Playing [Texas’s] energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin (www.economist.com)

submitted 2 months ago by swlabr@awful.systems to c/buttcoin@awful.systems

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On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, 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 of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

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[-] bjorney@lemmy.ca 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Homeowners aren't signing contracts where they agree to use exactly 450MW of power at a constant rate 24/7 for the entire year. The problem with "Free market" utilities is that they are reliant on private sector contracts like this to fund expansion

From a business perspective, if the grid can handle the residential load 99.9% of the year, paying these businesses to cut usage during that other 0.1% of the time is a LOT cheaper than expanding their service to add one more decimal place of uptime that sits idle for the entire year

Cloud platforms like AWS/Google/Azure do something similar, where you can rent unused servers for pennies on the dollar with the expectation they can be reprovisioned by someone else on a seconds notice

this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024

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