What the hell is is with cryptocurrency proponents and trying to redefine words to suit their narrative? First Bitcoin was NOT fiat currency (despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition), then it was also a store of value (despite it being a horrible store of value, a high-risk high-reward investment is more accurate). Now it's supposed to be a battery? When the energy being put into it is basically pure waste?
There is no way to make aluminum other than putting huge amounts of energy. Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it. There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions, or even to do proof-of-work cryptocurrency (if you feel that's necessary), besides using Bitcoin. With aluminum you can even reverse the process and use it as an actual battery. With Bitcoin you can't. The energy is burned forever.
I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.
You need to have a triadic understanding of bitcoin, this is what allows it to be a flat currency, a store of value, and a battery at both one and the same time, through the act of transubstantiation of the coin a quantum state is triggered that allows the individual coin to choose which form it will manifest itself as.
You're spot on, in fact, the superposition is key. You see, bitcoin is actually a time machine. Every block entangles itself with a coordinate in spacetime. This allows anyone in the future to relive any moment in the past by just entering the block number they want to visit.
Unfortunately, this same architecture gave birth to both artificial intelligence because of the way it mimics DNA, and a black hole. The inevitable faith of a configuration of matter permeating all spacetime is the end of the universe.
Thank you bitcoin, the worst ecological disaster, like, ever!
It's interesting how your comment hasn't been flagged into the ground and garnered a response from dang. I guess sarcastic flamebait is OK when it agrees with the HN hivemind.
(meanwhile, my comment will be flagged in 3... 2... 1...)
> I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.
I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit.
> There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions
Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. The distinction is important, because that's why Proof of Work exists and is energy intensive in the first place.
Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.
> It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party.
Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.
They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.
Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically.
I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.
I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.
I believe that this will follow the usual technobubble pattern, pump energy (money) until it blows, gather the remaining working bits on the ground afterwards and come back in 10 years.
> Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.
Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so.
I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time.
There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed?
There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments.
It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved?
But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.
You don't think bitcoin should be valuable. Your point is fine, but it really doesn't address the article at all!
Assuming bitcoin stays valuable, does it make sense to use bitcoin mining to augment some power projects? Like using otherwise wasted energy to mine or to mine in places where it might not be easy to transmit the electricity?
Actual batteries would be a better choice than consuming the energy at the time it is created. Investing in better transmission infrastructure would increase this benefit.
Bitcoin is P2P software. Every model that doesn't start there is wrong. Certainly most hype pieces start somewhere else. All critiques do. It's easy to ignore them.
'Pure waste' is very much a point of view. If you dislike porn, the entire energy to create and distribute that, is 'pure waste' in your view (last time I looked, streaming porn consumes about the same amount of energy as Bitcoin. This probably changed by now). If, like me, you dislike billboards, all those giant flaring screens, burning neon, or LCD pixels, screaming to make you buy Pepsi, is 'pure waste'.
If you dislike Bitcoin, obviously any kilowatt used by it is 'pure waste'.
The vast difference here is that the energy consumption required by Bitcoin is integral to its model. The stated goal is to make massive amount of otherwise useless computations.
If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we consume less electricity.
As soon as there is a new way to do bitcoin related operations using less electricity (eg: ASICS), the security of the network decreases. And everyone moves to the new model, in order to go back to consuming a lot of electricity, in order to restore trust in the network.
On a macro scale, Bitcoin has to consume lots of electricity, any possible improvement in that area needs to be wiped out by just people going back to consuming more electricity, otherwise the model fails. The whole bitcoin trust model revolves around people being ready to waste a ton energy for it. That's not the case of porn, or billboards: the energy consumption is just a side effect and not a requirement, they have value outside of the consumed electricity. Bitcoin entire value is only dependent on how much people are willing to invest in it, which roughly translates on how much electricity is wasted.
A waste by most societal measures. Purely imaginary point backed by nothing that is easily defrauded and highly volatile. With no societal or personal value. And we've chosen to burn gigawatts of energy on this foolish game. Its easy to see it as enormous waste.
I agree with the sentiment, but this part is way off:
> [...] despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition [...]
FIAT currencies are by design inflationary to enhance spending. Bitcoin is deflationary _by design_. Since there's no bank or state backing Bitcoin, the only way that bitcoin makes sense was/is deflation. This quality makes BTC an asset and that's what it is, a digital asset. As a currency BTC has already failed.
A fiat currency is any currency that isn't backed by a commodity, i.e. it's not redeemable for a certain quantity of the commodity by the issuer, and bitcoin falls squarely into this category.
I think of the government part as largely an accident; my definition of fiat money is “money that has value solely because the transacting parties say it has, and not intrinsic uses” - historically the way to get people to agree something intrinsically value-less has value was by government decree, but there are lots of exceptions. I think of the Yapannese rei stones as fiat money, for example (though there is some question about them having inherent value). Basically any money that isn’t commodity money (or directly redeemable for commodities) is a fiat money.
Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.
> Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.
That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold.
Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline or food.
This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin. If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart.
Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
This is an excellent take on why the Grossman's idea is plainly idiotic [0]. You don't get more bitcoin for more electricity, you just get more security. The system itself can reach a state when you need 51% of whole planet electricity and computation devices locked into it to be perfectly secure. Thats frankly scary.
[0] https://elad-verbin.medium.com/bitcoin-is-not-a-battery-it-i...
Idiotic all the way. If aluminum can be perceived as a battery, then everything else can be. "Poop as a Battery (PaaB)" (am I the first to use this?)(no I won't DDG it).
In that sense, Bill Gatess "Reinvented Toilet" does kinda the same. People pee and poop, sewage is processed and is converted to clean water and can produce energy [0]. Thus PaaB(!?)
> Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power nothing also appears nonsensical at first glance, yet it actually happens to the point that energy prices can go negative.
For one, some forms of renewable energy are highly volatile and can not just be made to match demand under any circumstance. Hence there is a need for batteries to store this otherwise worthless energy. Today, these batteries just don't exist, wind farms are ideally backed up by gas plants, whose output can be regulated to even out wind volatility. In other cases, wind is backed up by coal or nuclear plants which can not be regulated as well, hence more of that wind energy goes to waste.
Secondly, especially in the case of China, these renewable energy projects are meant to raise the domestic product and production capacity numbers, with little regard to actual demand. The electricity grid to deliver all that energy to actual consumers is an afterthought.
In due time, these problems shall be solved. Better ways to store volatile renewable energy will emerge, better transmission infrastructure will arise. Bitcoin could be a stepping stone to solve the hen-egg part of that problem.
It’s so totally misguided IMO that I feel like I am maybe not understanding that.
It seems to inspired or in the spirit of ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson.
“ It’s called Carbon Coin in the book, a Bitcoin-like currency that the Ministry gives out for carbon sequestration — that is, any project that sucks CO2 out of the air, whether it’s carbon capture or farmers rewilding their fields — at a rate of one coin to one ton. Oil companies get coins if they stop being oil companies, basically, leaving their assets in the ground for a century or so. Coins can then be bought and sold on currency exchanges like any other.”
The only argument I can see is that the sheer resource hunger will force our hand in using renewable energy. Of course, I am not saying this is a good argument at all.
There is no such thing as virtual energy. And the other forms of payment we use are a million times more energy effective.
What bothers me is that newsletters as this one who I believe are widely read serve this up as a good idea.
> If bitcoin was changed to require a fraction the amount of electricity all of these ideas would suddenly fall apart
This is actually a weird game theory problem because there are a lot a miners with expensive hardware that would be worthless if such a change happened. You could fork it, but you'd have to attract miners after burning them (possible if commodity GPUs were viable, again), and you'd have to convince people that the new tokens are also valuable, and this isn't just Bitcoin Cash II.
Bitcoin has odd, long-term systemic risks based around miners.
Yes. Energy spent on Bitcoin is energy not spent on something else, even in a world where everything is powered by renewable energy. We do not live in a world where everything is renewable, and renewable energy spent on Bitcoin means whatever non-renewable power is being used elsewhere instead of being eliminated. It is also a myth that renewables have no negative environmental impact: metals have to be mined/smelted/etc., chemicals of various kinds are used, and there is waste from the manufacturing processes. Ideally we would be working towards more efficient technologies that use less energy to accomplish whatever task (and for the most part we have been doing that).
All energy generation is bad for the environment, just more or less bad. Solar cells and wind power might be "renewable", but it requires a lot of metals and material to build (and also energy), they disturb natural habitat etc. They are much better than coal, oil and gas, but they are not harmless. It's better to avoid using energy if possible than using renewable energy.
Yes, because those renewables could be powering people's homes and productive equipment, or powering conventional payment systems with plenty capacity left over. It's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but plenty of crypto exists that doesn't need this much power.
Depends. Could those renewables go to other applications? If so, then using them for BTC means that somebody else must use carbon. If instead the renewables were located in places where it was not possible to move the energy to more useful locations or if the entire world ran on zero-emission power, then it'd be much less of a concern.
I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.
> This seems like a pretty flawed idea and an attempt to justify the incredible amount of electricity required by bitcoin.
It's not "required", it's only that high because it has so much success. Bitcoin would be working with only one miner running, the first blocks were minted on a private computer.
Sorry but that's BS, It absolutely requires the energy. If it would be running on a privet computer still then anyone with such a computer could double spend which would make it useless regardless of success.
Bitcoin’s price is backed by the sunk cost of energy used to mine it. If any critical mass of miners began using cheap or free renewable energy, the price of BTC would fall precipitously.
Miners have, in the past, resisted improvements to the network that would reduce their profits so this all seems pretty unlikely as well.
This is false. Bitcoin’s value is “backed” by the expectation that it will be valuable tomorrow — nothing more. It’s the same with gold. Gold’s value has nothing to do with the cost of mining it out of the ground. Rather the cost of mining it is justified on the basis of its expected value.
Bitcoins price is basically unrelated to the energy used. Right now, it is an independent currency at best and a speculation object at worst. Energy spent is only useful in so far as that no single entity can take over the network; for all other purposes, bitcoin could run on a single 10 year old GPU.
