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This seems healthy and totes normal

Playing the state’s energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin

"On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price soars, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin."

economist.com/united-states/20

The Economist · Why Texas Republicans are souring on cryptoBy The Economist
Robert J. Berger

@kims Cryptocurrency: Grift on top of scam on top of Ponzi scheme

@rberger @kims
And also, crypto is profoundly anti-nationalist, ultimately seeking to undermine the full faith and credit of the United States treasury and taxpayers.

@paninid @rberger @kims remember those wise people that founded the country? They had something to say about what happens when you let the government control the money

@feld @rberger @kims
“let the government control the money”? 🤨

I’m curious how you believe currencies have historically worked?

@paninid @rberger @kims you should probably do more research on this topic

> It was not until 1694 with the Bank of England—that is, after more than three hundred years of modern state building—that the foundations were laid for a true note-issuing central bank. And even then, the Bank of England did not begin as an institution that creates money and did not have a monopoly on issuing banknotes until 1844.

https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-governments-seized-control-money
Mises InstituteHow Governments Seized Control of Money | Mises InstituteIt took many centuries for regimes to secure the sort of prestige and power necessary to claim a monopoly over money. From the state's perspective, it has
@paninid @rberger @kims I'm not sure what you want me to take away from this because it's kind of a weird article that wanders and is ignoring some pretty big events like how the petrodollar came into existence

I'd start my criticism at the beginning with this here:

> The seeds of the January 6, 2021, insurrection can be traced back to the early 1900s, when industrialists concerned with the erosion of their wealth and power attempted to control the currency and restrict government spending. Later these forces, in alignment with America Firsters, aggrieved veterans, and antisemitic splinter groups that mirrored various features of European fascism, including white supremacists, rallied to oppose Roosevelt and the New Deal.

like how can you even write this without acknowledging that Roosevelt himself campaigned against the New Deal. The New Deal was fucking written by Hoover. Let me cite this:

> It is a little-known fact, carefully airbrushed from the history books,
that in the 1932 U.S. general election, Hoover ran on a highly interven-
tionist platform while Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran on a platform of
fiscal and monetary responsibility. Americans had actually voted against
Hoover's policies, but when FDR got into power, he found it more con-
venient to play along with the interests that had influenced Hoover, and
as a result, the interventionist policies of Hoover were amplified into
what came to be known as the New Deal. It's important to realize there
was nothing unique or new about the New Deal. It was a magnification
of the heavily interventionist policies which Hoover had instituted.

edit: this quote source is from The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous, page 50

But can you trust that? Let's go back to 1932 and get a quote from someone who was involved in the government at the time:

> Tugwell later conceded that "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started... When it was all over I once
made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover's years as secretary of com-
merce and then as president. I had to concluded that his policies were substantially
correct. The New Deal owed much to what he had begun. ... Hoover had
wanted- and had said clearly enough that he wanted - nearly all the changes now
brought under the New Deal label."

Rexford G. Tugwell, "Flaws in the Hoover Economic Plan," Current History, Jan-
uary 1932, 531.

Tugwell quoted in Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert
Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston, Little, Brown, 1975), 158; see also Tugwell,
Roosevelt's Revolution: The First Year, a Personal Perspective (New York: Macmillan,
1977), xili-xiv; and Tugwell, The Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968), xxii.


edit: and here's another reference to this

https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover-new-deal
HISTORY · Before FDR, Herbert Hoover Tried His Own ‘New Deal’By Christopher Klein

@rberger @kims I am … going to go for "chaotic neutral" on this one, due to my personal experience with my house on the wholesale energy market

The underlying good news on this is that the grid is flooded with cheap clean energy on sunny days, and that's a good thing to begin with, a good thing to end with, and in the middle requires some reassessing assumptions and norms

What I want the future discussion to be is to split:
- What we make with energy
and
- How we generate & timeshift energy

@rberger @kims The Economist is usually better than this, but the article didn't mention batteries, just saying "sell power back to providers" without explaining generation or time-shifting

I can't judge the harmfulness until I know if a loophole exists that's being exploited. In the past we've seen rebates and bonus tariffs — but they're always temporary, always subsidised.

But if it's what I'm using — pure market prices — then it's both sustainable and (partly) virtuous to sell power.

@rberger @kims The sentence "Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself" is about a really interesting dynamic — but shouldn't be so provocative.

Flat tariffs, typical retail pricing is an artificial construct. True demand is variable, and cheap renewable energy (wind & solar) is variable too.

And just as important — battery storage is far easier & cheaper than old nuclear, vaporware modular flavour even more so, and "exists" more than thorium or fusion.

Time-shifting is GOOD …

@rberger @kims The basic mental rearrangement is that Lunch = Cheap, Dinner = Expensive.

And yes that really means you can run a profit AND use more than you export. But only if you consume power when it's … sunny? Windy? Honestly, no harm no foul.

I'm keeping one eye out for abuses of course — and subsidies exist everywhere, exemptions too. If everybody played by the same rules there'd be milk and honey for all.

But "baseload" linear generation & consumption 24/7 is a fiction.

@rberger @kims In my case, I'm absolutely paying a flat fee for grid connection, another for retail operations, and a demand fee for all the grid power I consume 3pm-9pm (yes, I try and succeed to keep that to zero).

Most importantly, the energy I export is worth 10¢/kWh less than the same energy I import.

After all that, I still make a profit most months — not to mention, in the summer half, pumping 3x more solar into the grid than my house consumes.

@rberger @kims A chunk of the reason I can make that profit is the "emergency" days when three or more things go wrong on the grid, e.g. sun has set, wind is seasonally calm, and then an interconnector fails. (Bad Texas, bad bad Texas, you should stop being anti-interconnection with other states because "ideology").

The upshot of this is that I get paid a month's bills in one night, but that's because my energy is SUPER useful to the grid's stability.

Cheaper than building spare power plants!

@rberger @kims So I struggle a bit to criticise *this* element of the crypto miners' operation

In fact … surely … if they're shifting business model, it's an improvement if anything

The final original bitcoin will be mined in a few years anyway, but I'm quite happy to debate "what's a waste of resources" and how to incentivise things correctly … or stop perversions that incentivise the wrong things.

One of the questions is: What resources are limited? We can make > 1000x more solar than now

@rberger @kims The context of that last sentence is that a solar farm the size of Manhattan or Monaco can power entire countries … it's a ridiculously good news story

Solar in 2024 is NOT what solar in 2014 was, or 2019

It's powerful AF.

My house is the tiniest on the street, 100 years old. For several hours in a sunny summer day, I generate 5x more than I can use … if I try REALLY hard. Over a 24-hour period, it's 3x.

Winter is 30% as strong. I sized my system based on my heat pump need.