the public dismay at the carbon footprint of crypto is always fascinating to me. The network rewards are setup in such a way the the most profitable miners are the ones with the cheapest electricity as this is their biggest overhead. This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables
> This pushes miners to the cheapest forms of electricity, i.e renewables
I would love for this to be true (and that's why I used to believe it). But there are two problems with this:
• Renewables aren't the cheapest form of electricity; low-value (dirty-burning) or subsidised fossil fuels are cheaper in many places. You've heard of people buying and re-commissioning old coal power stations for crypto mining, I'm sure?
• Using any grid electricity drives up the price of other electricity, by market forces. The effect is local, but when cryptomining is happening globally, that's a global effect. That means that otherwise-infeasible inefficient (and polluting) electricity generation is now viable.
Greenest ≠ cheapest. If this were a universal truth, we wouldn't have a climate problem in the first place.
From https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/electricity_prices/ - the countries with the cheapest energy prices (and show up in the hash rates) are those that are using fossil fuels (and likely trying to subsidize those prices from the government to avoid civil unrest).