> In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin is actually one of the greatest financial incentives to transition the world to clean energy.
without bothering to explain why any one point they highlight would beget any one outcome claimed by the post. In fact, there are some backwards incentives that are missed. An example would be their claim with regards to Great American Mining: rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for capturing lost methane, what's to stop producers from diverting existing gas production towards mining right now, putting demand pressure on existing supplies and driving up gas production (and leaks, etc.) rather than just capturing and processing leaked gas?
There's nothing. There's no incentive for existing gas facilities to fix their leaks when they can just pipe their existing output into bitcoin, drive up demand for gas, and therefore justify more drilling (and more inevitable leaks that they won't have any incentive to fix).
> Bitcoin isn’t bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is very, very good for the environment. The University of Cambridge reported at over 75% of miners use renewable energy and now there are solutions to turn methane emissions into mining as well.
This doesn't mean anything. Or worse, it means 25% of a phantom industry makes use of dirty power, So whatever Bitcoin imposes on the world in power usage (130 Terawatt-hours of energy - https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...), 25% of that, or about 0.15% of global power production, leverages dirty fuels. If all mining ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially from dirty power usage coming down and more clean energy supply being directed back into productive work.
I can't really follow the logic in this article – maybe I don't get it?
The article states that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy and as miners want to maximize profit, they want cheap energy. This is good for renewables as that is cheaper than other forms of energy generation.
Doesn't everyone want cheap energy, like factories or heavy industry? Are Bitcoin miners really more eager to push for clean energy than other industries?
The whole arguments sounds like "we need to use up more energy so there's more incentive to produce additional, clean energy".
Having an open mind but is good but make sure your brain doesn't fall out of its skull. Just because a mining operation produces methane gas and it is better to burn this gas at the site and turn it into carbon dioxide because it is the lesser of green house gasses shouldn't mean you can sell this as a carbon offset since there is still a net contribution.
I was told the existing financial system uses more power than Bitcoin, so doesn't that make it even better for the environment because they want even more clean power than Bitcoin?
I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery.
The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy, where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of resources.
This reminds me of another interesting point I recently saw raised regarding WWII. WWII is often credited with ending the Great Depression, but in reality was primarily helpful insofar as it made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy far eclipsing the New Deal (and other governments to do likewise).
Tying that to the broken window fallacy, it seems the ultimate conclusion is that wartime economic policy without the actual war would have been a better way to achieve the desired result.
Of course the reality may not be so simple from a US perspective when we consider that all the broken windows were outside our borders, the national focus and urgency imposed by the war, and that removing the war from history would have dramatic unpredictable effects on our world today. Nevertheless, the idea seems convincing enough to me in abstract that starting a new war purely for perceived economic benefits would be an inefficient alternative to simple progressive economic policy on an equivalent scale.
> made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy
Well, Britain transferred all its money to the US for arms, so that would help the US economy. (Churchill spent the last year of the war concerned with how to pay for it.) Also, there were wage and price controls to control speculation (and inflation.)
Well said. Also purely from the point of view of physics: no energy is stored, you would simply be buying energy _produced_ elsewhere with the intrinsic value you created... in other words you are double spending energy!
It’s not double-spending energy. The chunk of energy you generate isn’t spent by you, it’s supplied to Bitcoin users to power their transactions. You only consume the second chunk of energy for yourself.
Well, low intensity heat. It's trivial to create a setup where you take your hot morning shower with water heated in last noon's solar surplus. Setups like that are actually not uncommon at all, but they use direct solar heat extraction instead of photovoltaics. But a "bitcoined" version would be way too small scale and idle way too much to ever make back the hardware expense, at least unless progress suddenly stops.
Granted, it could still provide value beyond hot water: if you happened to own a considerable amount of bitcoin, your net worth would benefit from a greenwashing strawman giving bitcoin some more press attention.
> The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak
Viewing aluminum as a battery isn't even valid, unless people start oxidizing it for energy. It's more like economic value added. Bitcoin is only a "battery" in the sense that it could be turned off on-demand to free up power generation capacity.
The tangible hard money equivalent is gold. It is also a battery one can store value across time. Yes, the raw energy that went in to feed the miners was lost via heat etc but the brunt of it was stored.
The problem with analogizing Bitcoin mining to gold mining is that Bitcoin mining secures value in the past and gold mining secures value in the future. If you stopped mining Bitcoin, all previously mined Bitcoin would lose value due to the decreased security of the block chain.
It's like if gold began to sink into the ground the moment you stopped mining it, and you had to keep mining and smelting it at a ever-more furious rate to keep it above ground.
In a physics sense a processor just turns current into heat, the same way a wire does. It just does so in a way that happens to be useful to us. So in that sense they're resistive heaters, so 100% efficient.
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be.
Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times when there's not much demand for window repair additional glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy generation methods.
The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial enterprises economical.
It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to funnel more money into education, especially to the places where it's most needed.
If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
This gets the cause and effect completely wrong. The only reason you can sell it later is because someone will need it later. As a society you store energy precisely because you will need it later. Whether you do this by creating a market for it or not is purely an implementation detail.
