4 ms·

And with good reason - some particularly enterprising miners revived a coal power plant of all things. Other meme coins wasted insane amounts of HDDs and SSDs.

• bombcar 2y ago
  The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement. Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement. The problem is that's basically entirely based on vibes. For crypto opponents it's justified by crypto not doing anything that the traditional finance system can't do, and for AI opponents it's justified by AI only being able to rehash soulless copypasta while stealing jobs. As a result the whole argument just becomes a roundabout way of arguing "[technology] sucks".