Ok, fungible electricity. And unless it is consumed immediately it expires. Electricity doesn't magically transport itself to where people can use it.
BTC miners can be put near the oil pad to consume the electricity there.
Re:The Ethereum merge is done
by matkoniecz on Friday September 16, 2022 @12:19PM
(#32868341)
> BTC miners can be put near the oil pad to consume the electricity there.
It is happening so rarely that it can be dismissed and treated as smoke screen.
1) It is less than 0.01% of all energy consumed by BTC
2) Would still require energy waste on equipment
Or we could simply not waste resources and time with such absurdities.
What absurdities? The wells are already there and they may leak or have flares with incomplete combustion. This cleans it up.
I agree Bitcoin probably won't be carbon negative any time soon if ever. But electricity is definitely not fungible as production is not always in the same place as demand.
If something is not 100% fungible, it can still be fungible to some extent. Given the size of our electricity grids and to a lesser extent the capacity to store energy, electricity is definitely fungible at some level. I don’t have the numbers but I’d say this level is pretty high.
There are very few goods as fungible as electricity, even though it is not perfectly fungible.
If this were true we would not still be dependent on fossil fuels.
OP didn't say there were no goods as fungible, they said few. Fossil fuels can be more fungible without them being wrong.
Arguably, "fossil fuels" are not as fungible as electricity anyway. I can take electricity from any outlet and, with the right adapter, use it to power any electric appliance. I cannot take gasoline intended for my car and use it in a grill, or in the furnace, or in a jet, no matter what equipment I buy.
It’s the other way around. You can transport barrels of oil overseas and use for trading but sending electricity requires infrastructure that may take some time to deploy. It’s the same problem with gas pipelines.
Re:The Ethereum merge is done
by matkoniecz on Friday September 16, 2022 @01:14PM
(#32869137)
How it is related? Fossil fuels are used primarily to generate and store electricity.
Even if electricity could be transmitted at any distance without loss we would use basically the same amount of fossil fuels.
Phrasing in this way suggests that Bitcoin is already net carbon negative or can plausibly become it. That is not true.
> Using electricity isn't the problem.
It is, as electricity is fungible and wasting it on bitcoin increases prices for everyone else and encourages greater degradation of shared resources.