[Cryptography] An academic paper on Bitcoin's energy consumption

[Matt Corallo]

On 1/10/21 1:25 PM, John Levine wrote:
> If you had bitcoin miners sitting on standby, ready
> to turn on when the price drops and turn back off when it goes back up,
> you could argue that they're not generating any carbon.
> 
> On the other hand, I am not aware of any miners actually doing that.

There's a relatively new well-funded startup claiming a decent chunk of hashpower called Layer1 doing this already and 
Square recently announced a fund to invest in these types of Bitcoin mining operations. Not quite the same, but chinese 
bitcoin mining generally moves around seasonally - yes, I mean literally they pack up entire mining farms on trucks, 
drive them across the country, and plug them in somewhere else - based on the availability of cheap hydro during rainy 
seasons. This happens on a much larger scale, and you can occasionally measure the drop in hashrate while farms are 
moving around.

Still, in general, these types of deals are harder to negotiate with power companies in the west that often want 10-year 
contracts not trusting some rando bitcoin miner is going to be around next month, let alone in 10 years. Doesn't mean it 
can't happen, only that its happening very slowly.

> If we're going to build facilities to soak up peak power, I can think
> of battery banks and pumped storage for those dark still winter
> nights, or electrolysis to make H2 for ZEV trucks that are a lot more
> socially useful than looking for hashes with leading zeros.

No question, but grid-scale batteries are also only just starting to appear, and it'll be a while before there's enough 
of them to make a big dent, not to mention even if there are you may still have local/temporal inefficiencies in power 
markets.