Let’s say you live in a house in a place where the sun never shines and have ten dollars. One electricity costs one dollar. But you spend your ten dollars on a wireless solar mining rig that lives in the desert ten thousand miles away. Now you’re using this power, that previously only cactuses could use, to generate Bitcoin. You take the Bitcoin via the net, and buy electricity with it in your home town, which you can do as long as the sun is shining in the desert. Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.
Now generalize this principle to millions of people, and you get the idea.
Using your example, you live in a place without sunlight and you buy a solar mining rig far away. You then use that power to do literally anything that generates money, including just straight selling it to someone or feeding it back into the grid.
Then you use that money to buy electricity in your home. Boom! You've "move[d] energy around the world wirelessly" without bitcoin.
I'll leave out the part about building a "renewable geothermal power plant under your house" because I'm guessing it's a joke.
If you can afford to put PV + compute + internet in a random distant desert, you can afford to put pure PV in a specific and well chosen bit of desert that has people and houses and power lines and an existing internet connection in it. Which means you can sell the power it makes to those specific people right there.
It is, if anything, slightly easier to install PV on the rooftop of a complete stranger in a community in a desert than to install the same quantity of PV in the middle of nowhere the same distance from you.
Bonus points: installing PV on someone else’s roof and selling the energy it makes to the person under the roof is a tried and tested business model.
Second bonus: unlike crypto mining where your equipment becomes rapidly obsolete, PV keeps going with minimal degradation for decades.
And take my space example. I could have a Bitcoin farm on the moon, using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins, and then send them back via the internet.
Bitcoin farms can be placed anywhere, not just where there are people nearby. Which was the original point I was making.
The answer is “they are the same”.
> Land prices near settlements will be high.
Irrelevant, the cost of getting stuff far away from a settlement is higher, even ignoring things like cleaning the panels and replacing obsolete compute. (Plus for your mining rig you need to get internet to it, which is even more expensive and at that point you should be asking serious questions about installing a power line instead of a data line, and yes people already suggest that for the moon with microwaves etc., I’ve had that conversation at least a decade before BTC was even invented).
Whenever the cost of getting to uninhabited places (in a controlled way not e.g. messages in bottles or crashes, which risk the destruction of your equipment and are unlikely to result in good PV orientation) has been lower in the past, people move to those places and make a new community and suddenly it’s no longer far from a settlement.
Also, literal profitable businesses literally put literal PV on literal rooftops literally at zero cost to the people under them and literally fund this by literally selling their output to the people living literally under them, and have done literally for years now.
QED the cost is not prohibitive, money can be made this way because it is already being made this way.
> using all that passive cooling and uninterrupted sunlight to generate coins
The only cooling on the moon is because the sunlight is not uninterrupted. The vacuum of space is a fantastic insulator.
Now a second question. Have you heard of Dutch disease?
Because even if you go back to the setup in the first question and change it to make whatever number of BTC you fancy, money just does not function in the way you’re expecting it to.
No get-rich-quick scheme can be scaled up to a community, even in the rare cases that they aren’t scams. And trying to, breaks stuff.
At best, even if BTC (or whatever cryptocurrency you want) had no flaws and was a perfect system, all money is just a token of wealth, it is not wealth itself.
> The answer is “they are the same”.
What is the point that you are making here? The supply schedule of bitcoin is fixed. When more energy is used by rational economic actors to mine bitcoin, it would just have to be supported by an increase of demand rather than supply.
The most efficient use of energy is always to produce internet tokens that have the same tech as hundreds of other tokens /s.
And this is already happening. There are geothermal remote Bitcoin mines in operation.
Full disclosure, I don’t own any crypto. I’m just interested in the technology. I see it as an inevitable transition.
If everyone does what you do, then you get one of two effects depending on which unwritten assumption you prefer:
1) if the conversion rate from joules of sunlight to number of bitcoin remains constant, then (first 1 then 1 million) people have more bitcoin than they did before, but the immediate actual production of electricity in your local area is exactly the same as it was before any of you scenario happened, and therefore the local market price for electricity goes up because that’s how supply and demand works
2) if the supply of bitcoin continues to follow the existing rules, then going from one person to one million people has exactly zero impact on the supply of bitcoin, so instead of 1 BTC/unit of time/person, you get… 1 BTC/unit of time/million people (and likewise for your $ investment, 1 BTC/unit of time/$ becomes 1 BTC/unit of time/million $); in this case you still don’t have any more power being produced locally, but nobody notices the local price per unit of electricity changing because the BTC itself is too dilute to do anything
> Now, with all this money, you build a renewable geothermal power plant under your house. Boom, passive energy generation.
If money is the limiting factor, you can apply for a loan to install a renewable power source. As a bonus, you get the money sooner and therefore the power sooner. Economically speaking, this is in fact such a great idea that at least one solar company announced free-at-the-point-of-installation PV systems funded by their potential future earnings.
And let me put it to you like this - when you turn on your power, what do you do with it? Well, you use it. You heat your home with it. You cook with it. You turn on your lights with it. What’s the difference if you make money with it? You’re using that energy. It’s really quite simple - in my example, you’re simply using unusable energy, and converting it into money, which you can use to do work.
Money, any money, even cryptocurrency, simply does not do what you think it does.
If you want stuff then invest in that specific stuff — you should only be investing in or building a financial network when that in particular is what you need, not when you want something else like “electricity” or “food” — and if you’re really going to call out the $10 as a serious number, at that level food is a higher priority than any of the equipment you’d need to take part in even a low-cost digital payments and micro-financing system like M-Pesa (it’s not just banks that do loans!), you certainly shouldn’t be considering paying for random hardware to be installed in a different continent (which is implicit in your scenario)