> Bitcoin uses about .1% of the worlds power currently. 10x less than you have suggested

Your source says 0.2% on page 18, not 0.1%.

The New York Times says 0.5%. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/09/03/climate/bitco...

Add to that the rapid growth we've seen in the past, and I believe it is reasonable to say that we're rapidly approaching 1%.

> Flared gas in texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network currently uses.

While the amount of gas that is flared off is immense (25-30% of the actual consumption of the US and Europe), the problem is that it is only flared off because there are no pipelines to transport the gas away and the amount that the small oil wells produce is too low to justify the cost.

If it were for me I'd force oil well operators to either build a small secondary pipeline for flare gas alongside oil pipelines or place a small power generator to contribute to the electric grid, but unfortunately "regulation" of any kind is seen as a bad thing in wide parts of the US.

>Lastly, bitcoin mining to could sustained solely by using stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused.

You can make that argument about any sort of waste of electricity, like blasting your A/C with the windows open. The problem is you can't guarantee that people are only using wasted energy. People don't mine Bitcoin to generously find a use for surplus energy. They do so for a profit. Also, people will require mining for Bitcoin transactions regardless of whether there happens to be surplus energy.

You cannot have PoW running on burning a free or cheap resource, the entire point of PoW is that the resource you are burning is costly, which pushes up the amount burned to close to the break-even point.

The amount of energy consumed now is not at its current level because of some fixed power requirement of the network. It’s there due to competition. If power was cheaper miners would run their ops using more power and the only thing that would change would be more energy would be wasted.

> ... stranded energy, which would otherwise be unused. Flared gas in Texas, for instance, could provide more power than the network currently uses.

I do like the idea of using energy that would have otherwise gone to waste. Or the concept of putting mining hardware in remote areas where there is energy to be tapped, but no customers for it. I wonder about all the steam that emits from a nuclear plant's cooling tower. It seems like such a waste to let all that energy just go up into the air.

One thing that troubles me is the various reports of theft associated with mining. I occasionally see various stories of energy and CPU-time theft. Plus there was that truck full of GPUs that was recently stolen.

I wonder what parallels could be drawn to the California gold rush. Theft was probably rampant then too.