Several headlines recently described a 25% drop in bitcoin network difficulty during Winter Storm Finn in January. Most attributed this drop to curtailment activity in Texas. While Texas does represent 17% of the global bitcoin hashrate, ERCOT data shows that some of the curtailment activity was a combination of higher prices and “good grid citizenship.” In ERCOT, and to a lesser extent in other ISOs, prices are the best proxy for grid stress. There are other proxies such as PRC (physical responsive capability) but prices are a better measure for most situations. For that reason, in order to prevent swings in prices and create more challenging gird conditions, an optimal environment is one in which the price does not swing wildly up and down. However, price volatility is a frequent occurrence in ERCOT, as evidenced by Winter Storm Elliot in December 2022 (see graph below).
Bitcoin miners are the economically perfect consumers of electricity. That is not to say that bitcoin miners

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