Whenever I read something this far off the mark, I genuinely wonder if it's total lack of intellectual honesty, or, having drank so much kool aid that this argument genuinely makes sense.
Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE.
In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an obvious bubble.
In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to actually be put to use in productive sectors.
IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.
Very disingenuous to include NFTs in the same category as Bitcoin. NFTs live on Ethereum which is in the process of changing its consensus from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake.
A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it.
While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.
Refined aluminum is in quite a high-energy state. Chemically you could extract energy or make electricity from aluminum.
It's used in some types of military explosives. Because the refining takes so much electricity, some well-meaning people suggest running it at times of low demand to balance the grid. But refining is capital intensive so you don't want to turn it off or you miss out on the returns from the investment, and the process runs at high temperatures and can't just be turned on and off (in fact if that happens unintentionally it makes a big mess!)
You're right.
If we further expand the idea we can extract energy from anything flammable or otherwise reactant. I'll refrain from calling my dog a battery though.
Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
Actually we can extract electricity from aluminium. A while ago someone proposed a "battery" that would consume aluminium as it provides electricity. Supposedly this battery was going to have 10x the energy density of today's li-ion batteries.
Edit:as for crypto you're completely correct. If one set out to invent the most inefficient energy use possible in computing the result would be crypto proof of work that grows all the time.
Agreed - calling it a battery is definitely a massive conflation with calling it an “energy sink”.
While you could call it (generously) a form of embedded energy, it fundamentally can not turned back into a form of energy directly, making the comparison very silly.
As others have mentioned, Aluminum can actually be turned into a battery to get the energy back. Bitcoin only if you traded it for energy....(still not a battery)
Imagine that as you mine BTC, you’re instantly paying that BTC for someone to drill some oil and put it in a barrel wherever you plan to use it. The system of you and your BTC plus that other person and the oil in the earth is a battery. Ok now just delay the other person’s actions in time.
> Human organisations don't run on energy and resources. They run on money.
You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an abstraction of energy and resources used by a human organization. Remove the money and the organization can still function. Remove energy and resources and the organization can't function.
Even if one accepts the underlying assumption that bitcoin "store" the energy wasted on "mining" them, the theory espoused in the article simply does not hold water.
If a new energy source becomes available, so 10x as much energy as before gets put into aluminum smelting, you end up with 10x as much aluminum.
Bitcoin "mining" does not work that way. The computations are an artificial hurdle erected to hit a predetermined level of scarcity/difficulty. If 10x as much energy as before gets put into bitcoin "mining", difficulty levels will adjust, and you end up with exactly the same amount of bitcoin as before.
If more energy is spent on bitcoin, it is usually because the value of the miner reward grows and attracts more mining. Miner reward value grows due to either 1) the market value of the coin itself grows or 2) the miner fees grow. Both are market forces and ultimately depend on demand for bitcoin transactions. So I don’t see a contradiction here.
But you will notice that my hypothetical stipulated a new energy source becoming available (or cheaper).
The difference between bitcoin and aluminum is that bitcoin values the energy not qua energy, but purely for its wasted cost, so if energy becomes cheaper overall (or hash computation becomes more efficient), you have to use more of it to create the same value for bitcoin, if it becomes more expensive, you can create the same value using less energy.
That's why I find it silly to say that bitcoin stores "energy". It stores sunk cost.
Tether supply has grown roughly 10x since January 2020, though, but that's on a blockchain, so surely everything is on the up and up: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
I'm so happy that other people start to notice this dynamic.
Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage?
The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed due to lack of demand. There are too few ways to turn excess electricity into money. If we are going to have fully renewable energy in the future, we need to produce way more energy than we need so when conditions are bad for power generation we still have enough. And for that we need incentives. We are struggling to create artificial, law based incentives on global scale.
Cryptos are currently the best way we have to organically create those incentives. There were already instances of crypto miners selling energy they contracted, back to the grid, when price of energy briefly exceeded the gain they could have by burning that energy to mine.
When prices of crypto rise again in few years and hardware hashrate plateaus we may reach a point when miners will be building/buying new windmill and solar panel installations on mass scale, because their costs will be dominated by the energy costs and the cheapest energy will be excess energy renewables produce.
We don't lack resources to reach the green future, we lack incentives, and if we are lucky meteoric rise of price of crypto can provide those.
EDIT: And the post is flagged into oblivion. I'm no longer happy because interesting observation got silenced. Well I guess see you all in few years.
EDIT2: .... and now it's unflagged. :-) A hot topic.
What about training ML models as another example? It requires a lot of energy as well (and I expect it to be more significant in the future), and the optimal power draw should depend on the price of energy. Of course it requires GPU/TPU pricing to change depending on clock speed, which is hard to sell to customers. So yeah, for now Bitcoin mining is a more scalable solution.
Sure. That's also great if you can monetize trained ML models so easily that everyone can participate.
It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable.
I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy.
I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia".
If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.
I think the flaw in this is that crypto mining will take place regardless of whether the source of the electricity is green or not, and regardless of whether the electricity is excess capacity or not.
