4 ms·
>wear on mining machines There is virtually no wear on mining machines from actual use. There is, but it's negligible compared the main cause of depreciation of
by automatic6131 4y ago
>wear on mining machines
There is virtually no wear on mining machines from actual use. There is, but it's negligible compared the main cause of depreciation of mining machines: better hardware coming out every 2-4 years AND the reduction in mining reward rate[1]. A bitcoin mining rig is worth essentially 0 after 2 years due to this depreciation. Not failure from wear. This is also true for GPU miners.
Second, there are many better uses for cheap power - one could use it to store energy in a hypothetical future where we use lots of intermittent renewables. You could use it to produce highly energy intensive physical goods - aluminum, hydrogen gas, fertilizer. You could use it for intensive climate engineering with carbon capture.
Almost anything else you can think of would be better than running a proof-of-waste cryptocurrency network.
[1] https://paulbutler.org/2022/the-problem-with-bitcoin-miners/ https://paulbutler.org/2022/the-problem-with-bitcoin-miners/