How is that a false dichotomy when that's exactly the choice this particular place has faced? No alternatives were available due to cost and non-existent gas infrastructure.
Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?
Maybe they shouldn't be heating them at all! We don't owe it to old leaky castles to make it economically viable to heat them. Cheap gas is an ecological nightmare. That doesn't mean that other methods are not also ecological nightmares. How do you even know that the electricity they're burning to mine bitcoin didn't also come from Russian gas? There's no economic principle that says it can't. All Bitcoin does is make it profitable to waste energy - that doesn't mean wasting energy is good! How can paying people to use up electricity possibly be a net win?
Sorry but here we like to preserve our 2000+ years old culture. This particular castle is 1200 years old. I can understand you're not excited about preserving some random few hundred years old buildings, but this is highly valuable cultural legacy and one of the few remains from that age.
Czech electricity companies allow you to choose your energy mix (green/standard).
1) You don't need to heat a castle to preserve it.
2) If you really cared, as a society, you'd pay for the (more efficient!) heat pumps through taxes. Funding inefficient heating with Bitcoin just offloads the financial burden to new Bitcoin investors and is unsustainable in the long run anyway. TANSTAAFL.
1) You do. Castles are not just walls, there's stuff inside.
2) "if you really cared as a society" is not useful when there's simply not enough money in this society. We're not funding anything, this is a private project. The castle is buying some heat from them for a damn good price, that's it.
Not like we want to expand our gas usage anyways as here we buy it all from Russia, right?