Hatorade
A nice asshole.
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Makes sense...fuck weed, fuck them womens rights...fuck your electricity options and your power grid. We gonna be the first to get into digital currency.
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Bitcoins/Litecoins/Virtual Currencies
- Thread starter Tripamang
- Start date
Makes sense...fuck weed, fuck them womens rights...fuck your electricity options and your power grid. We gonna be the first to get into digital currency.
Tmac
Adventurer
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Weed and women's right? This is the crypto thread, not the woke retards thread.
In the spirit of the aktual thread topic, this is good for Bitcoin.
Flobee
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I'll leave the first two aside and address the third. Bitcoin has been a net positive for the Texas power grid. That's unanimously accepted by everyone involved. The flexibility of Bitcoin miners (can turn or on or off instantly) makes it economical for the grid to run a higher base load and thus have the ability to adapt to increase power requirements from the grid.
Bitcoin makes the power grid more resilient.
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Khane
Got something right about marriage
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Tmac
Adventurer
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Um wat?
Basically, Bitcoin becomes hackable soon? Why not my bank account? It has way less encryption, lol.
Khane
Got something right about marriage
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Why do you think your bank account has way less encryption? You believe that Bitcoin has proprietary security that is leaps and bounds ahead of our financial sector?
Really?
Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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The "Bitcoin is saving the grid" narrative is way more marketing than reality. Yes, miners can curtail load quickly. But the reason they need to curtail is because they're drawing massive amounts of power in the first place. They're not adding resilience out of charity, they're getting paid to turn off because they're a major source of discretionary demand.
If you remove miners, the grid doesn't suddenly become fragile. ERCOT existed long before Bitcoin mining and managed peak events without a single ASIC in sight. What's changed is that Bitcoin miners inserted a huge, optional load and now get compensated for not using it during stress. That's not "making the grid more resilient," that's being paid as a flexible burden.
The higher baseload argument is also selective. A grid doesn't need Bitcoin miners to justify infrastructure expansion - it needs predictable demand. Miner demand is only "predictable" as long as BTC price stays high enough to justify their operations. If BTC tanks, miners unplug instantly, which means the "baseload expansion" justification evaporates just as fast.
Arden
Vyemm Raider
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if Shor’s algorithm ever becomes practically dangerous, your bank account (as it is now) would be toast long before your Bitcoin wallet is.
The biggest realistic danger for BTC is actually Satoshi’s wallets. His wallets are basically the world's biggest quantum honeypots
Edit: gotta point this out- both bank accounts and active bitcoin wallets are relatively easy to Q proof. Dead wallets like Satoshi’s that have a known public key are another matter.
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Flobee
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Go look at a hashrate chart, yes some miners unplug but most keep going. Price drops don't significantly impact hashrate. A grid needs demand, Bitcoin mining is ideal demand.
Are you just arguing for the sake of arguing? This isn't controversial at all.
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Haus
I am Big Balls!
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Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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You're overstating a very narrow point and inflating it into a universal truth. Yes, Bitcoin miners can act as interruptible load, and yes ERCOT has found ways to monetize that flexibility. Nobody is denying that Bitcoin mining can be a net positive in certain grid architectures with certain pricing regimes.
But here's the part you're skipping: It isn't because Bitcoin is magical grid infrastructure - it's because any large, interruptible, price-sensitive load provides the same benefit. It doesn't have to be proof-of-work hash operations. Data centers, desalination, aluminum smelting, compute farms, synthetic fuel production, etc. They all serve the same function.
Bitcoin just happens to be the current buyer of last resort because mining is mobile, energy-price sensitive, indifferent to geography and revenue-generating. But that's not a property of Bitcoin the asset, it's a property of any industry where revenue > marginal energy cost.
And as far as, "Go look at a hashrate chart… price drops don’t significantly impact hashrate." - Hashrate tracks price with a lag, every cycle. When price falls far enough for long enough, miners capitulate. It's happened in every bear market since genesis. In 2014 you had miner wipeouts, in 2018 you had miner bankruptcies, and in 2022 you had core scientific implodes.
The hashrate doesn't magically stay because miners "believe." It stays because price hasn't been low enough, long enough, to kill them. If BTC hits sustained unprofitability, hashrate will fall, because electricity bills don't care about ideology.
Also, saying Bitcoin provides "ideal demand" glosses over the fact that it adds volatility to load forecasts, it distorts power pricing signals, it competes directly with ratepayers for energy, and its economic incentive to locate in distressed grids is not altruism. If the U.S. tax regime, energy pricing rules, or emissions laws change, that "grid benefit" evaporates overnight.
It's a temporary alignment of incentives. Treating that as a universal truth instead of a contingent one is why this starts to sound less like economics and more like evangelism.
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Flobee
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I mean... Duh dude.
I was very clearly speaking about the specific energy situation in Texas under ERCOT. Look at the post I'm replying to.
My point regarding hashrate is that's it's constantly climbing and will continue to do so. Obviously if Bitcoin fails in some way that trend ends. Yes price affects individual miners and taken to the extreme it would stop them all, but as a whole hashrate goes up and to the right. As you see more stranded energy being harnessed you'll see an even lower effect of price on hashrate. Mining growth as an industry will continue to decrease short term price movements effect on hashrate.
I'm not overstating anything, you're attributing a meaning that I'm not saying. You're once again seemingly arguing with phantom "Bitcoin maxis" making arguments that nobody actually makes.
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Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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You said...
Sure, you're responding to a post about Texas, but when you aren't specific in your statements regarding power grids, it doesn't necessarily mean you were specifically talking about ERCOT. There's a lot left to interpretation there.
If your claim is, "Bitcoin mining has been beneficial for ERCOT under current market conditions." We agree.
But if your claim is, "Bitcoin transforms global energy grids and ensures resilience everywhere." You're going to need more than hashrate charts and optimism.
It sounds like it's the former after clarification. But without the specificity, that's where the disconnect was.
Your hashrate point doesn't prove what you think it does. Hashrate trending upward means miners believe future prices will rise, not that Bitcoin inherently stabilizes power markets. If price tanks long enough, yes, hashrate drops and there's no magical "up and to the right" law shielding miners from economics. The fact some miners unplug while others don't isn't a strength argument, it's a survivorship one.
You keep framing this as if I'm arguing against things nobody said, but I'm reacting to the statement "Bitcoin makes the power grid more resilient" - a universal claim, not a Texan footnote without specifics. ERCOT found a clever use case. Cool. That doesn’t translate into global energy policy, sovereign grid design, or evidence of inevitable mining integration everywhere. It's not "arguing for the sake of arguing" to point out the boundary between what Bitcoin has done in a specific regulatory sandbox vs. what you were seemingly trying to imply it will do everywhere. That's the exact distinction you keep blurring, which is why this conversation feels circular.
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Tmac
Adventurer
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I did some deep research and found a real photo ofKirun I truly have been defeated in this thread.
View attachment 610737
Dude def has a punchable face.