High hardware utilization is a good thing for efficiency because that enables ASICs to be produced that are growing increasingly more efficient. Right now one

High hardware utilization is a good thing for efficiency because that enables ASICs to be produced that are growing increasingly more efficient. Right now one of the main metrics people use when evaluating the profitability mining hardware is Ghash/Watt, so the market is naturally incentivizing low OpEx and therefore less power usage (per transaction processed not the nominal amount of power used). Also, it's actually more efficient to have a smaller number of machines running at full utilization 24x7 than the typical massive datacenter that averages around 20-30% utilization [0]. That's because modern servers consume nearly as much power at 20-30% utilization as they do at 100%. [0] - http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS294.F09/wharehousesizedcomputers.pdf http://bnrg.eecs.berkeley.edu/~randy/Courses/CS294.F09/whare... (page 55)