Surely I would not really know this, and sometimes the miners themselves might want to put out disinformation in order to keep out competition.
I see all kinds of numbers on how much it costs to mine a bitcoin, and sure I recognize that some sources are likely more credible than others. The more that you are involved in mining the more you might care about this, but also sometimes folks spout out theories of expected BTC price movement based on mining costs, too, and surely I take some of that with a grain of salt too and appreciate that peeps going to have differing perspectives about what causes what, and probably many of us appreciate that it is not exactly a one way street.. and even some miners might purposefully mine at a loss for a considerable amount of time to attempt to flush out competition too.
It's a fairly simple supply/demand equation, albeit slightly complicated by BTC volatility and the correlated risks.
Seems to me that you are complaining (if we want to call it that) about the interference of the natural ways of the free market which would more likely just follow a supply and demand curve. So if there are guys meeting in private meeting and wanting to either collude in terms of stating industrial preferences and sure maybe Elon is wanting to look "green" in order to get subsidies, which is not exactly either free market or following where supply and demand might more naturally take incentives.
By the way, don't get me wrong because necessarily anti-government or of the belief that free market is going to take care of all problems - even though I understand that bitcoin likely has built in incentives that would likely both cause efficiencies or the searching of energy sources that are under utilized with a presumption that those under utilized energy sources would be cheaper to allow them more profits relative to their competition.
If it's very profitable to mine, the difficulty will rise until it's not, so the window of opportunity - especially for a smaller miner who doesn't benefit from high volume electric rates etc - is quite small. If this has any effect on price (which I doubt considering mining volumes and trading volumes) then it's likely a drag in bear season (miners need to sell more coins to pay the bills) and less selling pressure in bull season (miners can afford to hodl), so basically mildly negative.
There is no need for me to argue with any of this - even though some miners are going to have stronger abilities to hold for longer periods than others, either economies of scale or maybe they have found some other efficiencies that other miners might not have been able to achieve. Also mismanagement or even superior management could cause efficiencies or lack thereof.
Anyway, my point is that if someone wanted to use renewables, even at a loss for all I care, they could already do it, so all these tweets and meetings and shit do nothing for the environment, nothing for Bitcoin, maybe some new trolling material for Elon and a few pointless jobs for some college dropouts to create a Powerpoint on "transparency".
Whether meetings are beneficial or not to the players might be one thing and whether the meetings do anything might be a related thing, so if there is an ability to create an image, that could still be doing something for the participant(s) even if it might not do anything material and substantive for the environment, except create an appearance of doing something.
I doubt that you (suchmoon) and I are very far apart on these questions, even though we are framing some of the ways of talking about it differently.
