And the water miraculously makes that heat without chewing up fab capacity that could be used on cancer research or whatever.

Fab capacity responds to market demand. It's not a fixed supply, outside of the short run.

It's good enough from a demand perspective.

Chips are not made after lunch until evening. They are made weeks and month ahead

Long term demand for chips will result in more fabs and make things slightly cheaper for everyone.

Bitcoin demand is a bit erratic so maybe it's more negative than positive, but it's definitely not all bad.

It's all bad.

The chip shortage last year which affected cars, roof window, refrigerator etc were also affected by ASIC production for Bitcoin miners

That's the short term. In the longer term it leads to more asic capacity.

It's possible that without Bitcoin production in the many years leading up to 2020 the supply crunch would have been worse.

Also remember that a huge chunk was based on GPUs and those don't mine Bitcoin, they mine other things.

Those Asics basically have been made and will be thrown in the trash.

And the only thing they ever did was guessing a hash.

Our economy needs enough chips without demand from Bitcoin. The only thing this did was making it more expensive for everyone.

Do you not think supply and demand applies to building chip fabs, or something? And economies of scale?

I'm serious when I say that if there was less asic demand in 2015 and 2018, no matter what the asics were for, that might have reduced the asic capacity in 2021 enough to make the problems we had even worse.

"might".

Fabs (especially the ones who can build the chips we talk about) are not build on a crypto hype and also not build short-term.

The worry about whether it's stable enough is valid but bitcoin asics are long term.

So are you saying if the government wanted to subsidize chip development and had these choices:

A) Make resistive element chips out of wafers and all the normal complex chip patterning, using up the fab side of things and wafer space

B) Subsidize custom chip molecular simulation accelerators for cancer research, by providing the fab side of things and wafer space to design researchers or companies

A is as good as B?

No. Why do you think I'm saying that?

I'm saying that over the course of several years, A is better for chip advancement and availability than nothing at all. And in the real world it's A+B vs. just B, the same amount of B in both scenarios.

I'm not aware of Bitcoin reducing any cancer research budgets anywhere. Are you?

This would be like the government proposing buying up a big portion of argricultural tractors and running hours on them until their engines wear out, in order to help the economy make more tractors. Cash for clunkers without the environmental rationale.

That would be bad because of the CO2 emissions and because it's a huge waste of government money.

It would not be bad for long-term tractor availability, if they kept up big purchases for many years. Especially if tractors were a hotbed of research and improving by orders of magnitude.

Or to put it another way: It's a hugely inefficient way of boosting tractors, but it will in fact boost tractors. It's not a good idea overall, but it will have some positives.

This is written like the construction of a hydroelectric dam on an intermediate point at any elevation change in a river is an inevitable law of nature... ?

It's a choice whether to build a dam or not, but that choice will not change the amount of heat generated.

You could put that power to better use, but if you don't have something lined up then the waste of idle turbines bypassed by water is just as bad as the waste of mining bitcoins.

Hydro dams typically store water uphill for later. If you use it now, it's not there to use later.

In the case of a 'stranded' dam, there isn't likely to be a reason to generate power either now or later, so you might as well run BTC generation. I suspect this has been the motivation to build an awful lot of 'stranded' hydro dams, though...

You can store water in the short term. The long term view is simpler. The storage will eventually fill up if you're not using all the power, and at that point you either find a use or you dump the excess water and cause just as much waste heat.