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I'm probably going to be downvoted into oblivion but I'm genuinely curious: Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't

I'm probably going to be downvoted into oblivion but I'm genuinely curious: Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? How much electricity do all the gaming PCs and gaming consoles in the world consume vs Argentina? To me, it feels a lot like Nascar or Formula one burning tons of fuel. I don't think that it is somehow bad to play games, but I wonder why the one (crypto) is always criticized into oblivion for the energy consumption, while the other isn't.

sparkling 6y ago
How much use does a GPU get in a gaming PC? A few hours per day? In crypto farms these things are running 24/7. Anyway, i still think its a bad move to tell people what they can and can not do with their hardware.
rq1 6y ago
You don’t play 24/7.
throwaway525142 6y ago
I would guess that computers used for gaming are turned off most of the time, whereas mining rigs are likely turned on and using much of the GPU at all times?
almog 6y ago
> I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? You presume the total energy consumption would be the same whereas it'd be more likely that GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day.
- badlucklottery 6y ago
  > GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day. Yup. And even if they could utilize them 24/7, gamers generally* won't have 10+ cards going at once. *:I'm sure someone has some weird 360 degree flight simulator edge case.
  - mcny 6y ago
    If you reduce this argument, the best way to help our planet is to have fewer children. I’d argue the target total fertility rate per woman should be somewhere below one. To hell with economic growth that relies on an ever increasing human population.
    - oooooooooooow 6y ago
      I'd much rather change my extremely wasteful (can't overstate how much, from someone that makes an effort to minimize it) lifestyle, and much rather use the force of law so that everyone has to, before advocating or forcing such an asinine policy. Even if strange when it comes to animals, humanity progresses following rules similar to classic evolution, aka by randomly mixing stuff until something works. We've gotten (only) pretty good at selecting and amplifying what works extremely well, but we still need a steady stream of randomly arranged characteristics to enter the pool. Imagine if the next Newton isn't born (or is born 200 years later) because a couple decided to not have children to "save the planet". Perhaps this figure would've been a key piece in a breakthrough discovery about energy, climate, terraforming, public policy.... I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists.
      - mrec 6y ago
        > I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other. Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a society that makes sufficient use of scientific discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.
Lvl999Noob 6y ago
> is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? Not an upside, but probably that the mining is mostly done by 1 person (or org) who use a lot of energy. A gaming rig probably won't be running 24x7 as max utilization.
kall 6y ago
I would argue that gaming creates a lot more value (joy) per tflophour(?) compared to mining. How many thousands of hours of gaming equals one btc transaction?
- daniellarusso 6y ago
  I think that depends on when the mining took place.
- qqii 6y ago
  How do you compare the value of gaming to trustless decentralised gambling or prediction markets? What about to NFT based trading cards? How about decentralised exchanges?
kevingadd 6y ago
Not even the most dedicated gamer is going to burn the amount of electricity a miner does with the same hardware. That's not even considering the number of cards miners purchase... The number of games that actually cause a modern GPU to hit its maximum TDP is also much lower than you'd think. If vsync is turned on, even a 3060 will trivially hit 60fps on older/simpler games, and modern ones unless the settings are turned way up. Games like Doom Eternal and Counter Strike Go are incredibly well optimized and can easily hit hundreds of frames per second on modern hardware. Likewise if it's a simple 2D game or more balanced title that leans on the CPU (unless you're using complex shader packs, popular games like Minecraft do a lot of their work on the CPU)
ThePhysicist 6y ago
Sure, ultimately gaming is entirely optional, but alas it's no different than other pastimes in that regard. Games make a lot of people very happy though and provide employment to millions (?) of people, so personally I'd put it higher in the needs hierarchy than crypto-currencies. Not being able to buy the latest graphics card due to high demand surely is a "first-world problem", but for NVIDIA it might become a problem if the situation persists, as they risk to anger a lot of loyal customers. Also, gamers and professional users will likely still buy graphics cards in 5-10 years (and more so), while I'm pretty sure miners will have either given up or switched to more custom solutions like ASICs by then (which has already happened with Bitcoin). So NVIDIA also risks losing a long-term market to please a potential short-lived market, hence I think they do the right thing by trying to disentangle these two market segments for good.
- qqii 6y ago