Crypto mining is a business; they may find it beneficial to mine during both peak and off-peak hours, and they're unlikely to care whether the electricity is coming from wind or coal, so long as it's cheap enough to turn a profit.
So as a side effect, yeah, it may make building new renewable sources more feasible, but it's a big shotgun and there's a lot of collateral damage.
People claiming bitcoin is a battery understand nothing about batteries. It's just fake rethoric designed to greenwash it.
Batteries are batteries, fair enough.
Load shifting "are batteries" because you're not using the electricity now, but later. So it's equivalent to storing it now and using later. Fine
Aluminium smelting "are batteries" because you're shifting the location. It's like putting a battery in a ship, charging it then shipping it somewhere else (as long as it doesn't get stuck ;) )
Bitcoin mining is... ? You mined your coin now, using electricity, cool. Then to use it you need to spend more electricity. 812.74 kWh per transaction to be exact https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
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There is no way to make aluminum other than putting huge amounts of energy. Aluminum has value to everyone in some way, not just those invested in it. There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions, or even to do proof-of-work cryptocurrency (if you feel that's necessary), besides using Bitcoin. With aluminum you can even reverse the process and use it as an actual battery. With Bitcoin you can't. The energy is burned forever.
I really do think cryptocurrency and block-chain technology is cool. But the level of hype and double-think is getting insane.
Unfortunately, this same architecture gave birth to both artificial intelligence because of the way it mimics DNA, and a black hole. The inevitable faith of a configuration of matter permeating all spacetime is the end of the universe.
Thank you bitcoin, the worst ecological disaster, like, ever!
At least we got AI and a Blackhole.
(meanwhile, my comment will be flagged in 3... 2... 1...)
I agree with this, the amount of hype makes it hard to find the true innovations in the space, because most of it is honestly shit.
> There are plenty of ways to do digital transactions
Yes, but Bitcoin was not initially made to just "do digital transactions". It was made to be able to do digital transactions without any trusted 3rd party. The distinction is important, because that's why Proof of Work exists and is energy intensive in the first place.
Now a couple of years into blockchain technology, we have some alternatives that _might_ work as well as Proof of Work (Proof of Stake for example) but we've yet to see if it actually can work on the scale that Bitcoin operates in. Time will tell.
Which is what makes it even more absurd that people are claiming that adding centralized layers on top of Bitcoin is a valid solution to the cost and speed of transactions.
They're devoted to Bitcoin itself above any of the reasons why the technology was built in the first place. But if people don't actually care about having distributed payments, and if they're perfectly willing to buy into payment processors that are only using Bitcoin as a store-of-value in the backend, then Proof of Work doesn't matter.
Proof of Work/Stake only matter if Bitcoin is actually being used as a trustless and anonymous payment system for regular transactions, which is ironically the task that (among most other cryptocurrencies on the market) it's perhaps least suited for technologically.
I'm not saying there's no innovation here. I am saying that I don't see any evidence that Bitcoin's largest proponents care about that innovation. I don't see any evidence that any of this matters beyond giving them an excuse to hype a speculative asset. If they did care, they would have abandoned Bitcoin and moved to basically any other coin -- anything at all that did Proof of Stake to reduce transaction fees and environmental costs, or that fixed its price to the dollar, or that had better privacy.
I firmly believe at this point that the technology of Bitcoin matters to the majority of its investors about as much as the technology of Beanie Babies mattered to its investors. That's not to say the technology isn't interesting or that it can't be used in useful ways, but most of the time that people talk about Bitcoin's success, they're not talking about technology.
1. Those who wrote the encryption and understand the math (very small %).
2. Those who write the software powering the blockchain (small %)
3. Those who write the wallet software you use to use the blockchain (small %)
4. Those who build the software you use on the same platform you use your wallet.
5. The operating system you use implementing all of the above.
6. The hardware you use implementing all of the above.
Yeah, tons of no trust....
Proof of Stake as a theory and concept is probably almost 10 years old at this point. And as an actual real-money-in-production blockchain Proof of Stake will actually be 10 years old in the next couple of years or so.
I wish I could confidently remember specific names and dates here, but on bitcointalk I remember SunnyKing coding and launching a real in production a PoS coin almost 10 years ago now...I want to say it was something like "NuCoin" but I could be off on the name there. I do speicifically remember he made Primecoin which was an alternative PoW function based on discovering the world's highest prime numbers(kind of cool, which is why I remember it I guess) after he was done with his initial PoS coin. He(SunnyKing) was also endlessly trolled and mocked due to the theoretical threat PoS posed to those invested in Bitcoin and other PoW coins like Litecoin at the time.
There was also a larger PoS coin called NXT from that era(again, almost 10 years ago, 2013 maybe?) that I suppose never really caught on, perhaps it was technically flawed?
There were lots of legitimate criticisms of PoS regarding whether or not it was a truly viable decentralized consensus mechanism. And I don't claim to after the answer to whether or not it is, or was sufficiently viable. But historically there was also lots of trolling and suppression from people trying to protect their investments.
