Comment Re:No real surprise here (Score 2) 90
Bitcoin is generally wasteful, but miners can be turned on/off at will, so it provides a way to 'burn off' excess energy from renewable sources during low demand, while keeping it available for peak demand times.
I don't think there is generally that much "excess energy" as there is energy PRICED OUTSIDE THE RANGE PEOPLE WOULD USE IT. Get that energy to people or even industry to use it for 1/10 or 1/100 or whatever (there's no lower limit if it really is "excess" that nobody would use it except to compete in a pointless contest for cryptocurrencies) and I'm sure both private persons and the industry would find some use for it.
It's like the nonsense with that crypto using hard drive space, people would just use free space (which is something usually much less dynamic than spot electricity consumption), in 100GB increments on their hard drives, even boot SSDs. That was the theory, just use free space. Suuure, next step you get "regular people" showing pictures with 500 TBs of hard drives, while waiting to have delivered 500TB more. That is for small apartment operations, as there are multiple bigger ones even today, years after the hype mostly died out hogging hundreds of PBs that spin for nothing and pat themselves on the back about how green their shitty coin is.