  > Is this really good news, or is this just Nvidia playing both sides? To be clear, these CMP cards are still the same exact silicon that goes into GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. They don't have video outputs, cooling should be improved (for large-scale data center mining operations), and they're better tuned for efficiency. But every single GPU sold as a CMP card means one less GPU sold as a graphics card. What's perhaps worse is that while miners can still use consumer cards for mining (maybe not the upcoming RTX 3060, depending on how well Nvidia's throttling works), gamers can't use these mining cards for gaming. > Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly, that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080, and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible. Nivida isn't risking anything. They boost their sales now by selling mining cards knowing they won't enter the seccond hand market to compete with their new products. They gain good PR with their mining locked 3060 cards. Gamers praise them without internalising that a number of mining cards would have been binned lower and sold, but instead an artificial restriction allows Nivida to allocate behind the scenes.
josalhor 6y ago
> Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I never had that specific opinion, but I have another point of view. Games bring inherent value to the table. That is, if you didn't play games you would be reading a book, going outside to play, browsing the web... Games fill a purpose and bring value. Whether or not I believe our current consumption of videogames is acceptable is irrelevant. I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to invest in an asset that does not depend on the currency you could buy gold. (I had a paragraph here making a point about international transaction costs. I removed it because I started to find it offtopic. Long story short: I find the societal cost of crypto way too high).
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Presumably people enjoy investing in crypto. It’s a hobby for many, like gaming.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Presumably, gaming doesn't use as much electricity globally as the entire country of Argentina. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
    - Tenoke 6y ago
      Why do you think that? Any stats or are you just guessing? I wouldn't be surprised if it's within an order of magnitude of that.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      So how much electricity does gaming use?
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >investing in crypto Crypto is an investment the same way $GME or playing the roulette is an investment. Better term would be speculating or gambling. Nothing wrong with either, but let's call it what it is.
A12-B 6y ago
To play one game for one day with your GPU - and I'm just guessing here - probably uses a small fraction of the power that mining 0.0001% of a bitcoin does, because blockchain is not the same thing as graphics. Besides, it's also the transacting that uses a lot of energy, not just the mining.
thejosh 6y ago
Because when the crypto card is done it goes on the trash, when a gaming card is done it gets resold. People upgrading sell their old cards on FB market place etc
robkop 6y ago
We can do some quick estimates to compare (using a 3090 because I helped a friend do a bit of mining on theirs and I know what figures are plausible): First some variables: RTX3090 idle power usage = 21 Watts RTX3090 mining power usage = 270 Watts RTX3090 gaming power usage = 350 Watts Mining energy usage: 270W \* 24H = 6.48 kWH per day Gaming energy usage: (low, 1 hour per day) 350W \* 1H + 21W \* 23H = 0.37 kWH per day (med, 4 hours per day) 350W \* 4H + 21W \* 20H = 1.82 kWH per day (hig, 8 hours per day) 350W \* 8H + 21W \* 16H = 3.14 kWH per day (ext, 18 hours per day) 350W \* 18H + 21W \* 6H = 6.43 kWH per day So even with someone who I'd consider a high volume gamer (8 hours per day) uses less than half the energy of running a miner for a day. You'd have to game for over 18 hours per day to use more energy than a miner. Of course both the gamer and the miner end up using a chunk of metal and plastic that will end up in a landfill so that bit counts the same. Note: From what general figures I've seen online the energy works out roughly the same for the rest of the recent RTX series cards (some such as the 3060Ti work out a few % more favourable for mining as they are more energy efficient overall)
- Tenoke 6y ago
  Good comparison though it misses some externalities. Gamers also use monitors(~40W) for many hours a day, and run the whole machine with 1 card while many miners minimize all other costs but the GPUs. Also gamers typically damage their cards a bit faster and change them for newer ones faster on average (miners keep mining with very old cards still).
- deepakhj 6y ago
  Why not both? I’m paying for my card by mining when I’m not gaming. I checked with a watt meter and I’m using 270-300 watts mining total (cpu, gpu, etc). It also heats my room so it’s more efficient than running a heater or using a space heater (1500 watts).
meibo 6y ago
How much bitcoin do you own?
Bayart 6y ago
I think it's a pretty lazy and complacent argument, to the extent energy-constrained industries are the ones driving the adoption of renewable energy. The price of coal is much, much higher than solar, wind, hydro or geothermal.
_trampeltier 6y ago
I use my card during just during winter for mining and calculated the energy for mining just under "heating my apartment". So the coins are just some bonus from heating. So in future I couldn't do that with an Nvidia card.
znpy 6y ago
