I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.
I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/
In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?
There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.
The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.
Imagine you have a big board on your front lawn where people can come to write stuff and respond to others on the board. This board is an instance.
Your neighbor has their own board, which they have “federated” with yours. Messages from your board can show up on their board, and people there can write on those messages same as ones native to that board.
You can federate with them so their stuff shows on your board, or defederate if you don’t like the people there.
Anyone with the ability to make a board can have one federated with other boards to make a really big web of boards, but to a person looking at your lawn’s board it feels like one big one.
I have a print hanging on my bedroom wall! It’s a very interesting picture.
No, there’s a Hidetaka Miyazaki now, the head of FromSoftware who is unrelated to Hayao Miyazaki as far as I know. It took me a while to figure that out.
There’s a sentence in the article I linked to in another comment that, in the city the article was about, there were data centers for Microsoft and similar companies that had required high-speed internet infrastructure be built in town despite its small size. I suppose, based on what you said, that speed wouldn’t be too essential but you would want stability to maintain a connection. Satellite internet probably wouldn’t be great for that (maybe Starlink is?) in which case you still want to run some kind of cable.