Yeah, that's not creating energy.

Is buying solar panels and using them creating energy? If so you could do the same thing with your mining proceeds.

But that's not what anyone's doing, or what anyone's going to do, with cryptocurrency.

Even if we assume (which is definitely not a safe assumption) that burning all that oil in the first place to mine the coins produces less carbon than the overall reduction caused by the increase in demand for solar panels and subsequent increase in their production and deployment (because just buying solar panels that were already being produced and going to be deployed by someone does not reduce the overall carbon load of the planet)...

That requires the miners to sink all their profits into buying solar panels, rather than, y'know, making money for themselves, which is the reason they're mining cryptocurrency in the first place.

I never stated that miners are doing this, only that crypto mining could enable this new opportunity that never existed before it.

I did not check this but Michael Saylor claims that over 40% of mining is done using renewable energy. Considering solar power by itself is a good investment last time I checked ( around 13% ROI depending on your local energy price) then that number will probably increase as it just makes business sense to do it.

"Cryptocurrency miners could, in theory, buy massive amounts of solar panels with the money they make by mining" is not in any meaningful way a refutation of the criticism that cryptocurrency actually, right now, in the real world, uses an absurd amount of energy and contributes significantly to the greenhouse gases warming our planet.

By that logic, anything that makes money makes energy. Because money is fungible. I could use money from any source to buy solar panels and use them to create energy.

I could use money I earned from selling power generated by a coal plant to buy solar panels. That doesn't make the coal plant produce twice the energy.