It apparently may be finally getting its time, given PoS as a technology seems to have only recently become a mainstream topic of interest, despite how old the tech and theories themselves are. Perhaps that's just because the problems were only recently solved?
But regardless, I find it funny how much play PoS gets these days now that mainstream media is reporting on how PoW mining as a whole is using more power than many nation states, as if there was any other path for PoW to scale given its fundamental design.
Assuming bitcoin stays valuable, does it make sense to use bitcoin mining to augment some power projects? Like using otherwise wasted energy to mine or to mine in places where it might not be easy to transmit the electricity?
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If you dislike Bitcoin, obviously any kilowatt used by it is 'pure waste'.
If there was any way to stream porn using less electricity, we would consume less electricity for that. If there was any way to make those billboards consume less electricity, we consume less electricity.
As soon as there is a new way to do bitcoin related operations using less electricity (eg: ASICS), the security of the network decreases. And everyone moves to the new model, in order to go back to consuming a lot of electricity, in order to restore trust in the network.
On a macro scale, Bitcoin has to consume lots of electricity, any possible improvement in that area needs to be wiped out by just people going back to consuming more electricity, otherwise the model fails. The whole bitcoin trust model revolves around people being ready to waste a ton energy for it. That's not the case of porn, or billboards: the energy consumption is just a side effect and not a requirement, they have value outside of the consumed electricity. Bitcoin entire value is only dependent on how much people are willing to invest in it, which roughly translates on how much electricity is wasted.
Now 1. a bad billboard doesn't make bad btc better. Neither does everything else you mentioned.
2. there is a margin of difference on how much enjoyment and entertainment something like porn makes vs. btc does.
If we would need to cut down on a lot of things to reduce co2, i would argue that btc would be much much further up the list then porn.
> [...] despite being one of the most fiat currencies by definition [...]
FIAT currencies are by design inflationary to enhance spending. Bitcoin is deflationary _by design_. Since there's no bank or state backing Bitcoin, the only way that bitcoin makes sense was/is deflation. This quality makes BTC an asset and that's what it is, a digital asset. As a currency BTC has already failed.
What is your working definition for fiat currency?
Mine is:
"Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold."
Government doesn't issue bitcoins. Stopped reading after that as you seem uneducated on the subject.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
A sound monetary system has more value than anything else on this planet. There's a lot of information out there, but here's one article to illustrate my point: https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-2...
> The energy is burned forever.
Wrong. I can use it to pay someone to do work, for example. "Work" in both societal and physical senses. That means the energy is not lost in a bitcoin.
That moves the definition of battery far away from normal usage. That means anything of monetary value is a battery, whether it’s cryptocurrency, a $20 bill, or a piece of gold.
Paying someone to do work has the actual energy come from another source, such gasoline or food.
Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power a bitcoin farm is just completely nonsensical and does noting to help with the shift to renewables.
Specifically, more security for the next block, only. Once that block is mined, the process starts all over again for the next block.
The energy usage reset button is pressed as soon as each block is mined. No energy is "stored".
In that sense, Bill Gatess "Reinvented Toilet" does kinda the same. People pee and poop, sewage is processed and is converted to clean water and can produce energy [0]. Thus PaaB(!?)
[0]: https://www.elitereaders.com/waterless-toilet-system-generat...
I find it strange that even people at a prominent firm like Union Square Ventures are perpetuating such misconceptions.
Building renewable energy sources in the middle of nowhere to power nothing also appears nonsensical at first glance, yet it actually happens to the point that energy prices can go negative.
For one, some forms of renewable energy are highly volatile and can not just be made to match demand under any circumstance. Hence there is a need for batteries to store this otherwise worthless energy. Today, these batteries just don't exist, wind farms are ideally backed up by gas plants, whose output can be regulated to even out wind volatility. In other cases, wind is backed up by coal or nuclear plants which can not be regulated as well, hence more of that wind energy goes to waste.
Secondly, especially in the case of China, these renewable energy projects are meant to raise the domestic product and production capacity numbers, with little regard to actual demand. The electricity grid to deliver all that energy to actual consumers is an afterthought.
In due time, these problems shall be solved. Better ways to store volatile renewable energy will emerge, better transmission infrastructure will arise. Bitcoin could be a stepping stone to solve the hen-egg part of that problem.
It seems to inspired or in the spirit of ‘The Ministry for the Future’ by Kim Stanley Robinson.
“ It’s called Carbon Coin in the book, a Bitcoin-like currency that the Ministry gives out for carbon sequestration — that is, any project that sucks CO2 out of the air, whether it’s carbon capture or farmers rewilding their fields — at a rate of one coin to one ton. Oil companies get coins if they stop being oil companies, basically, leaving their assets in the ground for a century or so. Coins can then be bought and sold on currency exchanges like any other.”
The only argument I can see is that the sheer resource hunger will force our hand in using renewable energy. Of course, I am not saying this is a good argument at all.
There is no such thing as virtual energy. And the other forms of payment we use are a million times more energy effective.
What bothers me is that newsletters as this one who I believe are widely read serve this up as a good idea.
