Texas' grid operator just spent $31.7M in the middle of a heat wave and energy shortage.

No, not to provide fresh shelter to the homeless. Nor to install booths with free fresh water. Nor to increase the number of public spaces (outside of shopping malls) where people can gather, instead of burning energy to keep their homes cool 24/7. Nor to boost its investments in renewables and pivot away from the oil that it keeps digging.

No, the government just gave that money away to Riot Platform (a business that runs a bunch of Bitcoin mining servers) to convince them to turn off their energy-hungry machines, so everybody else can also use energy to keep themselves cool. Btw, that's more than twice the mining profit that they make in one month.

Let that sink in. Even a life-threatening heatwave can't get miners to behave cooperatively and turn off their machines, whose only purpose is as pointless as randomly guessing a number whose SHA256 hash satisfies a certain arbitrary numeric constraint - and they skim some profits out of these pointless puzzles just because someone decided that putting up a system with such perverse financial incentives was a good idea.

In order to get them to behave as someone who's not a complete selfish sociopath and evolutionary failure, the government had to compensate them (by a 2x factor) for the losses that they would make by temporarily turning off their gamgling den, while everybody else will probably just get a regular rolling blackout without any compensation.

I guess that today's capitalism is that system where it's actually ok for the government to spend public money - as long as that money goes to those who need it the least and create the least amount of net value.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/