Anecdotally I know a lot of people who are too ashamed to admit they're mining on it in their spare time but know that leaving a money printer that makes $5 a d

Anecdotally I know a lot of people who are too ashamed to admit they're mining on it in their spare time but know that leaving a money printer that makes $5 a day sitting idle is stupid. ;) (even today, a 3090 is still profitable even with absurd $0.30/kWh electricity or whatever - if you are around the national average of 10c they're still doing like $3 a day. Not "buy 10 of them and build a rig" profitable anymore, but at the peak they could do ~$11 a day after electricity and for a long time they were $5 a day after electricity. Pre-LHR 3080s were a beast too, almost the same hashrate as a 3090.) Anyway the backlash against mining and miners in the 2021 timeframe was real and intense. I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons - it's a waste of electricity, it's screwing up the market for everyone else, etc - but I think a huge number of gamers who bought cards in the 2020-2021 timeframe mined on them when they weren't using them and just don't want to admit it. Unfortunately, crypto is a memeplex, it's like a corporation, it's a self-reinforcing living entity that supports itself (maintains homeostasis) through a series of rules and incentives, and now that it's been created it can't be easily killed. Every individual is financially incentivized to keep playing their part, so everyone would have to collectively agree to not make money by taking part, and as people fall out the incentives become steeper and steeper to participate. Would you mine on your card for $100 a day? $1000 a day? Even if you pulled the plug on the exchanges, crypto is far enough along that it would be self-sustaining simply based on the black market. And the existence of PoS paradoxically makes it impossible to ever kill the PoW coins, because they can be traded on decentralized exchanges even if the real money exchanges ban them. We will just have to live with destroying our planet, because now that it's been created it's virtually impossible to kill. That was the whole point. With apologies to Alien: it’s biologically engineered to be a survivor... the perfect predator (of certain other memeplexes).