Bitcoin’s Energy Revolution Happening Now — Bitcoin Magazine

This is an opin­ion edi­to­r­i­al by Kent Hal­libur­ton, Pres­i­dent and COO of Sazmining.

Though the inten­tion of the Bit­coin white paper was to ush­er in a finan­cial rev­o­lu­tion by intro­duc­ing the first effec­tive peer-to-peer elec­tron­ic cash sys­tem, we’re now see­ing the incep­tion of Bitcoin’s sec­ond rev­o­lu­tion: Energy.

Bit­coin min­ers serve as ener­gy buy­ers of last resort, can work from any­where and can turn on and off with near­ly infi­nite flex­i­bil­i­ty. As such, bit­coin min­ing can ren­der viable renew­able and remote ener­gy sources that would have oth­er­wise been unprof­itable. Addi­tion­al­ly, min­ers can con­vert waste ener­gy into dig­i­tal gold, dras­ti­cal­ly curb­ing humanity’s emis­sions prob­lem. Inter­est­ing­ly, these improve­ments to our rela­tion­ship with ener­gy are already under­way, even before bit­coin has evolved into the next glob­al reserve asset. Could it be that Satoshi Nakamo­to’s unstat­ed ener­gy rev­o­lu­tion actu­al­ly takes hold before the first rev­o­lu­tion of a peer-to-peer cash sys­tem? Although we can’t know with cer­tain­ty, the data sug­gests that could be the case.