Texas paid Bitcoin miner more than $31M to cut energy usage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605 - Sept 2023 (130 comments)
Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 - Sept 2023 (55 comments)
Again, grid stability at the lowest cost is the name of the game.
An aluminum smelter uses a humongous amount of power to, well, smelt aluminum. Due to the square-cube law the aluminum takes a really long time to cool back down. When you are trying to heat something from 20C to 700C it doesn't really matter if you take a break in the middle of the heating cycle. Sure, it might cool down from 500C back to 450C, but who cares?
As long as they get paid enough to make up for their workers getting an unscheduled paid day off, the smelter really isn't going to complain too much.
Not really. NIST did a really good introductory blockchain technology whitepaper in 2018:
* https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/ir/8202/final
Figure 6 is a decision flowchart laying out whether blockchain or some other technology would be best for various needs / use cases, and blockchain is very niche:
* https://twitter.com/justincormack/status/1048875246437195778
Needing both distributed and trustless simultaneous isn't common, especially in the modern, connected world:
> Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future.
* Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s
It’s so slow and cumbersome that the vast majority of use is via banks, making it effectively quite centralized. It’s so volatile it’s a horrible currency so its main role is gambling and speculation. It’s pretty useless as the basis for decentralized communication or storage systems for a variety of reasons.
The only decentralize app even tangentially related to Bitcoin I’ve ever seen be marginally useful is Nostr, and Bitcoin has nothing to do with how that works. It’s tacked on as an afterthought. Nostr is just a straight up relay-facilitated peer to peer network with cryptographic addressing.
If anything the presence of Bitcoin makes Nostr worse by flooding it with spam, endless chatter about sending Satoshis, and stupid laser eye memes.
Some lobbyists must have lined some pockets.
The issue with "pure" surge pricing is that it doesn't solve the actual problem. Most businesses - even "non-essential" ones will have fixed-price electricity contracts. They are not affected by surge pricing on the electricity market and have zero incentive to reduce their usage even when the market price spikes 100x.
In practice the "market forces" here are a bunch of Wall Street investors losing a shitton of money because their bets went sideways, but that is not going to fix the grid itself.