> After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? No. Really, no. Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. OTOH, gaming hardware very often has a second life in the form of used hardware and lower-specced gaming computers. Don't be fooled by YouTube influencers, most of the real people won't be buying the latest and greatest hardware and drop their previous hardware. IIRC, valve stats showed that 1080-era cards are still very common and in use. And by the way: pretty much no one is running games 24/7. Mining hardware OTOH are specifically meant to be kept going 24/7.
- Tenoke 6y ago
  >Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. Except people are still mining with cards they bought 4-5 years ago. This is not True.
  - qqii 6y ago
    Some people are, but we also saw a flood of both normal and mining only cards in the used market last time the mining bubble burst.
- csomar 6y ago
  > Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. How come? You can still game with these.
  - qqii 6y ago
    No you can't, as the article explains these cards don't have display outputs.
Sonnen 6y ago
Gaming gives people enjoyment. They are not consuming other energy sources and to a certain degree, i think this is okay. It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest. You can still critizie it and there have been huge energy savings for idle GPUs which was not the case 10? years ago. Nonetheless, one thing doesn't make the other thing better or worse. Doing bitcoin is supporting a system which requires mining to make transactions. It also doesn't free me but potentially people who benefit from this directly. Like money washing, moving their millions from left to right or other things. And while doing that, taking my graphicscard, i wanted to play with, to sit somehwere, running 24/7 for what? What real problem solves bitcoin for me and most other people on the world?
- Tenoke 6y ago
  >They are not consuming other energy sources and to a certain degree, i think this is okay. Both are using energy, I don't know what the 'other' even r refers to. >It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest. .. Both of those apply for crypto. Better GPUs are developed because of usage, gaming usage doesn't necessarily give you more than crypto usage and cryptocurrencies are putting a lot of money into cryptography.
  - Sonnen 6y ago
    I might be a weirdo but playing RDD2 for 85 hours was very entertaining and while i played RDD2, i did not travel or do something else resourceintenvise. I have not had this amount of return on investment when doing something with bitcoin. It was more like 'huh? how much is the transaction fee now?', ah why is this market seized? Oh i found a little bit of bitcoin here, i totally forgot. And while i play 85h over a span of 4 weeks or so, your mining rig already consumed 590h more energy than i did. I said 'to a certain degree, i think this is okay' and i also think that for bitcoin, this is not the case.
- qqii 6y ago
  Trustless prediction markets and gambling. Trustless exchanges and lending (including tokens pegged to real world assets like the dollar or stocks). NFTs as digital proof of ownership.
leovailati 6y ago
Other people in this thread bring up great counterpoints. Namely, gaming is not nearly as intensive as mining and whatever value gaming brings to society is more than that of mining. I'd also say that gaming at least occupies the human who is playing. Mining would be running in the background: the human would still be consuming energy doing something else. So one doesn't replace the other. Therefore using the inefficiency of one to justify the inefficiency of the other is not a valid argument. One last observation: you're assuming that all these video cards would still have been produced. Maybe production of hardware has gone up to serve the mining demand.
nonameiguess 6y ago
There are plenty of good answers addressing the reality that gaming doesn't use anywhere near the same aggregate energy as mining, but to me, the more important difference is that currency of some kind is critical infrastructure. Civilization collapses without it. Right now, civilization won't collapse without cryptocurrency because we can just continue using government-issued currency, but in the crypto endgame where it is actually supposed to replace government-issued legal tender, we've suddenly become reliant on a tremendously inefficient power grid hog. Imagine something like what just happened in Texas happens on a larger scale. Well, now not only do you not have lights at night, but you can't spend money either. The basic fabric of society is much less reliant on the ability of citizens to play digital games, so losing that ability wouldn't matter much. Running with the Nascar/Formula One analogy, those things aren't such a huge deal because they're niche applications of vehicle technology. It would be far more disastrous for society at large, on the other hand, if we decided to make all commuter vehicles get 2 MPG and require high octane fuel and new tires every two hours. Similarly, cryptocurrency is (relatively) harmless right now because it is a niche speculative commodity. It would be a global disaster if it ever became widely used as actual currency. Cryptocurrencies are like castles, gaudy but interesting spectacles when only a few lords build them, but the world would quickly run out of rocks if we made them the universal unit of housing.
wildpeaks 6y ago
Gamers use only 1-2 cards at a time and keep them for years, they don't build entire farms running 24/7 that burn out the cards in a short time.
Merad 6y ago
> After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100% utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of miners.