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-315
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This is actually a weird game theory problem because there are a lot a miners with expensive hardware that would be worthless if such a change happened. You could fork it, but you'd have to attract miners after burning them (possible if commodity GPUs were viable, again), and you'd have to convince people that the new tokens are also valuable, and this isn't just Bitcoin Cash II.
Bitcoin has odd, long-term systemic risks based around miners.
I'm happy to let BTC win if it means that global warming is halted. But if worldwide net zero emissions is a prerequisite for BTC being considered non-wasteful then that's a tall order.
"Distributed" sounds nice, but it isn't really that valuable in the end.
It's not "required", it's only that high because it has so much success. Bitcoin would be working with only one miner running, the first blocks were minted on a private computer.
Miners have, in the past, resisted improvements to the network that would reduce their profits so this all seems pretty unlikely as well.
> In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Bitcoin is actually one of the greatest financial incentives to transition the world to clean energy.
without bothering to explain why any one point they highlight would beget any one outcome claimed by the post. In fact, there are some backwards incentives that are missed. An example would be their claim with regards to Great American Mining: rather than using mining as an incentive to pay for capturing lost methane, what's to stop producers from diverting existing gas production towards mining right now, putting demand pressure on existing supplies and driving up gas production (and leaks, etc.) rather than just capturing and processing leaked gas?
There's nothing. There's no incentive for existing gas facilities to fix their leaks when they can just pipe their existing output into bitcoin, drive up demand for gas, and therefore justify more drilling (and more inevitable leaks that they won't have any incentive to fix).
> Bitcoin isn’t bad for the environment. In fact, Bitcoin is very, very good for the environment. The University of Cambridge reported at over 75% of miners use renewable energy and now there are solutions to turn methane emissions into mining as well.
This doesn't mean anything. Or worse, it means 25% of a phantom industry makes use of dirty power, So whatever Bitcoin imposes on the world in power usage (130 Terawatt-hours of energy - https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/21/the-debate-about-cryptocur...), 25% of that, or about 0.15% of global power production, leverages dirty fuels. If all mining ceased tomorrow, we'd benefit substantially from dirty power usage coming down and more clean energy supply being directed back into productive work.
Thanks for hearing my rant.
The article states that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy and as miners want to maximize profit, they want cheap energy. This is good for renewables as that is cheaper than other forms of energy generation.
Doesn't everyone want cheap energy, like factories or heavy industry? Are Bitcoin miners really more eager to push for clean energy than other industries?
The whole arguments sounds like "we need to use up more energy so there's more incentive to produce additional, clean energy".
wish I could downvote.
The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the article boil down to a variant of the broken window fallacy, where economic value is falsely attributed to a useless waste of resources.
This reminds me of another interesting point I recently saw raised regarding WWII. WWII is often credited with ending the Great Depression, but in reality was primarily helpful insofar as it made it politically viable for the US government to inject a massive stimulus into the economy far eclipsing the New Deal (and other governments to do likewise).
Tying that to the broken window fallacy, it seems the ultimate conclusion is that wartime economic policy without the actual war would have been a better way to achieve the desired result.
Of course the reality may not be so simple from a US perspective when we consider that all the broken windows were outside our borders, the national focus and urgency imposed by the war, and that removing the war from history would have dramatic unpredictable effects on our world today. Nevertheless, the idea seems convincing enough to me in abstract that starting a new war purely for perceived economic benefits would be an inefficient alternative to simple progressive economic policy on an equivalent scale.
Well, Britain transferred all its money to the US for arms, so that would help the US economy. (Churchill spent the last year of the war concerned with how to pay for it.) Also, there were wage and price controls to control speculation (and inflation.)
Granted, it could still provide value beyond hot water: if you happened to own a considerable amount of bitcoin, your net worth would benefit from a greenwashing strawman giving bitcoin some more press attention.
Viewing aluminum as a battery isn't even valid, unless people start oxidizing it for energy. It's more like economic value added. Bitcoin is only a "battery" in the sense that it could be turned off on-demand to free up power generation capacity.
It's like if gold began to sink into the ground the moment you stopped mining it, and you had to keep mining and smelting it at a ever-more furious rate to keep it above ground.
You can regain the energy where it’s needed by using Bitcoin to purchase it
That's not how batteries work.
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be.
Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times when there's not much demand for window repair additional glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy generation methods.
The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial enterprises economical.
It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to funnel more money into education, especially to the places where it's most needed.
If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.
Bitcoin transactions require the solution of a completely useless and expensive to compute mathematical computation. THIS IS BY DESIGN, TO MAKE IT SCARCE.
In the short term, we are facing a critical shortage of computer chips because bitcoin miners are buying critical infrastructure and using them to do absolutely useless math to speculate on an obvious bubble.
In the long term, we absolutely need to solve global warming, and the only way we will do so is if we figure out a way to decouple carbon emissions from productivity on a global scale. Bitcoin makes this task much harder - by its very definition, bitcoin literally scales with energy consumption. Energy prices and bitcoin prices (plus fixed costs due to mining equipment) will always be in some sort of equilibrium. Second - we need those chips that are currently calculating completely useless hashes to actually be put to use in productive sectors.
IF your attitude is some variant of - fuck you, I don't care about the world, I just want to get rich profiting from this bubble - fine, I can't convince you to care about the rest of humanity. But please - be clear eyed about this: there is not a single credible global warming scholar that believes Bitcoin will help. Not one. The only people who try to push forward incredibly shoddy thinkpieces about how Bitcoin/NFTs will help global warming are obviously Bitcoin speculators or paid shills.
b) if you choose today to put yours on ETH instead of a chain that is today not PoW, you don't get to play the "but soon(TM)" card IMHO
While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.
I agree with what you're saying though.
Now excuse me while I go feed little Duracell. Good girl!
Edit:as for crypto you're completely correct. If one set out to invent the most inefficient energy use possible in computing the result would be crypto proof of work that grows all the time.
While you could call it (generously) a form of embedded energy, it fundamentally can not turned back into a form of energy directly, making the comparison very silly.
As others have mentioned, Aluminum can actually be turned into a battery to get the energy back. Bitcoin only if you traded it for energy....(still not a battery)
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Crypto is a weird kind of battery, where you can put in energy, take out money, and when you need energy later, buy energy for that money.
Analogy doesn't make sense at all if you skip the money part.
You are talking nonsense here. Money is just an abstraction of energy and resources used by a human organization. Remove the money and the organization can still function. Remove energy and resources and the organization can't function.
If a new energy source becomes available, so 10x as much energy as before gets put into aluminum smelting, you end up with 10x as much aluminum.
Bitcoin "mining" does not work that way. The computations are an artificial hurdle erected to hit a predetermined level of scarcity/difficulty. If 10x as much energy as before gets put into bitcoin "mining", difficulty levels will adjust, and you end up with exactly the same amount of bitcoin as before.
The difference between bitcoin and aluminum is that bitcoin values the energy not qua energy, but purely for its wasted cost, so if energy becomes cheaper overall (or hash computation becomes more efficient), you have to use more of it to create the same value for bitcoin, if it becomes more expensive, you can create the same value using less energy.
That's why I find it silly to say that bitcoin stores "energy". It stores sunk cost.
US money supply has not grown at anywhere near 10x recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MZM
Tether supply has grown roughly 10x since January 2020, though, but that's on a blockchain, so surely everything is on the up and up: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/
Why are we not yet fully running on renewables? Why don't we have trillions of dollars pouring into solar panels and wind turbines and pumped storage hydroelectricity and battery storage?
The answer is there's not enough demand for excess electricity to create and keep excess electricity. I read about new pumped storage hydroelectricity installation closed due to lack of demand. There are too few ways to turn excess electricity into money. If we are going to have fully renewable energy in the future, we need to produce way more energy than we need so when conditions are bad for power generation we still have enough. And for that we need incentives. We are struggling to create artificial, law based incentives on global scale.
Cryptos are currently the best way we have to organically create those incentives. There were already instances of crypto miners selling energy they contracted, back to the grid, when price of energy briefly exceeded the gain they could have by burning that energy to mine.
When prices of crypto rise again in few years and hardware hashrate plateaus we may reach a point when miners will be building/buying new windmill and solar panel installations on mass scale, because their costs will be dominated by the energy costs and the cheapest energy will be excess energy renewables produce.
We don't lack resources to reach the green future, we lack incentives, and if we are lucky meteoric rise of price of crypto can provide those.
EDIT: And the post is flagged into oblivion. I'm no longer happy because interesting observation got silenced. Well I guess see you all in few years.
EDIT2: .... and now it's unflagged. :-) A hot topic.
The less energy we use the better for now, given that part of that energy will be "dirty".
And storage capacity technologies we can create are oscillating around break even point economically.
There's no gold rush to place energy storage system everywhere and it's not obviously economically profitable.
However variable load such as crypto mining provides similar incentives as energy storage. And there is a crypto gold rush.
It's already being done to some very small degree by few companies that locate their ML server farms in places where energy is cheap and renewable.
I hope this application will some day compete with crypto for computing power and energy and win but I don't think it will be popularized and commoditized soon enough to bring money into green energy.
I hopefully await headlines "ML training now uses as much energy as Australia".
If you could create crypto based on ML training it would be so cool.
Crypto mining is a business; they may find it beneficial to mine during both peak and off-peak hours, and they're unlikely to care whether the electricity is coming from wind or coal, so long as it's cheap enough to turn a profit.
So as a side effect, yeah, it may make building new renewable sources more feasible, but it's a big shotgun and there's a lot of collateral damage.
Batteries are batteries, fair enough.
Load shifting "are batteries" because you're not using the electricity now, but later. So it's equivalent to storing it now and using later. Fine
Aluminium smelting "are batteries" because you're shifting the location. It's like putting a battery in a ship, charging it then shipping it somewhere else (as long as it doesn't get stuck ;) )
Bitcoin mining is... ? You mined your coin now, using electricity, cool. Then to use it you need to spend more electricity. 812.74 kWh per transaction to be exact https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
This is ridiculous. This is not a battery.