I don't immediately see how to ensure that only negatively priced electricity (or, at minimum, renewable) could be used. There might be some clever authentication process possible, though...
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Is it possible to have a climate-friendly variant of bitcoin where miners can only operate using negatively priced electricity (surplus from renewables)? They'd then mostly have the effect of making it more economic to increase the contribution of renewables to base load.
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*"increase the contribution of renewables to the _grid_", not base load.
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An amusing enforcement mechanism would be to require that power-generating entities participating could only be paid for power in the underlying coin - let's call it greencoin.
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Mining a block would require specifying who you bought your power from, and the price (negative!) paid - i.e., a pointer to the relevant transaction - in addition to the standard things done in mining.
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Lots problems with this. Still, an amusing idea, and if it could be made to work would address two big problems simultaneously.
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(Context for all this: a huge problem with renewables is that they can be difficult to turn on and turn off. Both California and Germany, which have large renewable components to power, often have to pay other regions to take power off their hands, lest it overwhelm the grid.)
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Like adding a User Agent to power.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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You might be able to do something to authenticate the combination of time (fairly easy) and location (much harder) of the compute usage, to try to correlate it with periods where particular regions have a surplus...
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Bitcoin can do this already, if we just go to 100% renewable energy, bitcoin will be too ;)
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I think of Bitcoin as being a comoditization force; whatever it depends on it should put pressure to make it as cheap as possible. Be it energy, chips, etc. If renewable is fundamentally cheaper, bitcoin will use it and drive costs down.
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