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.
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.