keep my government functional by promoting and voting for good policies, staying involved at the local level, and generally acting as a participant in government rather than a subject of it. Playing John Galt and pretending that I'm just going to have my own safe little bitcoin world if our government fails, so I don't care and in fact assume that it WILL fail, would be both sickeningly cynical (regarding society's outcome) and naively optimistic (regarding my own outcome).

How would a world, realisticly speaking, look like if we ever reach a dystopian level where we all stop using the currencies of our own countries?

Srsly, if i stop trusting in the Euro, i can't imagine how our whole economy has to look like. I think we might have a lot of bigger issues at this point in time as bitcoin and probably not enough resources anymore to run bitcoin.

You could pick up a history book, and you would learn that gold was almost never used as currency because it was simply too rare, and too valuable for the amounts traded in normal commerce.

Rather, silver was the currency of choice in Europe and most of Asia, with lower-value denominations eventually showing up as coins made of less valuable metals.

If ECDSA or SHA256 were shown to be weaker than believed, they can be substituted in the bitcoin codebase (given approval of all participants, which are incentivized to ensure the computational security of the protocol).

The energy is the barrier to prevent malicious parties from rewinding history. Fundamental, understood quantities in the universe is far better than the political whims of the party in charge.

What does hyperbitcoinization look like? This infographic video provides some introduction to what this could be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlaOGA2ac (Bitcoin: Everything there is, divided by 21 million)

The endgame of HODL is a digital Fort Knox. Under the gold standard people didn’t actually exchange pieces of eight. They used paper money.

You’ll just get a new state which holds Bitcoin and issues debt based on Bitcoin in the form of promissory notes.

It’s pretty simple - just require taxes be paid in Bitcoin and use violence against those who don’t pay. Just like with other revolutionary wars, you pay generals with land and soldiers with the new currency (I.e. Bitcoin). Some of those generals will end up as a dictator or president depending on whether you are able to establish a democracy.

The state will be the ultimate HODLer just as it was with gold.