We already had some big Bitcoin mining operations in progress during the last outage. It turns out they just dialed down production, which they can do, unlike folks who need air conditioning or heat. And then guess what happened?
But thanks to the way Texas power companies deal with large electricity customers like Whinstone, Harris’s bitcoin mine, one of the few owned by a publicly traded company, didn’t suffer. Instead, the state’s electricity operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), began to pay Whinstone — for having agreed to quit buying power amid heightened demand.
“Right now, Texas has some of the lowest kilowatt hour prices in America,” says the narrator in this Wired video. “That’s due in part to a deregulated energy market…”
This is the deregulated energy market that falls over when it gets too hot or too cold - right? So extra strain is put on a creaking system built on fossil fuels to perpetuate the Bitcoin scam?
Brandon Arvanaghi, a U.S.-based bitcoin mining engineer
I suppose that there are complex technical problems involved in scaling up crypto-mining to that scale, but you could say the same about building a 200 ton fidget-spinner. Grr.
