>Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. I would say there's a second piece here, too, which is that to the ext

>Bitcoin miners are so stupidly single purpose that development there doesn't help much. I would say there's a second piece here, too, which is that to the extent that it's driving any sort of research into more efficient practices, it's only in response to constraints of bitcoins own making, and there's every intention to immediately use up new capacity with additional bitcoin mining. What could have been an external net benefit to humanity will just be absorbed into the same things that absorbed prior capacity. I don't want to run all the way with that thought, though, because it can be the case that there's a net benefit to humanity nevertheless. But it makes me think of how Keynes promised that future efficiencies would bring a utopia in the form of dramatically scaling back the need to toil to fulfill basic needs and comforts, how that wasn't necessarily wrong, and how we ended up not taking that path just the same.