<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jillesvangurp</author><text>The premise is that there no more worthier causes than bitcoin beyond the grid needs. That premise is simply false. You can use excess grid capacity for lots of useful things including water desalination, charging cars at off peak hours, producing hydrogen. These are all applications that can flexibly use clean&amp;#x2F;cheap power when it is available instead of putting a constant load on the grid. This solution would compete with all of that. Excess grid energy is a resource that we need to use more effectively. Wasting it on bitcoin is pointless. Nobody really needs bitcoin except those living on hoarding it; which is pretty much the only thing you can do with it.&lt;p&gt;In the same way a lot carbon capture schemes use clean energy to slightly reduce (but not completely solve) the amount of CO2 added to our atmosphere. A better use of that clean energy is to completely remove the need for adding more CO2 to our energy (rather than just partially) through alternatives that make better&amp;#x2F;more efficient use of the clean energy that these capture schemes take.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>SolarBatteryBitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/ARKInvest/SolarBatteryBitcoin</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>barathr</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to believe that something like this is possible, but I just don&amp;#x27;t get how this gets around the fact that every Joule that is used for bitcoin mining is a Joule that wasn&amp;#x27;t used somewhere else.  Even if many Joules of renewable power get wasted during periods of overproduction (mid-day in the summer in California), other more worthwhile loads could be shifted to use that power, because today it&amp;#x27;s negative-priced during such periods.  If bitcoin soaks up that power, it won&amp;#x27;t be negative-priced, and other loads won&amp;#x27;t be moved to use it, and they&amp;#x27;ll use power from non-renewable sources during some other time of day.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s all sorts of demand shifting that can be done. Most articles talk about washers and dryers, and certainly that&amp;#x27;s one smaller load, but also EV charging, pre-cooling of buildings during the summer (run the AC in houses full blast during the middle of the day so there&amp;#x27;s no need to run it in the early evening), etc.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>SolarBatteryBitcoin</title><url>https://github.com/ARKInvest/SolarBatteryBitcoin</url></story>