It's estimated all of the U.S. is ~17% of global energy. [1]
"According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), Bitcoin currently consumes around 110 Terawatt Hours per year — 0.55% of global electricity production, or roughly equivalent to the annual energy draw of small countries like Malaysia or Sweden." [2]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87&t=1 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs.
Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world.
Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.
Sure, but there doesn't seem to be to be any indication that this is what actually happens. Is there any evidence for that?
Then the difficulty would jump and we'd need to send one to Jupiter.
Then to mercury to set up the dyson swarm.
Suddenly we are a Kardashev civ... but it's all for bitcoin mining for rich billionaire paranoia of centralized currency control by the US government, and the actual bitcoin production rate is constant since the difficulty rate on the coins exploded from galaxy-spanning miner fleets.
If somebody's mining bitcoin they're clearly not interested in ethics in the first place.
It's disturbing that nobody in this whole thread thought to fact-check those implausibly large numbers; it indicates that the whole thread is dominated by herd instinct, not rational thought.