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A ‘false solution’? How crypto mining became the oil industry’s new hope
- anshumankmr 5y ago>Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, the most-popular decentralized digital currency, have a notoriously large carbon footprint (bitcoin mining alone consumes about half as much electricity in a year as all of the UK). So to leverage a cheap source of energy to run their bitcoin mining operations, Lochmiller and Cavness found themselves partnering with oil companies to repurpose a byproduct, primarily methane, that’s typically vented or burnt off in flares. Aren't crypto miners using GPUs to "mine" bitcoins? Doesn't that also mean every person who plays video games is also responsible for stressing the power generation system. And as GPUs become more powerful to give better frame rates and fancy tech like RTX, they also become more power hungry. Doesn't that also mean the massive data centers like the what Google is running for Stadia with massive number of GPUs is responsible for taxing the power generation system? Or people who train Deep Learning models with billion of parameters on GPUs? I do see people pointing fingers at Deep Learning and how it isn't "carbon neutral" but the other things are not really talked about. That being said, I am not people/companies who use GPUs aren't the cause of global warming or are somehow singlehandedly making it worse I believe that as a society we are kind of involved in this. Finger pointing will really keep going in circles. I am not the biggest fan of pop science as it often oversimplifies problems but this video by Kurzgesakt is very good as it explains what I am trying to say. https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc