At the per kWh price a lot of these miners contract for, it’s profitable even with older hardware. These arrangements also help extend the lifespan of older hardware.
If you’re asking why a referral program would forbid the listing of referral links on coupon sites, I’d imagine it’s because most people visiting a coupon aggregator are already on the website checkout page ready to make a purchase. You’re not referring these customers and bringing someone new to the table.
Not all electricity is created equal. I don’t think Bitcoin miners should be allowed to fire up an old coal power plant just for the sake of mining Bitcoin, but in the case of renewables, like hydro, wind, solar, etc., there is going to be, at times, more electricity generated than we can use or store. All other use cases aside, the ability for Bitcoin miners to turn excess or otherwise wasted electricity into revenue is to the benefit of 99.9% of US citizens by way of lower power bills and/or property taxes.
That’s pretty cool if you ask me. Being able to approve and move forward with a big solar or wind farm project because you have a Bitcoin miner willing to partner with you for the excess electricity generated seems like a win-win to me. Again, we obviously don’t want Bitcoin miners using dirty electricity or straining the grid in peak times where higher priority use cases arise, but that’s a matter of governance and oversight.
It’s relevant now. We don’t have ways to store days or weeks worth of the excess energy many renewable sources produce. When you have somewhere for that energy to go when it can’t otherwise be used, and you’re getting paid for it, you can subsidize the cost of producing a more robust infrastructure that eliminates or greatly reduces the need for traditional power plants that cause environmental harm.
Bitcoin mining is globally distributed and doesn’t come to a halt when a particular facility or even a whole region has to shutdown because excess energy is not available.
What does obsolete mean to you? There’s nothing obsolete about a 2019 iPad Pro. It received the most recent iPadOS update and it’ll certainly receive an update to iPadOS 17. The hardware is as good or better than current entry level iPads. The battery should still be good, but maybe yours needs replaced.