sparkling 6y ago

How much use does a GPU get in a gaming PC? A few hours per day? In crypto farms these things are running 24/7. Anyway, i still think its a bad move to tell people what they can and can not do with their hardware.

rq1 6y ago

You don’t play 24/7.

throwaway525142 6y ago

I would guess that computers used for gaming are turned off most of the time, whereas mining rigs are likely turned on and using much of the GPU at all times?

almog 6y ago

> I mean, is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? You presume the total energy consumption would be the same whereas it'd be more likely that GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day.

badlucklottery 6y ago
> GPUs that are used for mining will be used 24/7 whereas gaming is likely to be performed by a human being who cannot or would not utilize the GPU nearly as many hours of the day. Yup. And even if they could utilize them 24/7, gamers generally* won't have 10+ cards going at once. *:I'm sure someone has some weird 360 degree flight simulator edge case.
- mcny 6y ago
  If you reduce this argument, the best way to help our planet is to have fewer children. I’d argue the target total fertility rate per woman should be somewhere below one. To hell with economic growth that relies on an ever increasing human population.
  - oooooooooooow 6y ago
    I'd much rather change my extremely wasteful (can't overstate how much, from someone that makes an effort to minimize it) lifestyle, and much rather use the force of law so that everyone has to, before advocating or forcing such an asinine policy. Even if strange when it comes to animals, humanity progresses following rules similar to classic evolution, aka by randomly mixing stuff until something works. We've gotten (only) pretty good at selecting and amplifying what works extremely well, but we still need a steady stream of randomly arranged characteristics to enter the pool. Imagine if the next Newton isn't born (or is born 200 years later) because a couple decided to not have children to "save the planet". Perhaps this figure would've been a key piece in a breakthrough discovery about energy, climate, terraforming, public policy.... I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists.
    - mrec 6y ago
      > I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other. Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a society that makes sufficient use of scientific discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.

