This is a very deep question about energy, not just about bitcoin mining. And ranges the gambit of tapping free sources of energy, that were, until now, cost prohibitive, all the way to giant data centers plugged into their own nuclear power plant.
Everything is about to change. Everything is changing.
Where we get our electricity
How we use our electricity
Right now, energy is money - money is energy.
Today the petro-dollar, tomorrow hydro-bitcoin?
We are still using 100 year old technology to make electricity. And no one is paying for electrical expansion to provide for our needs during heat waves. No stingy corporation wants to invest throw money down an infinite hole that won't return a profit.
However, bitcoin miners looking for inexpensive energy, without any constraint about where, are looking to "invest".
Lots and lots of oil wells just burn off the natural gas (or just let it bleed off into the atmosphere). It is too costly to capture and move. But, a little NG powered generator and a bitcoin mining block, and it is suddenly useful / usable.
There are lots of places you can build a tiny hydro-electric dam. They are just remote. Too hard to hook up to the grid. Too small to bother hooking it up to the grid. But, bitcoin miners don't care about remote.
Max Keiser is down in El Salvador drilling into volcanoes for free energy to mine bitcoin, AND, at the same time, bringing more El Salvadorians electricity. The volcanoes have always been there, but now, they are producing "free" electricity.
There is sooo much of this "free" energy that there is a company building modified shipping containers, just drop in place, fully enclosed bitcoin mining operation.
We, in this space, have all heard about the guy who is now heating his house with bitcoin miners. However, this only works with really cheap bitcoin miners. Because you aren't using them half the year.
However, there are dump-resistors all over the place.
When you are producing electricity. You need a constant load. If everyone suddenly turns off all the lights, you HAVE TO divert that energy somewhere, and you have less than a few seconds to do that. Thus, dump-resistors. They are at all the sub-stations and power stations, and hydroelectric dams… they are everywhere.
Dump-resistors turn electricity into heat. And keep the power plants and the electric lines from melting down.
But, even better would be to have a source of resistance load, that is variable, that can actively be used to balance electric loads. And so, in has come the bitcoin miner. With controls from the electric company to manage how many miners are on at any moment.
The electric company can sell all their excess power, and they get a constant, known, controllable, resistance load.
(There are two load types, resistance and inductive. Resistance = light bulb. Inductive = motor, like in a refrigerator. And you NEEED enough resistance load. If you set up a little hydroelectric dam, you NEED a dump-resistor to start the thing up. You HAVE TO have a load on the electrical system else it runs away, or seizes. And so, you start the generator with it hooked up to the dump-resistor, and slowly, as real loads are put onto the line, switch off the dump-resistor)
Well, it doesn't really matter if we (the people forming small communities) drill a bunch of geo-thermal wells and are now generating our own electricity OR we create some kind of electrogravitics or magnet motor or aether power.
The only question is how fast are we creating this tech.
If we can power all the bitcoin miners that we can make, how long till we cook the planet? Do we want to continue with our method of mining bitcoin?
Here is what WILL happen in the future: The people form into tribes/"families"/small communities. And each of these will have a "bitcoin" server and we will have some kind of a Proof of Existence algorithm. Where each good community is know, located, and digitally acknowledged. And this will be the block chain of the future. And it will probably be working out best barter paths…
Right now, we have a lot of bad actors, and people who would be a bad actor if it was cheap enough. And so, bitcoin's proof of work system works really well. But that POW only works when electricity has a cost, and the costs is what keeps too many bad actors from showing up. As electrical costs move toward zero, we may see bad actors actively trying to break the PoW system.
We can imagine some evil country, or group, like The US, or their controllers those mother WEFers, building nuclear powered bitcoin mining centers. Who cares how much electricity you are wasting, if someone else (the American people) is paying for it. Think about what we will/can do when this happens. When people greedy enough to ignore cooking the world, try to take over bitcoin.
It is fascinating that bitcoin is solving world energy problems. Going around the big G&E companies and their dinosaur ways.
Bitcoin was bought/mined by people who could see the future. And these people, suddenly with millions may be the financing we need to build things like small community sized geo-thermal power plants. Or have enough funds to buy local politicians and creating a giant paddle wheel on the coast to create wave-energy electric plant.
The big players in the old money really want to stay in control of power. They like the petro-world. Where you can continually sell oil, which your customer will burn away, and then want more. Keep this money wheel spinning until the land is barren and the people are bankrupt. None of them will release their grip on this power, even if it means they will destroy the world.
And so we have to go around this group and create our own electrical systems. Technically it is not that hard. Politically it is a nightmare. People who have actually made things like the water powered car, have all mysteriously died or disappeared.
It will really take people operating completely differently. Money people with a good heart and enough bitcoin to spend on insane projects. Inventors who feel open-source is the way to go. People who aren't afraid to disturb the people behind those who operate in the shadows. Once all this gets out, there is nothing T.H.E.Y. can do. And it will get out.
