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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
“demand for wind farms” and whether that is good or bad or neutral is a matter of analysis.I don’t personally care for or have any bitcoin or crypto, but I suppose it’s interesting to think about how that functions as a general speculative commodity and how that type of speculation compares to the other types in the economy. A first order analysis might say “buying real assets like grain commodities does more for the economy than buying what amounts to burned up megawatts”, though it is interesting to consider how bitcoin has affected the demand for new electricity build out. We have heard some horror stories of carbon intensive bitcoin mining but there is also more demand for electricity in general and electricity providers will spend some of their build out on green technologies.All that said I’m pessimistic that simply burning megawatts as a form of market demand generation is even remotely optimal. In my view direct government investment in green energy buildouts would be more economically efficient and environmentally beneficial (I’ve not yet studied how China is doing it but if I wanted to know more about what’s possible I’d certainly research what they are doing). It is probably fair to say “bitcoin as a means of stimulating green energy growth is a poor allocation of finite resources”.So maybe the net value is zero or negative. But there is some value and some harm this type of thing invites. By that logic even criminals are of value to an economy. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to prevent crime. Actually we certainly should not do everything in our power to prevent crime. The net costs would be way too high. We tolerate a certain amount of crime on purpose because preventing all preventable crimes would be prohibitively expensive and restrictive on society. The fact that we have to pick and choose how to best prevent crime does not mean the crimes themselves are beneficial to our economy. And like I said in my original comment, at this scale it’s easy (and relatively cheap) to ban
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