Lvl999Noob 6y ago

> is there any inherent upside to burning tons of energy for games vs burning it for a cryptocurrency? Not an upside, but probably that the mining is mostly done by 1 person (or org) who use a lot of energy. A gaming rig probably won't be running 24x7 as max utilization.

kall 6y ago

I would argue that gaming creates a lot more value (joy) per tflophour(?) compared to mining. How many thousands of hours of gaming equals one btc transaction?

daniellarusso 6y ago
I think that depends on when the mining took place.
qqii 6y ago
How do you compare the value of gaming to trustless decentralised gambling or prediction markets? What about to NFT based trading cards? How about decentralised exchanges?

kevingadd 6y ago

Not even the most dedicated gamer is going to burn the amount of electricity a miner does with the same hardware. That's not even considering the number of cards miners purchase... The number of games that actually cause a modern GPU to hit its maximum TDP is also much lower than you'd think. If vsync is turned on, even a 3060 will trivially hit 60fps on older/simpler games, and modern ones unless the settings are turned way up. Games like Doom Eternal and Counter Strike Go are incredibly well optimized and can easily hit hundreds of frames per second on modern hardware. Likewise if it's a simple 2D game or more balanced title that leans on the CPU (unless you're using complex shader packs, popular games like Minecraft do a lot of their work on the CPU)

ThePhysicist 6y ago

Sure, ultimately gaming is entirely optional, but alas it's no different than other pastimes in that regard. Games make a lot of people very happy though and provide employment to millions (?) of people, so personally I'd put it higher in the needs hierarchy than crypto-currencies. Not being able to buy the latest graphics card due to high demand surely is a "first-world problem", but for NVIDIA it might become a problem if the situation persists, as they risk to anger a lot of loyal customers. Also, gamers and professional users will likely still buy graphics cards in 5-10 years (and more so), while I'm pretty sure miners will have either given up or switched to more custom solutions like ASICs by then (which has already happened with Bitcoin). So NVIDIA also risks losing a long-term market to please a potential short-lived market, hence I think they do the right thing by trying to disentangle these two market segments for good.

qqii 6y ago
> Is this really good news, or is this just Nvidia playing both sides? To be clear, these CMP cards are still the same exact silicon that goes into GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. They don't have video outputs, cooling should be improved (for large-scale data center mining operations), and they're better tuned for efficiency. But every single GPU sold as a CMP card means one less GPU sold as a graphics card. What's perhaps worse is that while miners can still use consumer cards for mining (maybe not the upcoming RTX 3060, depending on how well Nvidia's throttling works), gamers can't use these mining cards for gaming. > Nvidia does state that these GPUs "don't meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Frankly, that doesn't mean much. What does Nvidia do with a GPU that normally can't be sold as an RTX 3090? They bin it as a 3080, and GA102 chips that can't meet the 3080 requirements can end up in a future 3070 (or maybe a 3070 Ti). The same goes for the rest of the line. Make no mistake: These are GPUs that could have gone into a graphics card. Maybe not a reference 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, or 3090, but we've seen TU104 chips in RTX 2060 cards, so anything is possible. Nivida isn't risking anything. They boost their sales now by selling mining cards knowing they won't enter the seccond hand market to compete with their new products. They gain good PR with their mining locked 3060 cards. Gamers praise them without internalising that a number of mining cards would have been binned lower and sold, but instead an artificial restriction allows Nivida to allocate behind the scenes.

josalhor 6y ago

> Does anybody else think that the "mining is bad for the environment and gamers can't buy the cards" argument is a bit weird? After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I never had that specific opinion, but I have another point of view. Games bring inherent value to the table. That is, if you didn't play games you would be reading a book, going outside to play, browsing the web... Games fill a purpose and bring value. Whether or not I believe our current consumption of videogames is acceptable is irrelevant. I don't see tangible value in crypto. Crypto is worth what other people are willing to pay for it. If you wanted to invest in an asset that does not depend on the currency you could buy gold. (I had a paragraph here making a point about international transaction costs. I removed it because I started to find it offtopic. Long story short: I find the societal cost of crypto way too high).

chrisseaton 6y ago
Presumably people enjoy investing in crypto. It’s a hobby for many, like gaming.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Presumably, gaming doesn't use as much electricity globally as the entire country of Argentina. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
  - Tenoke 6y ago
    Why do you think that? Any stats or are you just guessing? I wouldn't be surprised if it's within an order of magnitude of that.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    So how much electricity does gaming use?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  >investing in crypto Crypto is an investment the same way $GME or playing the roulette is an investment. Better term would be speculating or gambling. Nothing wrong with either, but let's call it what it is.

