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Comment by kaoD | Hacker News Reader

And yet it isn't providing value to 0.05% of the world's population. Even if it did, the energy would go up (exponenially?)

I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it.

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When I am playing a game, my computer's power consumption increases by a lot. I am using more energy and ultimately generating more entropy in the universe. Is it worth it?

Depends on the game.

While this was almost certainly a joke, to the downvoters: Did you know about Foldit [0], the protein-folding game that actually contributes to scientific research?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit

Precisely what I was getting at :)

http://www.eternagame.org/web/

https://eyewire.org/explore

https://phylo.cs.mcgill.ca/

> Depends on the game. lol

> When I am playing a game, my computer's power consumption increases by a lot. I am using more energy and ultimately generating more entropy in the universe. Is it worth it?

Yup, that's the right answer to a collectivist sentiment. Value is subjective

Your computer's power consumption increases by a lot - so much in fact it might hit it's cpu and gpu rated max wattage - perhaps 300 watts in all for a high-power PC. A kettle uses around on average 1800 watts while on. Washing machine is 700 watts. On the scale of home gadgets, a fairly beefy home PC is only really in the middle of the pack for power consumption.

Mostly what we think others should spent their money on is irrelevant.

For example the global pet care market has sales of approx $100 billion. Many people think that is a waste.

H Other examples more than 0.05% simple to find!

> Mostly what we think others should spent their money on is irrelevant. Yup yup. One would think this is almost a tautology but sadly isn't

Actually it may be more worth it than most energy sucking things.

If it becomes an actual currency, the proof-of-work system will put everyone in an arms race of power/compute efficiency unlike any other.

That's actually a great point.

FPGA and GPU development has been granted quite the stimulus package from the crypto craze.

There are secondary benefits to this technology.

I bet the economic incentive got a lot more people into coding than before too.

It could be providing value even if only used by a small percentage of the world by serving as a price floor on electricity.

It de-risks and incentives clean and cheap energy generation like solar.

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