I often hear the argument: Bitcoin mining is wasting enormous amounts of energy.

Bitcoin mining uses about the same amount of energy as a small country and that is fine!

Time for a thread:

To start, energy consumption in general is not a bad thing. Without it, civilization as we know it would simply not be possible.

If we would monetize your manual labor by putting you on a rowing machine you would have produce approximately $0.30 of value per day.
Energy grids are in nature in efficient. It is impossible to tranport electrical energy over long distances. Because of this approximately 6% of the US energy production is wasted because of losses alone. Just about 3.5X the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network!
Varying load, seasonal or daily, poses challenges to the grid and the producers. It is for example not always possible or easy to lower supply to match demand.

This brings the need for balancing the network. Without it, the grid will become unstable.
With the increase of renewable energy, the need for load balancing solutions will continue to grow:

Solar energy only creates energy when the sun shines. Wind energy only creates energy when the wind blows.
In general, load balancing solutions are expensive. Without those solutions, excess capacity is often wasted eg: gas flaring.

Producers have to produce at sub optimal levels which hurts their profitability and stability. Excess energy is dumped or even sold at a negative price!
Today, Bitcoin miners for example use those flare gasses to mine bitcoin. Energy that otherwise would simply be wasted.

Another example are hydroelectric dams, where because of their location, sometimes the energy created can simply not be transported far enough to meet demand.
Bitcoin mining is extremely commoditized. This means net profit margins are low and the market is extremely competitive.

Therefore miners will move to the edge of the grid where energy is cheapest and there simply is no other use case, if there was, they would be outcompeted.
On top of that, Bitcoin miners are easily switched on/of if needed and can be moved if the supply/demand balance in the network changes.
Bitcoin mining can play a sustainable role in our future.

It provides an opportunity to monetize excess capacity in situations with varying load and will even help our transition towards a more sustainable future by making those solutions more profitable.
I hope this sheds some light on market dynamics in energy grids.

@saifedean @johnkvallis @stephanlivera @Breedlove22 @wmiddelkoop

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I'm sure someone else has explained this, but it is just so cool and I want to explain how this works.


So Curve is awesome for swaps between similar assets, right? The fact that they trade very close to each other is a key part about how Curve works, using it's custom swap invariant function.

That's step 1

Step 2 is that Synthetix is awesome for creating "synthetic assets" (aka synths) which are assets that trade like other assets, that are backed by another, entirely different asset. Basically, a plastic banana that I can buy and sell like a real banana.

Synthetix has a feature that lets you swap between any two synths with zero slippage and a flat fee. That's because it is simply converting the sythentic asset into another synthetic asset, the backing for the synth doesn't change it just uses a different price oracle now.

This is important. Absolutely no slippage, at any size

Swap $1m sUSD for $1m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee

Swap $10m sUSD for $10m sBTC? flat 0.3% fee

swap $100m sUSD for $100m sBTC? Well, there isn't that many synths in Curve, yet but you get the point. The only limit is the pool depth
2020 was a game changer for Ethereum.

The vast majority of its success was fueled by #DeFi.

Here's what happened in 5 Tweets 🔽

1) Governance Tokens 🪙

Projects gave complete ownership of billion dollar protocols to their users, often using retroactive airdrops.

Early adopters earned tokens for past usage, and token-based voting now dictates all technical


2) Liquidity Mining ⛏️

Power users were the first to earn on-going distribution by providing liquidity.

$COMP sparked the wave, with $BAL coining the term a few weeks


3) Yield Faming 🌾

Projects coupled liquidity mining and governance tokens to boost 'yields' by combining lending rates with an incentive layer.

APYs peaked as high as 1M% during 'DeFi summer', leading to a 'food coin' craze like $YAM and


4) Fair Launches ✅

Who needs investment when you can launch using yield farming?

@iearnfinance debuted $YFI with no formal funding, seeding a community treasury for self-sustainability.

The notion of a core team and community became one and the

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