A12-B 6y ago

To play one game for one day with your GPU - and I'm just guessing here - probably uses a small fraction of the power that mining 0.0001% of a bitcoin does, because blockchain is not the same thing as graphics. Besides, it's also the transacting that uses a lot of energy, not just the mining.

thejosh 6y ago

Because when the crypto card is done it goes on the trash, when a gaming card is done it gets resold. People upgrading sell their old cards on FB market place etc

robkop 6y ago

We can do some quick estimates to compare (using a 3090 because I helped a friend do a bit of mining on theirs and I know what figures are plausible): First some variables: RTX3090 idle power usage = 21 Watts RTX3090 mining power usage = 270 Watts RTX3090 gaming power usage = 350 Watts Mining energy usage: 270W \* 24H = 6.48 kWH per day Gaming energy usage: (low, 1 hour per day) 350W \* 1H + 21W \* 23H = 0.37 kWH per day (med, 4 hours per day) 350W \* 4H + 21W \* 20H = 1.82 kWH per day (hig, 8 hours per day) 350W \* 8H + 21W \* 16H = 3.14 kWH per day (ext, 18 hours per day) 350W \* 18H + 21W \* 6H = 6.43 kWH per day So even with someone who I'd consider a high volume gamer (8 hours per day) uses less than half the energy of running a miner for a day. You'd have to game for over 18 hours per day to use more energy than a miner. Of course both the gamer and the miner end up using a chunk of metal and plastic that will end up in a landfill so that bit counts the same. Note: From what general figures I've seen online the energy works out roughly the same for the rest of the recent RTX series cards (some such as the 3060Ti work out a few % more favourable for mining as they are more energy efficient overall)

Tenoke 6y ago
Good comparison though it misses some externalities. Gamers also use monitors(~40W) for many hours a day, and run the whole machine with 1 card while many miners minimize all other costs but the GPUs. Also gamers typically damage their cards a bit faster and change them for newer ones faster on average (miners keep mining with very old cards still).
deepakhj 6y ago
Why not both? I’m paying for my card by mining when I’m not gaming. I checked with a watt meter and I’m using 270-300 watts mining total (cpu, gpu, etc). It also heats my room so it’s more efficient than running a heater or using a space heater (1500 watts).

meibo 6y ago

How much bitcoin do you own?

Bayart 6y ago

I think it's a pretty lazy and complacent argument, to the extent energy-constrained industries are the ones driving the adoption of renewable energy. The price of coal is much, much higher than solar, wind, hydro or geothermal.

_trampeltier 6y ago

I use my card during just during winter for mining and calculated the energy for mining just under "heating my apartment". So the coins are just some bonus from heating. So in future I couldn't do that with an Nvidia card.

znpy 6y ago

> After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? No. Really, no. Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. OTOH, gaming hardware very often has a second life in the form of used hardware and lower-specced gaming computers. Don't be fooled by YouTube influencers, most of the real people won't be buying the latest and greatest hardware and drop their previous hardware. IIRC, valve stats showed that 1080-era cards are still very common and in use. And by the way: pretty much no one is running games 24/7. Mining hardware OTOH are specifically meant to be kept going 24/7.

Tenoke 6y ago
>Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. Except people are still mining with cards they bought 4-5 years ago. This is not True.
- qqii 6y ago
  Some people are, but we also saw a flood of both normal and mining only cards in the used market last time the mining bubble burst.
csomar 6y ago
> Mining hardware is just trash when new hardware is released, pretty much immediately. How come? You can still game with these.
- qqii 6y ago
  No you can't, as the article explains these cards don't have display outputs.

