Articles that benchmark this way aim for more clicks to make the headline interesting but not new.
Bitcoin carries a market with a capacity of about a trillion dollars and the network needs energy to ensure its continuity.
Mining equipment uses clean energies and can easily be converted to zero emissions in a short time unlike many other energy-consuming things.
yes the article is clickbait and people like badecker fall for it.
anyway, for clarity:
bitcoins market does not have a trillion dollar capacity.
bitcoins market price is based on the current price of bitcoins single trade at a single time
the market cap is just a multiplication of that single trade at single time. there is no huge bank account holding $1 trill
my 'valuation' of bitcoin is never based on the 'market cap' (empty multiplication of no meaning)
my valuation of bitcoin is on the underlying value. how much money is being spent to secure the network and mine coins. because no one will sell a coin for less than it cost to mine/obtain. and no one would mine if its easier to just buy. so a true value baseline of substance and support is in the bottomline mining cost
($21k a coin=(
meaningless marketcap multiplier value of $391b for those still loving cap values))
..
that said.
most major mining farms have contracts with utility companies. they do not buy out the domestic/residential supply allotment. instead they buy out the 'excess' electric. the difference between how much electric capacity a company can produce vs how much is actually used(capacity:supply:utility. 3 different things).
yep electric companies usually have a capacity of 120, supply say 110 constantly, where by the actual utility is only97. whereby normally that excess 13 goes to waste. unpaid for
bitcoin mining farms buy into that 13 with a contract of constant need/utility.
this then gives electric companies 13% profit for doing nothing more then pumping out what they always do. they can use this money to buy more generators(increase capacity potential above 120) or keep the generators working without having to turn off because they are even more profitable just to let it flow.
so everyone is happy
bitcoin miners have set their farms to only increase their hash by 1-5% periodically. because they dont want to shoot themselves in the foot spiking the difficulty. but they also upgrade the farms hardware where the electric efficiency per hash gets better. so that the 1-5% hash increases periodically are not even 1-5% electric increases.
last point to make
bitcoin miners if all farms moved to argentina. then yes there wont be enough 'excess' contractable capacity for all of them. and yes in that situation they would be then eating into residential utility and causing brownouts.
..but mining farms are distributed across many countries. so each one is snipping only small chunks of individual countries 'excess'. thus not even harming the residential utility, but instead helping electric companies expand their capacity
