If that renewable energy wasn't being used by miners, it'd be used by other industries/people in place of fossil fuels.
And to the extent that the UK is representative of the western world (who produce either directly or via china/east asian production the majority of CO2 emissions) we are about to completely fuck our national grid and local substation level infra by trying to switch to electric cars and electric based heating. Rest of the world is going the same way with cars, I have no idea how many other places in the world need to switch significant amounts of energy use away from natural gas/propane/oil heating systems to electric ones. Last thing we need is another big drain on the electricity we can produce.
I realise it's an international problem which complicates things when considering electricity production at a practical level but the principle is clear - to move away from the age of oil and coal without reducing our energy consumption (and by proxy our standard of living) we need a fuckton of electricity, and something so wasteful as bitcoin (or any proof of work crypto) needs to be left behind.
And governments are just printing £ & $ as a solution to every problem with little thought about the long term consequences, you can’t just keep printing cash... it’s madness.
This is a really, really simplistic view of what is happening. Printing money has been done to solve specific problems - in 2008/9 it was liquidity in the banking system, recently it's been this pandemic thingy and the need to keep money flowing around the economy whilst actual production drops massively. What would you have done to pay for 80% of the wages of people who got support under the furlough or self-employed support schemes?
Then the characterisation of simply printing money is wrong at a technical level, in a way that genuinely matters. QE is achieved by having the bank of england lend the UK goverment money. This money will, over time, be repaid and destroyed. It's setup as a temporary increase in the money supply and is not just printing money as a result.
As for long term results, how long do you want? Japan has been doing this for 30 odd years without ruining the Yen or the Japanese economy (I mean it's constantly talked about being in a bad state and just about to fall over, but it hasn't really fallen over, or at least no more or less so than other places).
Over the long term you need to increase money supply to account for a growing population and economy, and between this and a "normal" level of inflation any increases made in the money supply as interventions in the economy are effectively reduced over time. Today we might need - a made up figure of £1tn at a given speed of circulation to manage the UK's economic transactions, but in 10-20 years time when the population has increased by say 25% we need £1.25tn at the same speed of circulation. If today we "print" £0.25tn to get us out of a hole, and it never gets repaid or destroyed, then in 10-20 years time, the increase in money supply will no longer represent an oversupply of money.
Long term any inflationary problems caused by QE are reduced or eradicated by the passage of time. To believe that there is little thought about the long term consequences of this is simply wrong.
Now personally I'd rather inject money into the economy through keynesian measures, but this would be funded in the same way - borrowing money and repaying it later. I'd want to sort out the tax system as well but when the private sector's chips are down, borrowing to invest and repay later is the way to react quickly, and with a working tax system you would still have recessions that need to be managed through borrowing and investing.
One of many issues I have with BTC specifically and crypto generally as a currency. If you think BTC could be a currency for the developing world, what happens when the population increases 50% but the amount of currency can't be increased, and the amount of transactions and therefore speed of circulation of currency is fixed?
