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I wish more people would talk about this. It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. It's not even just the electricity but the raw materials

by sjm 9y ago

I wish more people would talk about this. It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. It's not even just the electricity but the raw materials that go into all these GPUs that are being bought up (to the point of real scarcity and crazy price hikes), and tossed away when a more performant chip comes out. Like you say, it is seriously perverse.

beepboopbeep 9y ago
Plenty of people talk about, issue is people are so locked into their profit motives that they reject dissenting statements like a hot poker to the skin.
sodafountan 9y ago
Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips further in order to stay competitive. Raw materials can be recycled, we're not dealing with finite resources here. Then again it could all just be a bubble, in which case yes there will be a lot of waste but the market will correct itself. The problem is cryptocurrency has real value, it takes real computing power to process and once it's processed it's very secure (therein lies the value) so I don't think cryptocurrency is going away
dspillett 9y ago
Last time I looked at the like profit "mining" ETH (a couple of people at work go on about it endlessly so I thought I'd check the maths) with my current hardware (a pretty decent single GPU and a couple of reasonable CPUs) and the price I pay for electricity I could net about $100 in a few months. That just isn't worth the potential hassle (setup, monitoring, keeping mining clients up-to-date, leaving the main desktop machine on full blast 24/7 heating up the room in summer for a start, and the profit calculation didn't include anything regarding extra wear-and-tear) to me.
wyldfire 9y ago
> It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. I don't think it's ignored at all. It's covered in Bitcoin's FAQ because it comes up pretty often. Also some folks have tried to create coins that use something other than a PoW. Some have created coins whose PoW has independent utility (XPM: cunningham chains of primes). > raw materials that go into all these GPUs Well, thank goodness the GPUs have independent utility. If you want to be concerned about waste, the ASICs are generally much less useful after difficulty increases than GPUs. > seriously perverse. shrug people every day "waste" global resources on things that I think are totally worthless. You might see bitcoin and friends as similarly worthless but if absolutely nothing else it does seem like it has real utility for making remittances more affordable.
freeloop2 9y ago
You can talk about it all you want. I don't think anyone has begun to come up with a realistic solution. You can't make it against the law to mine, so what else is there?

by sjm 9y ago

beepboopbeep 9y ago

Plenty of people talk about, issue is people are so locked into their profit motives that they reject dissenting statements like a hot poker to the skin.

sodafountan 9y ago

Except those are all good things, more demand in this space will drive more competition and force manufacturers to push the energy saving capabilities of chips further in order to stay competitive. Raw materials can be recycled, we're not dealing with finite resources here. Then again it could all just be a bubble, in which case yes there will be a lot of waste but the market will correct itself. The problem is cryptocurrency has real value, it takes real computing power to process and once it's processed it's very secure (therein lies the value) so I don't think cryptocurrency is going away

dspillett 9y ago

Last time I looked at the like profit "mining" ETH (a couple of people at work go on about it endlessly so I thought I'd check the maths) with my current hardware (a pretty decent single GPU and a couple of reasonable CPUs) and the price I pay for electricity I could net about $100 in a few months. That just isn't worth the potential hassle (setup, monitoring, keeping mining clients up-to-date, leaving the main desktop machine on full blast 24/7 heating up the room in summer for a start, and the profit calculation didn't include anything regarding extra wear-and-tear) to me.

wyldfire 9y ago

> It seems like a completely ignored aspect of cryptocurrency. I don't think it's ignored at all. It's covered in Bitcoin's FAQ because it comes up pretty often. Also some folks have tried to create coins that use something other than a PoW. Some have created coins whose PoW has independent utility (XPM: cunningham chains of primes). > raw materials that go into all these GPUs Well, thank goodness the GPUs have independent utility. If you want to be concerned about waste, the ASICs are generally much less useful after difficulty increases than GPUs. > seriously perverse. shrug people every day "waste" global resources on things that I think are totally worthless. You might see bitcoin and friends as similarly worthless but if absolutely nothing else it does seem like it has real utility for making remittances more affordable.

freeloop2 9y ago

You can talk about it all you want. I don't think anyone has begun to come up with a realistic solution. You can't make it against the law to mine, so what else is there?