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by specialized hardware, you mean GPUs? which are extremely useful for graphics, machine learning, and large-scale mathematical calculations? the gains to socie
by 0thgen 5y ago
by specialized hardware, you mean GPUs? which are extremely useful for graphics, machine learning, and large-scale mathematical calculations? the gains to society that GPUs brought can't be understated. how do you think they run the climate-projection models? [1]
and my argument is about second-order effects. even if bitcoin mining remains inefficient, the technological gains of directly incentivising lower energy usage than your competitors carries over to other markets / enterprises
plus, bitcoin is scheduled to run out. so eventually the mining issue is moot
a second-order prediction is obviously more noisy and holds less weight without any direct evidence, but 'lack of direct evidence' characterizes much of this debate
[1]: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/07/17/clima-climate-model/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2019/07/17/clima-climate-model...
- user-the-name 5y agoNo, nobody mines bitcoin on GPUs. Surely you would know that if you're here trying to make argument about it?
- 0thgen 5y agoI was under the impression that standard bitcoin mining leveraged GPUs for the heavy lifting. If that's not the case I'm happy to know what does
- terminalcommand 5y agoThere are ASIC chips as far as I know.
- user-the-name 5y agoThat hasn't been the case for most of the decade. I already told you what does: Completely custom-built hardware that can do nothing but bitcoin mining, such as Antminers. For instance, here is a shipping container that burns 1 megawatt of power in a pure and complete waste of energy and carbon emissions: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021123118285350583K2a0P505EF https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021123118285...
- 0thgen 5y agoalright, in that case you're right, the processors seem wasteful though interestingly, the specialized processors alkso seem like an example of a second order effect of bitcoin: driving innovation towards more energy efficiency. (though the tradeoff here seems to be wasting materials versus wasting energy)
- floatboth 5y agoIt's all the other shitcoins that are mined on GPUs.