Jan thanks for publishing this as the power usage of Bitcoin seems to keep going round in circles. It would be cool to put the argument to sleep, one way or another.

Without getting too much into the data, maybe you accept that the bitcoin algorithm has to force miners to find the cheapest energy source. They have to do this to compete with one another, if one starts using a free or almost free energy source, they all do, otherwise they can't compete for the rewards, since the miners with the cheaper energy source can afford to invest more in more powerful hardware, therefore consistently winning the competition more often.

Now lets say a number of competing miners all using effectively free energy (Which for technnical reasons can only come from solar) find themselves competing against one another with almost equal results, each one finds they get only the number of wins that might be expected if all odds are equal, in other words, they are all at the "Cutting edge" of their capabilities.

Let's say each miner also having used this, the cheapest energy, solar, for a number of years, has established that with this, used off-grid to power their rigs, they don't really have to declare anything to local governments, since no-one knows how much power they are generating or putting to use, therefore has no idea how much they might owe in tax. In other words, the mining entities are operating under the radar in places where solar farms of modest size go unnoticed, or not cared much about.

In this scenario, the only way any player could increase their advantage over the others, is to scale up the capacity of their solar power, within whatever land limits might practically apply to their particular installations.

To me this is the most logical explanation of what actually happened to the miners in China, when they were kicked out of there a few years ago. If this was the case, the solar farms of the miners would have started at a certain size, and then grown to the point that the government could no longer ignore, then when investigated revealed large revenues from mining which were not being taxed, and at the same time, significant solar power generation facilities being taken up by this illiciit, untaxed business that the Chinese government would have seen as far more useful put to use towards the utilities "Power of the people". So they kicked out the miners, and nationalised their solar farms. In other words it was more about grabbing the solar farms than stopping the mining, as far as the government were concerned.

Would we have heard an un-spun version of that, given what we know of mainstream media or corporate data sources? Of course not. But please tell me if this does not make logical sense.

I wrote a story drilling into this aspect of Bitcoin mining scaling up solar capacity, pre-dating affairs in China, having studied Bitcoin myself as a technnical non-investor since its inception around 2008.

To me it seems a very emotive subject, I have many friends very opposed to it for reasons they can't explain, other than it is just "Bad". Personally I think it came along for a reason, quite the opposite reason than most environmental folk think it did, and definitely not the reason most Bitcoiners think it did either. I think most Bitcoiners are missing the point with Bitcoin entiresly, in almost the same way as standard investors swearing blind that Bitcoin is just an empty Ponzi.

To me, Bitcoin is doing something that nothing else seems capable of doing, it is growing the leaves of the tree of humanity which are needed to collect the solar energy that we sooner or later have to come to use as a species.

This is my entire effort in Medium, to try to help folk understand why solar is the only way out of the energy cul-de-sac we are in, and to me Bitcoin is actually doing a surprising amount towards that end, that we see much clearer when we formally drill into the drivers and motivations all around it, like we have to in the stakeholder analysis of any reasonablly complex system.

Here is the story containing the main analysis, I would be really grateful to have your comments on it, whether you agree or not, if you can see any logical faults, (Not driven by emotion!), I would really appreciate you pointing them out:

https://eric-bott.medium.com/could-bitcoin-be-a-kardashev-hinge-b5d92df02795