Sonnen 6y ago

Gaming gives people enjoyment. They are not consuming other energy sources and to a certain degree, i think this is okay. It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest. You can still critizie it and there have been huge energy savings for idle GPUs which was not the case 10? years ago. Nonetheless, one thing doesn't make the other thing better or worse. Doing bitcoin is supporting a system which requires mining to make transactions. It also doesn't free me but potentially people who benefit from this directly. Like money washing, moving their millions from left to right or other things. And while doing that, taking my graphicscard, i wanted to play with, to sit somehwere, running 24/7 for what? What real problem solves bitcoin for me and most other people on the world?

Tenoke 6y ago
>They are not consuming other energy sources and to a certain degree, i think this is okay. Both are using energy, I don't know what the 'other' even r refers to. >It also combines and supports advantages in science by making this more affordable for the rest. .. Both of those apply for crypto. Better GPUs are developed because of usage, gaming usage doesn't necessarily give you more than crypto usage and cryptocurrencies are putting a lot of money into cryptography.
- Sonnen 6y ago
  I might be a weirdo but playing RDD2 for 85 hours was very entertaining and while i played RDD2, i did not travel or do something else resourceintenvise. I have not had this amount of return on investment when doing something with bitcoin. It was more like 'huh? how much is the transaction fee now?', ah why is this market seized? Oh i found a little bit of bitcoin here, i totally forgot. And while i play 85h over a span of 4 weeks or so, your mining rig already consumed 590h more energy than i did. I said 'to a certain degree, i think this is okay' and i also think that for bitcoin, this is not the case.
qqii 6y ago
Trustless prediction markets and gambling. Trustless exchanges and lending (including tokens pegged to real world assets like the dollar or stocks). NFTs as digital proof of ownership.

leovailati 6y ago

Other people in this thread bring up great counterpoints. Namely, gaming is not nearly as intensive as mining and whatever value gaming brings to society is more than that of mining. I'd also say that gaming at least occupies the human who is playing. Mining would be running in the background: the human would still be consuming energy doing something else. So one doesn't replace the other. Therefore using the inefficiency of one to justify the inefficiency of the other is not a valid argument. One last observation: you're assuming that all these video cards would still have been produced. Maybe production of hardware has gone up to serve the mining demand.

nonameiguess 6y ago

There are plenty of good answers addressing the reality that gaming doesn't use anywhere near the same aggregate energy as mining, but to me, the more important difference is that currency of some kind is critical infrastructure. Civilization collapses without it. Right now, civilization won't collapse without cryptocurrency because we can just continue using government-issued currency, but in the crypto endgame where it is actually supposed to replace government-issued legal tender, we've suddenly become reliant on a tremendously inefficient power grid hog. Imagine something like what just happened in Texas happens on a larger scale. Well, now not only do you not have lights at night, but you can't spend money either. The basic fabric of society is much less reliant on the ability of citizens to play digital games, so losing that ability wouldn't matter much. Running with the Nascar/Formula One analogy, those things aren't such a huge deal because they're niche applications of vehicle technology. It would be far more disastrous for society at large, on the other hand, if we decided to make all commuter vehicles get 2 MPG and require high octane fuel and new tires every two hours. Similarly, cryptocurrency is (relatively) harmless right now because it is a niche speculative commodity. It would be a global disaster if it ever became widely used as actual currency. Cryptocurrencies are like castles, gaudy but interesting spectacles when only a few lords build them, but the world would quickly run out of rocks if we made them the universal unit of housing.

wildpeaks 6y ago

Gamers use only 1-2 cards at a time and keep them for years, they don't build entire farms running 24/7 that burn out the cards in a short time.

Merad 6y ago

> After all, if all these cards weren't used for mining but for gaming, wouldn't the environmental outcome be the same? I would assume miners keep these cards pegged at 100% 24/7. By comparison very few games actually push graphics cards to 100% utilization, especially when you're talking about top of the line cards like the nVidia 3000 series, and on top of that very few people play games for more than a couple hours per day. A card in the hands of a gamer probably consumes only a small fraction of the power that same card would in the hands of miners.