wc- · HackerTrans

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.

wc-

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

Totally agree! But this isn't the reality we live in today and you have proposed a potentially better option with no ideas on how to achieve it. What you need to focus on is how we can grow a better grid while achieving prepaid usage levels, guaranteed usage levels, and on-demand response. These factors are what lead to a more efficient, more climate friendly, more better etc etc grid.

wc-

vor 3 Jahrendiscuss

There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:

https://twitter.com/ogbtc/status/1699588007664275873

It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.

Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).

This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).

One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.

wc-

vor 4 Jahrendiscuss

This point is getting missed by a lot of people I think. FTX / Alameda had a part in funding almost all solana-based projects, and almost all of these fundings involved some kind of "use FTX as your bank" fundraising stipulation. So not only were they propping up the ecosystem with projects getting funding that might not have really deserved it, but now those projects have no treasuries.

The entire solana ecosystem is just nuked now and it isn't hard to see this in on-chain activity and project/dao comm's.

edit: as a dev solana had some nice implementation details and was a step forward over some other chains in some ways. IMO it's totally DOA now, but I hope the dev community (whoever is real and not an alameda-funded "anon" dev etc) continues on in some capacity on a fork or other chain.