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Capital costs may not be trivial if you factor in food required for brainpower.

That's an operational cost, not a capital cost. ;)

Comparing capital cost between the two is also fun. Creating a literate person who can perform arithmetic certainly requires more resources than creating a person who can "merely" pedal a bicycle. There's a lot of embodied energy in a person's education, and the cost reflects that.

Also might want to consider what is the opportunity cost of what else a literate person could do instead of mining.

Or the opportunity cost of what else could the creators of that literate person could be doing with 20 years worth of time spent on that person.

cloud mining sites are scammy though but this article narrows down the search for trustworthy cloud mining sites: https://passivetalks.com/3-trusted-cloud-mining-sites-passiv...

Fair point :)

I guess the right comparison would be how much it would cost to produce another human capable of doing the SHA-256 hash by hand rather than the "fuel" to sustain it.

That's not capital in the sense of durable assets to be depreciated. That's an operational expense.

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