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> I truly hope that Btc ends up being the catalyst for something worth what currently appears to be an incredible waste of a dwindling resource. This is exact
by dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> I truly hope that Btc ends up being the catalyst for something worth what currently appears to be an incredible waste of a dwindling resource.
This is exactly what I had hoped, too, but it hasn't materialized yet, and I'm losing hope it will. Instead of inventing some ultra-smart general purpose supermachine people stucked to producing very specialized hardware able to do just one thing.
There is some glimpse of hope: now that it's less and less profitable to use electricity, the miners might have more incentive to use different forms of renewable energy rather than anything else. This can have various unpredictable consequences though...
- sincerely 9y agoAren't miners mainly using hydro power right now?
- kibwen 9y agoHydropower is renewable, but it's not very scalable (once you've dammed up your biggest rivers, that's it, you're done; hydro has been capped in the US for decades because of this). Hydropower is also quite ecologically damaging, though in the local sense rather than the global greenhouse gas sense.
- therein 9y agoNo they are not.
- Retric 9y agoElectricity is reasonably fungible. Hydro power is cheaper locally because you lose energy in transmission, but if they where not using it that energy would be shipped out and replace peaking power.
- outworlder 9y agoNo, they are using whatever is cheapest.